Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction

"In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists grappled with an enormous transformation of how human beings relate to the natural world. The management and extraction of resources on an unprecedented scale and within a global network required novel systems for measuring, analyzing, and manipulating natural phenomena across vast distances. Reading paintings and prints through the lens of concepts from environmental history, including unbundling, longtermism, and scale-thinking, this book examines the relationship between the operations of landscape and the operations of extraction. "Picturing landscape" is not a genre but rather a mode of inquiry through which artists explored the promises and the perils of extractive processes and the scientific concepts that informed them. Stephanie O'Rourke reveals this operation at work in relation to specific industries, such as mining and timber harvesting, as well as concepts of race, climate, and waste emerging within the continent and its colonial networks. In so doing, she offers fresh consideration of what was at stake in visual representations at a crucial moment when the natural world was increasingly defined by its incommensurability with human experience"--