Landscape is the fruit of communication between culture and nature. They come together in landscape and thus cannot be understood separately, the memory of one conceals the other. This is perhaps the key to recognise Estonian landscape. And the charm, if not nourishment, of one's own culture. We have shaped our landscape, and the same landscape has determined the construction of the arrangement of our life, and maintained it beyond outside oscillations. Landscape as a profound language of national identity concerns all nations, and there is nothing new in noting it. This also entails keeping our landscape in accordance with the ancient nature of our culture, as a mosaic, as a meadow.

The system of separately standing farms and subsequent way of life have obviously had an enormous role in the emergence and survival of mosaic landscapes. In case a village is dense, with many farms, then the fields not too far from the houses must have covered a large part of the immediate vicinity. The forest or nature was at the other side of the fields. Most communication took place within the village. In case of a separate farm, however, a lot of other land besides fields, including the forest, lies near the farm. Nature is thus not far away, but participates in the daily relationship with the surroundings. When the sub-boreal period ended 2000 years ago and the climate became slightly warmer again, it increased the number of population which in turn greatly advanced agricultural activities. When, however, the agricultural output became a restricting factor, and the material for tools was obtained through restricted channels, the circumstances for the development of power structures were ripe. This soon led to the emergence of counties and, perhaps about 1500 years ago, to parishes.

rain tamm "woodscapes" 2003

Kalle Eller has offered a plausible explanation about the original emergence of parishes, which according to him developed in watershed areas. At that time people mostly lived near rivers as there were no wells yet. Members of the same tribe lived along the river. Forks of the river, on the other hand, were places where different tribes met. By the middle of the first millennium there were already so many people that the best places by rivers might have all been taken, and population reached the upper course of the rivers. Hence the meeting of different peoples which was no longer based on family ties. A good example of something new happening on the borders.

Edgar Kant has explained at length the geographical area where Estonia naturally belongs. His suggestion is the Nordic countries. (The Scandinavians of today are reluctant to accept this, although the reason seems to largely linguistic - after all, the Danes-Swedes-Norwegians and even Icelanders can understand one another pretty well. However, Kant's argumentation reveals that Estonia could in fact belong to many places. It seems to be located on the edge of numerous areas and is crossed by the borders of various other areas. Estonia's peculiarity is apparently the very fact that it exists on several borders simultaneously.

Estonia is a border state in the deepest sense of the word. It has accumulated transition areas of many types of nature and culture, and therefore the concentration of different borders in Estonia is higher than in most other places in the world. We have borders such as granite base - sedimentary rocks; sea-continent; forest-field; Indo-Germanic-Finno-Ugrian; Germanic-Slavonic; Scandinavia-Central Europe. Our landscapes balance the border state. Concentration of borders, as we well know from geography, is the best indication of diversity. Besides, according to Juri Lotman, the border areas are semiotically the wealthiest.

Why is the meadow culture typical of namely Estonia, why have they survived here for so long? After all, the hunters-fishermen-gatherers stayed put elsewhere as well? Up north from us considerably fewer domesticated herbivorous animals have been used who keep the meadows going. Down south the need to stock food for them for winter is much smaller, consequently there has been no need to mow and gather sheaves of grass, and keep the meadows and the cattle so close to home. (Thus the culture of mowing and semi-natural associations here is at its maximum.) Population migrations in the south have been more intense, people have settled less and the changes in the usage of land are greater. Additionally, due to more favourable climate, the southern population density has been bigger; hence the role of cultivated land was more significant as well. This has left less space for natural associations. This is how the Estonian nature - the heritage landscapes - have to this day maintained something that disappeared in Western Europe already in the Middle Ages. Here we still have examples of Central European early Middle Age landscapes.

Throughout history the Estonians' nature has been that of a fisherman, hunter and plant gatherer, in addition to moderate cattle breeding and some land cultivation. For that purpose we have shaped permanent mosaic landscapes, in accordance with the settled way of life and the sprawl, and these landscapes in their turn create and bear the roots of our culture. This type of association presents the state of being chosen, and vitality.

No language exists alone. Every nation has several languages connected through that nation that keep them together, and which keep their experience. Besides Estonian oral and written language we also have the languages of body and clothes, things and buildings, and we have the language of our landscapes. The language of landscapes that I am trying to describe here, consists of a large number of sub-languages - the ones with which we relate to other living creatures, shape and use the landscape, adapt ourselves to nature and vice versa, and having found balance in these relationships, we preserve, manage and heal it, learn from it, and use it to teach our children and guests.

Deviations from our established system of values, including our relations with nature, other living creatures, are especially strong at the time when the self-confidence is failing, i.e. when people look up at another culture, when culture suffers an inferiority complex. This is especially evident in relations with the 19th century Baltic German culture, and with West-European cultures in the late 20th-early 21st century. The same might have applied to local population's attitude towards arrivals from the east 4000 years ago. Equally, at these times economy changes especially fast, urged on by the need not to lag behind. With the increase of communicative variation, however, these soon led to ever sharper distinctions. Without the local identity getting stronger, supported partially or wholly by innovation in mythology, changes could not calm down to balance. After the Viking times, larger settlements sprung up in Estonia for the first time, the national awakening period ended with the independent state of Estonia. As it is difficult to expect the current period, organisationally or administratively, to produce anything specifically Estonian, this could again be a new and more extensive Estonian myth. The sense of tradition that elevates us to the best and the most persistent. After all, changes in myth might have had a significant role at all periods of on lability.

In intensive economic development Estonia has been in constant temporal shift compared with most other European countries. Less intensive cultivation of land has preserved the ancient semi-natural landscape structures more. It has also been a powerful catalyst for the intellectual side of local culture. Indirectly, this heterochrony largely causes or shapes many Estonia-related values, and its survival might thus be vital in the future as well.

Estonian landscapes that each generation shapes and where it leaves its traces, have lost their previous stability since the 19th century period of national awakening (to this day), they have started to vacillate with great amplitude. The records of many centuries of both the scarcity and wealth of forest belong to the last century. Never before has human hand quite so much interfered with the relief. Waters have been disarranged, the map is covered with a blue network - the result of diligent draining, from the national awakening period onwards and lasting for a good one hundred years. The huge Kirovets tractors flattened hundreds of square kilometres, destroying the diversity of stones and hollows that provided those areas of their patterns. The power to change and alter landscapes is great, but the guide of its activities is feeble.

All this makes it possible or at least feasible to create an overview of Estonian ecological history. Images described here could also help to recognise some pattern features of different manifestations of the culture of this region. For example an observation that compared with the art of other countries, one of the specific features of Estonian art is the remarkably high number of landscape paintings (of which the largest part, if to take a closer look, depicts semi-natural associations). Another example could be taken from our literature (maybe also in folklore and poetry) - the zigzag time and space that seem to reflect our mosaic and many-layered landscape without single large objects or extensively visible horizon. A fragmentary landscape abounding in borders. This is a culture of slow movement that values solitude. On the Estonian horizon meet sky and water, and not land and sky. Through this landscape Estonia reveals and expresses itself, simultaneously presenting and concealing our history, peculiarity, life.

Kalevi Kull (1952), biosemiotician, professor of phy-siology and semiotics, received the national science award in 2002. See also zbi.ee/~kalevi