Anne Whiston Spirn is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning and Co-Director of Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

If mankind speaks through invented language, then nature can be said to present us with its own language – richly symbolic and subject to over interpretation. This we can call the language of landscape. This is an ancient truth. First for survival and later as a way of expressing important values, humans have interpreted the meaning of nature's many forms. What humans have themselves built is itself a continuation of this language