Production Confronts Consumption: Landscape Perception and Social Conflict in the Hudson Valley

With the Hudson River Valley for a setting, I examine in this paper the use of nature as a resource for production, and the employment of nature as a refuge from the negative social and environmental externalities accompanying production, As expressed through landscape art and design, the Valley was significant for development of a landscape ideology which, at first, ignored productive intrusion into areas used for leisure and residential consumption. However, given their dialectic relationship, tension between production and consumption in the landscape remained. Eventually the state was called on to attempt a spatial balance, when private efforts to defend nature as personal consumption space were no longer effective. Today, as in the past, individuals, in their defense of nature as consumption space, continue to be driven toward private positions which may be antagonistic to a collective class interest in capital accumulation. Acknowledgement of this possibility is important to realize new class alliances and the revolutionary potential of consumption-based social movements.