ABSTRACT
This chapter reimagines the East-West Silk Road as the “Blue Green Planet” of the future in an updated version of the network of ideas exchanged on trade routes of old. Through a comparison of landscape paintings of 13th-century China and 19th-century United States of America, it highlights shared correspondences toward nature. In both instances, it was the painter's brush that indelibly endowed the national consciousness of a birth-right and kinship with the natural landscape. Further, a closer look at the Chinese literati (wenrenhua), demonstrates how landscape painting was seen and experienced as both method and measure of the exemplary individual. The rise of the wenrenhua set the stage for a renewed communication with nature, not just visually, but also through a keener disposition of appreciating the undertones of rhythms in nature. Both East and West landscape painting traditions can point the way to the actual seeing of innumerable possibilities. To the degree countries and corporations reclaim their relationship to nature by interdependently addressing the earth's ecological imbalance may well be the true litmus test for 21st-century leadership.
