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By Root 1004 0

Cosmides call “superordi-nate programs.” Emotions function in this way, “orchestrating” the mind’s many subprograms so they function smoothly together. They give the example of fear. This emotion, taking hold of a person who walking at night in a potential “stalking and ambush” situation (it could a Pleistocene rain forest or the asphalt jungle of a modern city), can produce outcomes with a strong bearing on survival. Fear will tend shift attention and make perception more acute (the rustling in bushes heard more clearly), change weightings of motivations and goals (you lose interest in your immediate destination, no longer feel hungry, etc.), redirect information-gathering interests (where is my baby?), alter the entire context of action from a safe to a dangerous situation, and affect memory, inference systems, and behavioral decision rules. The emotion fear in this sense initiates something much more complex than just rush of adrenaline. It affects a person’s whole response and outlook, sharpening perception to the limit, and initiating both rational and automatic decisions.

Although Tooby and Cosmides do not mention the emotions implicated in landscape preference, such emotions fit their general account Homo sapiens who had an emotional predisposition toward green and the potential for water in landscapes would have been evolutionarily decisive. Moreover, there is ample evidence to indicate that we share homologous emotional responses with other primates. Even if our early ancestors were making largely rational choices about where to move next, their ancestors before the advent of language were using, as other animals do, nonlinguistic heuristics and emotional reactions in lieu of rational, articulate processes to make life-and-death decisions. The rational and the emotional responses to landscapes can coincide and reinforce one another. They can be in conflict, where the emotional impulse that draws us to a landscape can be overridden by the knowledge that it contains unseen dangers. This does not, however, obviate the existence of a prerational, emotional response, nor negate its overall survival advantages.

Another way to look at the issue is to turn it around and ask whether any survival advantage might accrue to a hominid or early human population that was emotionally indifferent to landscape types. If human beings could equally well adapt to all landscape types, then favoring a par tic subset might even be opposed to survival. Consider this issue in terms the fear-of-snakes analogy. Given mutations, the natural variability interests, tastes, and preferences, we would have had a number of potential ancestors who were indifferent or fearless when it came to encounters with snakes. Many of these people and proto-people, though they our aunts and uncles tens of thousands of generations removed, our direct, bloodline ancestors: on average, they were more likely killed by snakes before they produced offspring. Our direct ancestors, people each of us can trace back by adding “greats” until we arrive eighty-thousandth great-grandmother and her mate, are the same people who, in the natural variability of things, were on average made more ner vous by snakes. Evolution rewarded their phobic emotions giving them life and the possibility of offering descendants to the world, as it rewarded people made ner vous by standing close to the edges cliffs or repelled by the smell of rotting, toxic meat. In the Pleistocene, habitat choice was another factor determinative of life and death, emotional indifference to landscapes is as evolutionarily unlikely as indifference toward snakes, dangerous precipices, and poisonous foods, on the one hand, or sex, babies and sweet and fatty foods, on the other.

IV

The history of landscape painting is about much more than potential Pleistocene habitats. It includes treatments of every imaginable landscape type, from endless arctic snows to desert to dense jungles. Landscape painting as an art form—from Japan, China, and Europe to World—is heavily overlaid with historical attitudes toward land,