Why does the average American homeowner work so hard, or hire someone, to manicure patches of grass and trees within their properties. Is it a matter of taste, subjective and unimportant, or is there something in our psyche that makes them desire to fit into the suburban culture. In Lewis's work he makes the argument that no part of our cultural landscape is unintentional, and in fact has deep and various roots in our culture.
He breaks down some of the basic reasons and factors into what he calls his axioms. That is things that he sees as basic and self evident. The basic point of these axioms is that the culture of any nation or area is unintentionally reflected in its ordinary landscape. Roads, cities, farms, and malls all reflect investments of our money and there for tend to follow patterns already established in our psyche. In this section he also explains that as cultures grow and border each other, or members of cultures move, there is the inevitable blending or converging of landscapes.
In addition there is no one area or item of landscape that is more important than another. He compares them to tips of an iceberg, all different in appearance, but the parts of the same object. He suggests that some common things are harder to study such as mobile homes and gas stations as they appear all across the landscape. The stress he puts here though is that they can still give us a great deal of information about us as people. He also puts this stress on the history of older places, stating that although some older things seem obsolete now they were not at the time they were built.
He does note later in the essay the effect of environment and physical landscape on the development of our cultural landscape. He also discusses the human desire to control our environment by "conquering geography". It is at this point he turns to the academic question of why we don't usually study our landscapes.
