Inside the mind of the student body: Part 1
A response to Mitchell & Buggey's "Protected Landscapes and Cultural Landscapes: Taking Advantage of Diverse Approaches”

By Margo Logan

We, as humans, are a part of our landscape. We tend to forget that we are a major part of the environment around us. Many of the plants and animals that surround us are the way they are because they have adapted and evolved to accommodate our way of life. We have fundamentally changed nature, but this shouldn’t be taken as a bad thing.

Humans are animals, although we create a disconnect between nature (the rest of the animals) and ourselves. Our cultures and heritages are as much a part of conservation as the protection of biodiversity and the ‘natural’ habitats we see around us. Things wouldn’t be the way they are without humans. Because we have exempted ourselves from nature, we find ourselves taking on the role of steward to the land. We feel we are somehow above and responsible for nature, and so can protect and conserve it.

There are two types of landscapes that humans are currently working to conserve, protected landscapes and cultural landscapes. The paper entitled “Protected Landscapes and Cultural Landscapes: Taking Advantage of Diverse Approaches” by Nora Mitchell and Susan Buggey tries to bridge the gap between conservation of “natural” habitats and animals and historical human culture and heritage. Our culture is just as important to conservation as the protection of these natural processes. The paper defines a cultural landscape as “a diversity of manifestations of the interaction between humankind and its natural environment.”. If we substituted the word “animals” for “humankind” in that definition, we would get a definition of conservation. So, if we are animals, there should not be much of a difference between the two. An environmental historian quoted in this paper seems to agree with this idea, saying that “we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others.”
What makes us (humans) “unnatural” anyway? After all, we came from the earth and it is to there that we will return. Although we are creating much of the destruction we see today, our ancestors lived harmoniously with nature for thousands of years. This paper explains that the conservation of our natural heritages can be seen as a step towards sustainability. If we can conserve the historically sustainable areas, then we can learn more about them and adopt some of their practices. The World Heritage Committee states that the “protection of cultural landscapes can contribute to modern techniques of sustainable land use and can maintain or enhance natural values in the landscape.”

In order to really protect these diverse landscapes (conservation and cultural landscapes), we must bring people together. We must get people interested in their land, and give them a connection to it, a reason to be proud of it. These two landscapes must be combined if we want to really protect what we have from being lost like so many of the things we have already lost.

We are seeing these two disciplines come together and recognize each other, and the wonderful things they both have to offer. Compromises are being made, and more is being protected as a result. These two ideas are now facing each other and working together, instead of working against each other.