Jo's paper looks at the moment when large, centralized bureaucracies began to mediate everyday experiences of the natural landscape. Looking at early tourist visits to the Menai Straits Bridge, among the first modern engineering projects to attract large numbers of visitors to an entirely natural setting, she argues that states immediately transformed channeled public appreciation of nature to a reliance on large, centralized government, with ultimately catastrophic results for decentralized information, local political power, and the fate of the environment. This paper was originally presented at the American Society for Environmental History, Boise, Idaho, March 2008.The video is presented as part of the Landscape Studies Podcast, http://landscapestudies.blogspot.com/
The Landscape Studies Podcast aims to present peer-reviewed excerpts from new work across the humanities that deals with landscape, the built environment, vernacular architecture, spatial interaction, and their related fields.We welcome submissions from scholars in the form of video, slideshows, or audio, ten to thirty minutes in length, particularly summaries of new articles being published in scholarly journals or summaries of papers presented at scholarly conferences. Submissions should be saved on a public server (such as archive.org) and a link together with a short description should be sent to landscapestudies (at) gmail dot com.
