Landscape, honestly

It is a small shift in realization but a significant change in attitude. Predictably, artists are in the vanguard. Not so predictably, so are scientists.

The subject is nature. Our concept of nature. Nature in our cities and nature in our suburbs -- the nature that Southern Californians encounter every day, whether they are mindful of it or not.

Until recently you would get little argument in most circles if you observed that urban development, or any kind of human development, displaced nature. It was a shared way of comprehending the world around us. As Southern Californians sprawled over the landscape, nature vanished. It was as simple as that. To get “outdoors,” we invented the Sunday drive and the long-distance expedition -- and this demarcation between home and nature pushed outward with the decades.

Today, artists and scientists, even some die-hard naturalists, are suggesting a different angle of sight: Our mighty developments have altered nature but not destroyed it -- not at all.

A few generations ago nature, particularly the nature of the West, was romanticized; mythologized. The rise of industrialization reshaped attitudes. Nature was something to be harnessed and conquered. Then, soon, people recognized nature’s vulnerabilities. “Now, we’re taking a step beyond,” says Noel Korten, curator of a recent exhibit of neo-landscape paintings at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park. “These paintings reflect nature as a force, a process that goes on in spite of us. ‘Controlling nature?’ You don’t hear terms like that much anymore. They sound ludicrous. Fundamentally, this is a different perception of nature.”

Machinery, concrete and Hummers augment these artists’ landscapes, much as exotic species of trees and birds add to the region’s real life biodiversity. “Looking at L.A. is looking at the interaction of people and their environment,” says Kimball Garrett, an ornithologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and co-curator of a new exhibit there that invites exploration of this intersection of nature and the city, “L.A: light / motion / dreams.”

He offers himself as an example of how our interpretations of the city around us are in flux. He looks out the window of the museum’s ornithology laboratory to see both trees and a construction crane. “Guilty,” he concedes. “I haven’t made the leap to see that as nature.” He pauses to restate his view. “I don’t see it as natural.”

On the other hand, Garrett observes the flight and silhouettes of birds beyond the glass. “I do see the city as diverse, as interesting....The fact that we’ve created a home for 10 or more species of parrots means we’ve made quite an aviary of the place.”

The growing interest in re-greening the Los Angeles River is frequently offered as an example of what occurs when people open their eyes to their surroundings and open their minds to the idea that nature is not something that occurs only over the horizon.

“We’re never going to improve our environment by restricting environmental thinking to those lucky enough to be in natural settings,” Garrett says.

Or, to borrow an idea from the founding father of environmentalism, Henry David Thoreau: “It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village, to make any progress between his porch and his gate.”