Reading about Meinig’s ideas about “landscape as ideology” brought me back to the class where we attempted to identify and define different types of geographers. Specifically, I recall talking about marxist geography, the relationship between place and its economic foundation. This type of place analysis is concerned with the capitalist production of space, or place being reactionary. Initially, I found this idea to be somewhat depressing, seeing ways in which the world around us is constructed through a hierarchal financial system, in which efficiency is prioritized. Yet, Meinig’s piece fleshed these ideas out in a more optimistic way. Through an ideological analysis of landscape and place, we can move past the phase of marxist geography that simply identifies the roots of space construction, and think optimistically about the potential for the future: “if we want to change the landscape in important ways we shall have to change the ideas that have created and sustained what we see” (Meinig 42). It is easy to be caught in the mind’s trap that space or place is absolute and fixed. We, as culture/community/society, have the ability to interact with the landscape in new ways. In Waterville, we can arguably see the negative effects of globalization, a capitalist mode, on space with the abandoned mill buildings along the Mesalonskee. We can simultaneously see the potential for that space to become a new place for other types of production, whether it be jobs, living space, artistic production, or anything that might contribute to the creation of a multitude of new and positive places to members of a community. This community.