In his forthcoming collection  of essays, The Ways of the World, David Harvey observes that “it is impossible on the ground and in the streets to see where nature ends and culture begins. imposing a dichotomy where there is none is a fatal mistake.” Geography is his great illustration of this point: “the world’s geography has been and is being constantly made, re-made and sometimes even destroyed in order to absorb rapidly accumulating surpluses of capital. The simple answer to the question of why this is happening is: because the reproduction of capital accumulation requires it. . . . Geography is expressive of the unity of culture and nature and not the product of some causal interaction with feedback as it is so commonly represented. This fiction of a duality produces all manner of political and social disasters.”

He catalogues various recent and more distant examples of the human modification of landscape: “Shifts in the time and cost of transportation, for example, are perpetually re-defining the relative spaces of the global economy. . . .  Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris were partly conceived of as military installations designed for military and social control of a traditionally restive urban population just as the current spate of dam building in Turkey is mainly designed to destroy by flooding the agrarian base of the autonomous Kurdish movement while criss-crossing south-east Anatolia with a series of moats to inhibit the movement of the insurgent guerillas seeking Kurdish independence.”

Since it's Harvey, there's inevitably a Marxist twist. Building boulevards and dams “absorbs surplus capital and labour.” Whatever we make of that, his fundamental claim is true and important. A landscape is never merely natural: “Cultural perceptions and mores are constantly being built into the landscape in specific ways as the landscape itself becomes a series of mnemonics (like Sacré Coeur in Paris or a mountain like Mont-Blanc) that signal identity and social and collective meanings.”