Inscription of Historical Seascapes

Aesthetics, Politics, and the Construction of the Capricorn Coast's Scenic Highway

Abstract

According to Stephen Dovers, environmental history can provide broad historical perspectives on things like colonial impacts, the evolution of technologies, the emergence of institution settings, the growth of commodity trade and changing land use regimes. It is a useful method of gathering baseline data on the past states of natural environments and, because this often relies on ‘local knowledge’, has the potential to foster community participation and engender community empowerment. Through the intelligent critique of past regimes, such history can, moreover, convey policy lessons, by offering what elsewhere Dovers describes as an ‘antidote to policy amnesia’. He also suggests that ‘a more innocent and less driven purpose’ of environmental history is ‘to unearth stories worth listening to’. While Dovers is careful not to claim too much for environmental history, and concedes that it ‘provides clues and some cues at best’, he may well be understating the power of stories, especially those that relate to relationships between people and place. Peter Hay reminds us that there is a powerful congruence between empathy with place and a commitment to the protection and maintenance of local natural ecosystems. A deep sense of place instils a desire to act ethically towards that place, and usually it is grounded in a concern for the life — human and otherwise — that has been integral to it. However, it is also formed out of emotional attachments to scenery — land and seascapes built up, as Simon Schama puts it, ‘as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’.