'Landscape' is a Dutch invention that was developed by artists who were part of the prosperous commercial culture of the Netherlands in the early 17th century.  The patrons of art were plebeian (in the sense of 'not noble'), down-to-earth people.  They could tell one grade of cloth from another.  They were flower-fanciers attentive to the curl of a petal, artisans and craftsmen who were similarly conscious of the values of precision.  In this sense the art of the Dutch republic was bound to reflect what is common to all such cultural dispositions—the various embodiments of 'realism' in the home, town and countryside environments.

There is also the fact that Holland was a small country; little in it was unknown or mysterious; there was no call to introduce transcendental qualities into scenes familiar to everyone. On the same line of argument, Italianate architectural fantasies made up of buildings known to everyone but assembled in a grouping which could never actually occur, had little market.

It is probable that the painter guilds and the numerous individual painters were an important motor in developing a market where some citizens buy literally dozens of landscapes just as others buy hundreds of plants or bulbs or shrubs for their newly laid-out gardens?  Art came to carry a less heroic message as it expanded into  new subject matter. Things become interesting, especially landscape; also the still life, the composition put together from homely objects, or prized objects, or from flowers (echoing the intensive and specialized horticulture of the land). Painters became free to turn their eye to observe Holland's more prosaic achievements and specialize in one or other branch to celebrate them. A church is now a municipal monument, not a shrine, which is partly why it begins to be painted in a new and meticulously factual way. The observed realities which the painter shares with his fellow citizens (his market)—the artefacts such as ships and windmills or the elements about him, waves, wind, cloud, and storm—these are free to carry a weight of attention and a weight of meaning without precedent in artistic tradition.

These two things taken together, the weight of attention and the weight of meaning, are what we understand by the realism of the Dutch school. It is a product both of earlier achievement and of a present configuration of values concentrated in the culture of the republic and its tight bonds with its dangerous watery ecosystem. This regional environmental perspective heightened esteem for artefacts and natural objects 'as they actually are', whether at the waterfront or indoors or on the table, whether the alignment of houses on a well-known skyline, or a windmill standing on an inlet of water or a familiar vista of lonely dunes under a huge sky or a quality of cloud and atmosphere and light . . . These things, no longer crowded to the side, are reconciled in the painter's compositional discoveries for their own sake.

There is a link with the beginnings of science, a movement that produced botanic gardens and the invention of the microscope. The depiction of even a flower implies awareness of all sorts of assumptions to do with botany (the botany of the seventeenth century) and how things grow. The nature of things is all open to rational appreciation: scholarly humanists pursue science in the university of Leyden's Hortus academicus (botanic garden). Indeed there is in the seventeenth century no other way of imagining reality. Triangles, tulips, laws, or ships all exhibit their mechanistic nature.

The painter and the scientist are not looking at two different realities, one concrete and the other abstract, or even at two different aspects of a reality, one visual and the other rational. They are looking at exactly the same object, except that the painter will record its surface rather than its dissected innards, while the scholar may sometimes wish to explore the latter. Even then, the appearance of an object to the painter, under determinate conditions, is still a part of its nature—a point taken for granted by any naturalist. There is thus no need for a special artistic philosophy to justify realism.

The early North American conservation movement actually outdid the Dutch in their criteria for what makes a good landscape worthy of protection.  In his epochal study, National Parks: The American Experience, Alfred Runte discusses the arguments crafted to support establishment of the early National Parks. Foremost was what Runte terms monumentalism— the preservation of inspirational scenic grandeur like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Valley and the protection of the curiosities of nature like Yellowstone's hot pots and geysers. Later proposals for National Parks had to measure up to the scenic quality of Mt. Rainier or Crater Lake. Even the heavily glaciated Olympic Mountains were denied National Park designation for many years because they weren't deemed to have the required degree of scenic grandeur.  Paintings by North American artists produced idealised pictographs the idealized landscape of the geological wonders of the west.  These pictures focus in detail  the supremacy of the wilderness landscape devoid of any sign of human civilization. .

With its roots firmly in the cultural ecology of the Netherlands, landscape conservation today has pictorial objectives. Today, landscape conservation plans are being promoted in England for low altitude farmlands and coastlands, where the essence is to create a pleasing balance between the different component ecosystems.  The objectives are to preserve unprofitable agricultural systems characteristic of the Georgian era.

The educational power of landscape to influence what should be valued and conserved did not take long to arrive.  It arguably took Wordsworth to the English Lake District, where the most powerful poetic images of nature were produced.  It is significant that The Lake District comes as near as can be to the Rocky Mountains. Here, searching for a fresh source of feelings for the environment, Wordsworth rejected the Neoclassic idea of the appropriate subject for serious verse and turned to the simplicities of rustic life "because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."

That interaction with nature has for many of the Romantic poets mystical overtones. Nature is apprehended by them not only as an exemplar and source of vivid physical beauty, but as a manifestation of spirit in the universe as well. In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth suggests that nature has gratified his physical being, excited his emotions, and ultimately allowed him "a sense sublime.  Of something far more deeply interfused," of a spiritual force immanent not only in the forms of nature but "in the mind of man." Though not necessarily in the same terms, a similar connection between the world of nature and the world of the spirit is also made by Blake, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley.

The landscape of the lakes made Wordsworth one of the first environmentalist . Bill Marsden has encapsulated this in relation to the central role played by the educational concept of 'the book of nature, enshrining moral and spiritual purposes.

Jonathan Bate describes the poet as founder of "a language that is for ever green."  He agitated, for example, against the proposal for an extension of the Kendal- Windermere railway from Bowness to Ambleside and Grasmere: "Is then no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?. . . "  It has been asserted that Wordsworth’s was a vested interest, and that his real objection was associated with a distaste for "town travellers" who "did not know how to read or interpret the landscape."  His motives were no doubt mixed, but the passion of his engagement is evident in his famous Guide to the Lake District in which he wrote of disfigurement of the countryside by the bad taste of the lavish Lakeland homes of nouveau riche incomers. The ideal home should be incorporated into the scenery, and the scenery would dictate its colour. "I have seen a single white house materially impair the majesty of a mountain. . . "

Wordsworth also wrote with some asperity about the probing of Lakeland by visiting scientists, as in his ironic strictures about the "wandering herbalist", or his fellow traveller, the geologist:

Then there was the "geographic labourer", who on a Lakeland peak "pitched his tent, With books supplied and instruments of art, To measure height and distance".  The experience culminates in sudden darkness as the mist comes down, reminding both poet and geographer that "nature cannot always be seen, controlled and mapped -- it must be respected".

Wordsworth’s concern for nature’s creatures was also to be found in his poetry, exemplified in the actions of a wild, innocent and caring Westmorland girl, watchful for the interests of her region’s natural life: