Tom Chandler on Virtual Landscapes & Lost Ecologies

In this talk, I’d like to try and unpick a recurrent theme in my research, one that’s been there all along, but one I’ve only recently begun to appreciate. I’d like to explore how virtual worlds might mesh with studies in historical ecology.

The idea for this talk was prompted by conversations with research scientists in an ongoing project that Bernie Jenny and I have been working on with the CSIRO. We were using virtual reality to simulate landscape dynamics in Box Gum Grassy Woodlands; a nationally listed threatened ecological community. The assumption was that these landscapes existed, somewhere, in a relatively ‘pristine’ state, so this was the archetypal (baseline) floral assembly that we modelled against. But after seeing it, a landscape ecologist suggested to me that what we had modelled could already be historical, because the landscapes as we’d depicted them might no longer exist. What we think are enduring landscapes today, he pointed out, are mostly damaged, impoverished versions of what came before. Unwittingly, in modelling the present, we had created an archive.

This presentation will visit a range of places and themes, from the paintings of the Heidelberg School to scientific illustrations drawn out from the ‘deep time’ of Australian palaeobotanical studies. I will touch upon the creation of virtual landscapes in teaching, with examples of student work from Immersive Environments, a unit I teach with Mike Yeates. And I will attempt to appraise the discipline of historical ecology, which has been described as a field with “no unified methodology, specialized institutional background and common publication forums.” I like it already!

To wrap up, I would like to delve into what the podcaster Paul Cooper has described as the feelings of "ubi sunt" provoked by the sight of ruined buildings, and the ruin as a site of historical rupture. I will suggest that this is the liminal zone where virtual heritage and virtual ecology can interweave in meaningful ways, and how these kinds of virtual-historical adventures can sharpen the present, and the future, more than we would like.