Cultural Landscapes Blog

A central tenet of the HERCULES project is that landscapes are important components of individual and societal well-being. However, people value landscapes for a variety of reasons (and these are often in conflict with each other; some people appreciate a landscape’s potential to generate wind energy, while others are fond of the aesthetic values of landscapes). In the past decades, there has been a strongly growing demand for the intangible values of landscapes, called “cultural ecosystem services”. These can be cultural heritage values, the sense of place that people ascribe to a landscape, or the potential of a landscape for tourism and recreation. The growth of private and public nature reserves, tourism facilities, second homes, hobby farms, and residential homes in the countryside can all be understood as land uses stimulated by cultural ecosystem services.

What makes life good is one of humankind’s most fundamental questions. Given recent experiences of extreme droughts, soil degradation and a multitude of other existent or foreboding ecological crises around the world, there is increasing acknowledgement that human well-being is tightly linked to the natural environment. However, empirical studies that address this topic in a comprehensive manner have only recently evolved, most notably with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005). Following a landscape approach with a focus on the cognitive dimension of the human-nature nexus, the HERCULES researchers Claudia Bieling and Tobias Plieninger, together with Heidemarie Pirker and Christian R. Vogl, address this topic in a new paper in “Ecological Economics” (Bieling et al. 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.05.013).