Landscape as a Driver for Well-being: The ELC in the Globalist Arena

Abstract

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) recognizes that landscapes are dynamic entities that change over time and advocates appropriate management strategies that will protect landscape values and the well-being of communities and individuals affected by change. Global drivers are however often powerful forces to which the inhabitants of landscape don't have means to resist. Two cases of dramatic landscape change, in the contrasting geographies and political contexts of New Zealand and Palestine, are presented. The first example is located within a benign context and the other in an area of extreme conflict. Nonetheless in both cases the changes described have striking visible impact on the landscape and significant flow-on effects, some of them intangible and unquantifiable, on the well-being of the people who inhabit these landscapes. These cases present the two ends of a spectrum in which the hypothesis of a world landscape convention inspired by the ELC is relevant. The argument is that the moral imperative of a landscape convention in the spirit of the ELC holds the potential to become the mechanism to mitigate such ill effects of landscape change at a breadth of situations from the everyday ordinary landscape to military conflict zones.