Beholding Eye: Earth is a platform

The Beholding Eye expresses the relationship between man and nature during history. Meinig uses old conceptions and ideologies of nature as examples of changing ideas and the connection to man. The author describes the landscape as a number of fundamentals, such as, nature, habitat, artifact, system, and so and so forth. Meinig defines landscape as not being primarily composed of what lies before our eyed but also on what we materialize in our minds. To give a sense of the immensity of “mother earth” Meinig describes the control of nature with old metaphors and Romanticism ideology. With the notion being that nature is that controls and nature being seen as pure and majestic. However, the author turns the view around to the ideology that man is creator, and that Earth is a platform. Where rarely something is considered nature because in some complex way man has altered changes through infrastructure. This resulting in that landscape can be interpreted through many variations of old ideas, stories, and observations differing from person to person.