Markus wrote:
We - my brother Markus and the rest of my siblings and I - spent our earliest years in what, to me, is still one of the prettiest landscapes going.
Likely, I romanticized this landscape, I was only nine years old when we left. But you have all these rolling hills dotted with these pastoral farms leading right up to the Nagelfluhkette of the German Alps. One of the reasons it was and is so pretty, at least to my eyes then and now, is the farms that look a little bit like a picture book about farming. There is nothing "wild" about this landscape, it is an intensively used area. I love it as much as I love the wildest parts of the Lake Superior shore - not in spite of the presence of human activity, but because of it.
The kind of farming practiced there, it's got high "amenity value". It produces more than just the milk from the dairy farms - it produces a landscape. The same thing happens north of Waterloo, Ontario - where the tourists flock to see "Mennonite Country". Yet our way of looking at agriculture in the North American context is to see farming as "production" of specific "farm outputs" - and we don't always think of the amenity value.
In the Black Forest, there's a recognition that fully wild is not the most desirable landscape from the point of view of aesthetics and tourism and consequently local economies. I'm told it's the "black" forest because of the denseness of the closed canopies (though there are peaks that aren't forested), but the closed canopy is not that appealing for hiking and other outdoorsy forms of recreation. The farms - and their maintenance of open areas - are an integral part of the cultural landscape. The farming itself is pretty.
Managed landscapes have a lot of beauty too.