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J. B. Jackson defined "landscape" as the "infrastructure or background for our collective existence." By contrast, David Nye explains in the opening essay to this collection, an "anti-landscape" is a space that does not sustain human life in either a biological or sociocultural sense. Nye and co-editor Sarah Elkind suggest that this anti-landscape concept provides a useful extension of Jackson's earlier fusing of the human and non-human. The movement between landscape and anti-landscape might further bring together materialist and constructivist approaches under the capacious banner of the environmental humanities.
It is an ambitious goal, not easily realized with such an eclectic collection of essays. Nye and Elkind provide some useful organizational structure by dividing the volume into three sections. The first, "The Threatened Landscape," most squarely pursues the idea of the anti-landscape as a degradation of the eco-social potentialities of a previously useful landscape. James Fleming's essay perhaps most successfully unites the cultural and material by surveying visual representations of what he terms "skyscapes" and "anti-skyscapes." By its literally transparent nature, Fleming notes that the sky is often both materially and culturally transparent. Yet some artists have developed new ways of making the invisible visible, as with a French duo's use of laser...