Rock-Paper-Scissors is a game usually played by two people, in which each player simultaneously forms one of three shapes with an outstretched hand. These shapes are ‘rock’ (a closed fist), ‘paper’ (a flat hand) and ‘scissors’ (a fist with the index finger and middle finger extended, forming a V). It is a zero-sum game with three possible outcomes: a win, a loss or a draw. As you probably know, the rules are inexorably simple: ‘rock blunts scissors’, ‘paper covers rock’ and ‘scissors cuts paper’, complemented by a fourth kind of situation, where gestures cancel each other out or meet on equal terms.
Is landscape architecture becoming a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors? A game where the very basic elements are being played out against each other in an off-the-drawing-board game, in turn cut to pieces by commercial interests? A game where gains never exceed losses and the best outcome to hope for is a tie?
If the answer to this rhetorical question is no, it is because there are eventually winners and losers. Human-induced landscaping, no matter how ‘transitional’ or ‘equitable’ it wants to be, remains embedded in or constrained by a wider, competition-driven and exploitative scheme, with earth soiling water, water acidifying air, air corroding earth—all while the mercury is rising.
In this double issue of JoLA, however, we are introduced to a wide range of practical attempts to understand and modify what has become a destructive game with the most elementary planetary conditions. Implicit in the efforts presented is what environmental philosopher David Macauley already referred to more than a decade ago as ‘four-thought’, a revisiting through landscape of elemental, environmental imaginaries.Footnote1 In this regard, many of the contributions can be interpreted as attempts to further ‘ecologize’ landscape architecture, or to consider landscape a forcefield of elemental interaction.
Yet while biologically fundamental, the elements do also exhibit a cultural and historical density and weight that, in order to become conceivable or tangible, requires not only an interpretive, intervening hand, but a rich ‘imagination of matter’, to quote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard.Footnote2 Perhaps most known to landscape scholars for his Poetics of Space, Bachelard, who was trained in the sciences, was careful not to claim for his elemental essays the status of original myth. Rather, what was at stake in his writing was the substance of the poetic imaginary, and the materiality of fantasy. Imagination, declares Bachelard, finds its matter in immediate and commonplace experiences of the elements—of waters that can cool, freeze and drown out; of air that can empower and tear apart; of earth that can bury and support; and, perhaps most relevant at this point in history, of fire that can heat as well as annihilate. Distinguishing between formal and material imagination, Bachelard would consider the former as a ‘play on the surface of an element without giving the imagination time to work upon its matter’.Footnote3 The latter, by contrast, would seek material consistency and draw power from the substance itself as the very root element of thought. Science and poetry were considered complementary, emerging from the same deep source but developing along different axes.
If science aims to look through elemental metaphors, the material imagination extracts from these a much-needed sensorial grounding. There is today in many fields an intensified engagement with the elements and a (re)consideration of elemental matters, reflecting growing concerns with the very basic, biocultural conditions.Footnote4 A most relevant example in this context is provided by the recent issues of Les Carnets du paysage, explicitly dedicated to the elements.Footnote5 Far from essentialist reveries, what these elemental initiatives present are attempts to raise the question of material resources and infrastructures in new ways, and to critically deal with the discrete networks of forces that constitute the environment. As elementally expressed by ecocritics and cultural theorists Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert: ‘There is no “out-“ to which things are sourced, but always a wherein, with whom, wherefore.’Footnote6
The continuous challenge is to integrate elemental thinking in a wider ecological mobilization that also recognizes the political game in which it is inscribed. The ‘ecological turn’, often described as ‘deep’, should be more than a diving into ‘the elements themselves’. It also needs to face the question of why and how elements are made to matter, directing attention to the ‘mattering’ forces that precondition existence. ‘Attention to mattering,’ writes sociologist Victoria Pitts-Taylor, ‘is made crucial by recognition of contemporary modes of power, including those rendering . . . matter into capital, resulting in the production of new kinds of populations and forms of life.’Footnote7
In short, the elemental matters and should continue to keep landscape architects and scholars on their critical toes. This issue of JoLA, therefore, makes room for a number of studies that confront the elements through different perspectives and lenses. Davis et al. turn to water, bringing forward its material agency and the need to embrace it for the protection and management of Great Lakes coastlands and sandy landscapes. Zeng et al., as well as van der Meulen, return to indigenous and local water cultures and knowledges, the former advancing water infrastructure and the latter exploring watersensitive urban design.
