Abstract

The prevalence of the ‘Anthropocene’—the epoch of humankind’s detrimental force on environments—in academic discourse over the past decades has reinstigated an environmental approach to landscape history. This article is part of a project focusing on Lower Silesia’s environmental history and its relationship to urbanism, political economies and sociocultural shifts. The authors hypothesize that the repair of the Middle Oder Valley’s ecological systems can only proceed once the layered and unintended consequences of the region’s large-scale social and spatial engineering are laid bare. They do so by looking into the conquest of nature at the time of the Prussian Empire under the eighteenth-century reign of Frederick the Great. Through a specific focus on landscape perception and representation—with a series of interpretative cartographies and contemporary vedute (perspective-panoramic views)—the landscape itself comes to the fore in the unravelling of complexity and contradictions in the region’s environmental history and its exploitation.

摘要

“人类世”——人类对环境的有害力量的时代——在过去几十年的学术讨论中的盛行，重新激发了对景观历史的环境研究。本文是一个项目的一部分，该项目的重点是下西里西亚的环境历史及其与城市化、政治经济和社会文化转变的关系。作者假设，只有在该地区大规模社会和空间工程的分层和意外后果暴露后，中奥得河谷生态系统的修复才能继续进行。他们通过研究 18 世纪腓特烈大帝统治下普鲁士帝国时期对自然的征服来做到这一点。vedute（透视-全景）——景观本身在揭示该地区环境历史及其开发中的复杂性和矛盾性时脱颖而出。