The landscape assay: exploring pluralism in environmental interpretation

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Abstract
The ‘Landscape Assay’ is a field study exercise which invites students to explore, understand and gain an appreciation of some of the variety of ways people interpret the world around them. It also aims to give students a deeper understanding of the causes of some environmental controversies. The term ‘assay’ has been chosen for this exercise because it links the exercise with concepts of assessment and judgement without connecting it too closely with established techniques of landscape evaluation. The exercise forms the final element in the module ‘Environmental Philosophy’, a third‐year synoptic course for undergraduate geographers. Different societies have developed an enormous variety of world‐views; the aim of this exercise is to allow students to explore sets of environmental values within the environs of Oxford. The exercise works with the pragmatic categorisation of world‐views or ‘world hypotheses’ developed by Stephen Pepper (1942). These are used throughout the course to provide a simplified conceptual framework by which students are able to compare schools of environmental thought. In this schema environmental philosophies are understood through a tripartite division into subjective‐spiritual, material‐objective and systemic‐holistic factors. Students are encouraged to see philosophies formed from these as complex and interrelated rather than mutually exclusive. Student teams are sent out to classify a set landscape into zones which are ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘indifferent’ according to the precepts of different, specific world‐views. Their interpretations are employed to initiate discussion of the contextual and culturally specific nature of value judgements. After the spoken presentation of each team's findings, the class as a whole is required to determine the core beliefs which guided each classification.

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