3: Ecocriticism and Space
- Page ID
- 26305
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- 3.1: Imagined Space and Lived Space, Alienation and Destruction, Singularity and Specificity
- The trees are close around us. They are watching us. Their still, mysterious watching may indicate the colonial anguish around the beginning of the twentieth century, as in Joseph Conrad’s imagination of an inimical African otherness that is watching the guilty European intruders. The trope of trees as eyewitness to human history, to its horrendous events and momentous changes, is central to the common imagination of trees as the patient witnesses of human transience.
- 3.2: Nature's Helping Hand
- The achievements of engineers are one of the things which we today associate most readily with Roman civilisation. The building of roads and bridges, the construction of aqueducts, the digging of huge tunnels, clearance of mountain passes, construction of vast palaces – what could be more Roman? However, in antiquity no less than today, such massive engineering projects and alterations of the natural landscape were not only appreciated and admired, but also criticised and condemned.