The Protected Landscape Approach - Centre for Mediterranean ...

The Protected Landscape Approach: Linking Nature, Culture and Community
And it is more than scenery in another sense too. Because the landscape embodies the past
record of human use of the land, it is what generations of people have made of the places in
which we now live. Thus it both absorbs layers of history and embodies layers of meaning.
Therefore we can see landscape as a meeting ground 3 between:
Nature and people – and how these have interacted to create a distinct place;
Past and present – and how therefore landscape provides a record of our natural and
cultural history;
Tangible and intangible values – and how these come together in the landscape to give us
a sense of identity.
Herein lie both the strength and the weakness of the idea of landscape. The strength of
landscape is that it embodies many facets and appeals to us in all sorts of ways. Its weakness is
that – just because it is a meeting ground – no single profession owns it or can champion it
unaided: the proper understanding of landscape calls for contributions from many disciplines.
Furthermore landscape is a cultural construct and often culturally contested: different groups
will see it differently, and ideas about it are not constant but change over time. Thus an
Australian aboriginal will read quite different things into the outback landscape than a farmer
of European origin; and rugged Alpine scenery that eighteenth century travellers thought of as
repugnant became the spiritual heartland of the Romantic movement. Finally, because many of
the values of landscape cannot be quantified, they are open to challenge in a world where what
cannot be measured is at risk.
Landscape and policy 4
These various characteristics of landscape make it an elusive concept, and a difficult topic to
embed in policy. Of course, love of landscape has driven public policy in many countries for
many years. It has also motivated millions of people to support powerful voluntary sector
organisations like the National Trust in the UK or many of the Land Trusts of the US. But
landscape has usually been seen as a second class member of the environmental club. “Lacking
a coherent philosophy, thin on quantification and without a strong, unified disciplinary core, it
has often been viewed as a ‘soft’ topic, to be swept aside in the rush to develop and exploit the
environment, a trend that is justified by that trite commentary: ‘jobs before beauty’” (Phillips
and Clarke, 2004). Compared to the wilderness movement in North America, and its equi -
valents in Australia and other countries, the idea of taking an interest in lived-in, working
landscapes was slow to emerge, and confined to relatively few countries for many years. In this
it contrasts with the demands of wildlife conservation or pollution control. The protection,
management and planning of landscape has generally been a less powerful movement, and has
taken longer to emerge as a political force.
The contrast is particularly evident at the international level. Some regional nature conser -
vation agreements (e.g., that for the Western Hemisphere) and two global biodiversity-related
3
4
The European Landscape Convention captures this in its definition of a landscape: “an area, as
perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human
factors”.
These thoughts derive from Adrian Phillips and Roger Clarke: Our Landscape from a Wider
Perspective in Bishop, K. and Phillips, A. 2004.
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