To soil turn Pérez-Ramos, Eischeid, Ramos and Blejerman. In his contribution, Pérez-Ramos sets to understand the ontology of soil through the epistemological study of Mediterranean islands’ fragile and finite soils, which not only precondition insular life, but also contain their cultural, biological and geological makeup. Eischeid focuses on another island, Greenland, and its entangled manifestations of colonialism explored through an attentive chromatic study of soil and land. Ramos turns to Bordeaux’s rue-jardin experiments, which seek to transform streets into gardens and neighbours into gardeners, hence appropriating the street for sociability and collective life, and rebuilding citizens connection with soil. Blejerman proposes a game that returns to soil as a witness of human brutality and keeper of clandestine female graves in Mexico’s urban and rural landscape. The envisioned game presents an alternative to technological methods typically employed for locating and documenting discovered mass graves before they are forgotten, in this way providing a link between earthly landscapes and their material imaginaries. Cureton finally, in his contribution, elevates the study of land use by turning our attention to the fresh and recreational air of modernity and the highflying imaginaries that historically have permeated the modelling of new towns and Forest Cities. And if the fourth element, fire, is only implicitly touched upon here, it will be more thoroughly addressed in a forthcoming issue.Footnote8
While an elemental approach to landscapes under pressure today is a main priority, these contributions also show that the elemental should not be idealized. The artificiality and historicity of landscapes is an undeniable fact. Whether purposive designs or the incidental consequences of far from zero-sum struggles, landscapes bear testimony to humankind as a species engaging in what philosopher of science Karen Barad in her wrestling with matter and meaning refers to as precarious, ‘intra-action’,Footnote9 an attentive reconfiguring of the elemental, including the self-organizing processes referred to as natural systems, which, inevitably and repeatedly, will ‘kick back’.Footnote10
Today, these kickbacks come with increased frequency, signalling what has become a corrupt rather than responsive intra-activity, or literally, for too long fuelled by a fossil fire. At the recent UN meeting on climate transition, the COP28 in Dubai, this elemental imbalance was finally openly addressed, not the least through the ‘operationalization’ of the Loss and Damage Fund, the aim of which is to compensate for what has for too long been an extremely biased game.Footnote11
Whether or not it will become a game changer, only time will unveil. Children quickly learn that rock blunts scissors, scissors cut paper and paper covers rock, and employ the game to settle disputes fairly, one game at a time. What at first glance appears as random selection, with a one in three chance of winning each time, at closer look reveals players’ patterns that can be anticipated. Winners repeat actions while losers switch objects.Footnote12 In a field of elemental interaction, landscape architecture practice demands a close attention to winning patterns, to craft landscape imaginaries where the sum of elemental forces is more than zero. Approaching landscape architecture as a boundary practice between formal and material imagination is more important than ever: a practice that confirms the need for ‘elemental anamnesis’,Footnote13 recollecting through landscapes an unpredictably rich elemental dynamic.
Notes
1 David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water As Environmental Ideas (New York; Suny Press, 2015), 15.
2 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1999). Original French edition L’eau et les rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (Le livre de poche, 1942). Other elemental essays by Bachelard comprise The Psychoanalysis of Fire (La psychanalyse du feu, 1938), Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (L’air et les songes, 1943), Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority (La terre et les reveries du repos, 1946), Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (La terre et les reveries de la volonté, 1948).
3 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, op. cit. (note 2), 10–11.
4 See influential media scholar John Durham Peters, who in his book Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) advances the idea that not only technological systems, but also natural habitats are mediators of meaning. See also the book series Elements edited by environmental humanities scholars Stacy Alaimo and Nicole Starosielski, ambitiously tracing the matters that constitute and permeate the environment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, dukeupress.edu/ series/Elements).
5 Les Carnets du paysage: Revue de projets d’art et écologie politique is the journal of the ENSP, École nationale supérieure de paysage de Versailles-Marseille. For an overview of the special issues on the elements, see: actes-sud.fr/recherche/catalogue/ collection/1561?keys=, accessed 25 December 2023.
6 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (eds.), Elemental Ecocriticisim: Thinking With Earth, Air, Water, and Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 13.
7 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), translated from the French by Maria Jolas and with a new foreword by John R. Stilgoe. French original: La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Collection Bibliotèque de philosophie contemporaine, 1957).
8 See call for papers on Wildfires included in this issue.
9 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 422.
10 Karen Barad, ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction’, in: Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer Press, 1996), 177.
11 United Nations, ‘COP28 Talks Open in Dubai with Breakthrough Deal on Loss and Damage Fund’, 30 November 2023, news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1144162, accessed 28 December 2023.
12 James Morgan, ‘How to Win at Paper-Rock-Scissors’, BBC News, 2 May 2014.
13 David Lowenthal, ‘Discovering the Vernacular Landscape by John Brinckerhoff Jackson’, Geographical Review 75/4 (1985), 518.