Our landscapes; our privilege; our responsibility. This is, simply put, the concept of landscape stewardship. As the word itself suggests, a stewardship approach implies that we manage our landscapes and the resources contained therein not only assuming that we have rights (typical of owners) but also on a realization that we have corresponding duties (typical of caretakers). It is an approach fundamentally based on several core tenets of sustainability, intra and intergenerational equity, inclusiveness, and the safeguarding of critical ecosystem services among them.
Read more »While governance for cultural landscapes has traditionally followed a preservationist direction (meaning that valuable landscapes were simply put under legal protection), there has been a recent trend towards collaborative action, for which the term “stewardship” is frequently used. Stewardship is relevant at all kinds of spatial levels (from very local ones up to “planetary stewardship”) and in many different sectors (for example, there is “agricultural stewardship”, “forest stewardship”, or “environmental stewardship”). Here, we introduce the term „landscape stewardship“ into the HERCULES project to describe all collaborative efforts toward landscape sustainability. But what exactly are the implications of landscape stewardship?
Read more »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.
Read more »No attempt to implement the European Landscape Convention can be successful without knowing what is important to local people. In the UK the demand for a more locally focussed agenda is being met in part by the making of Community Plans, typically for a village and the land surrounding, which form a parish. In the deeper countryside, this administrative parish is often coterminous with the ecclesiastical parish centred on the parish church, and that is so in Winkleigh, the village in the middle of Devon, in South West England, which is the subject of this article.
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