Cultural landscape and ecology 11: regions, retrospects, revivals

Abstract

This is the second report in a series of three. The first reported on recent publications that combine a focus on cultural landscape(s) and ecological dynamics and dimensions (Mathewson, 1998). It also included a survey of coverage of cultural landscapes and ecology in Progress in Human Geography (1977– ) since its inception, and also referred to items in its predecessor, the annual review Progress in Geography (1969–76). To be sure, both categories have appeared in reports with varying rubrics over the past 30 years, but not as the titular nor main focus of them. Moreover, cultural landscape and ecology were rarely viewed in combination, and rarer still as a unity. This seems somewhat curious given that the nexus of relations, variously referred to as nature–society, human–environment, man–land and so on, constitutes one of the three or four consistent and fundamental divisions or arenas of geographic learning and labor (Agnew et al., 1996; Rediscovering Geography Committee, 1997). And within this sector, by any reasonable account, the concepts of cultural landscape and ecology are central (Turner, 1997). Whatever the past editorial rationales for this elision, a forum has now been provided. It comes at a critical time. General interest in human impacts on the global environment – past, present and future – has probably never been greater. Of course, geographers do not have exclusive proprietary claims to this immense topic, nor should they. Incre a s i n g l y, the practitioners are as apt to be enviro n m e n t a l historians, historical ecologists, landscape archaeologists and kindred specialist-synthesizers (to use Turner’s, 1989, term) as geographers. At lesser scales and finer resolutions, particularly wherein the study of cultural landscape and ecology meet and merge, a case for geographic liens (on certain neighbors’ interventions) based on provenance and development would be legitimate. In the meantime, geographers might be flattered by the mimicry, but also alert to opportunities to make it clear that Progress in Human Geography 23,2 (1999) pp. 267–281