Landscape history as a planning tool

Abstract

Landscapes are constantly changing, both ecologically and culturally, and the vectors of change occur over many time scales. In order to plan landscapes, they must be understood within their spatial and temporal contexts. This paper argues that the inevitable dynamism in a landscape requires planning to explain and to deal with change. However, planning has been slow to do this, in part because it is inadequately equipped to analyze both rapid change and gradual evolution. A landscape history exposes the evolutionary patterns of a specific landscape by revealing its ecological stages, cultural periods, and keystone processes. Such a history can be a valuable tool as it has the potential to improve description, prediction, and prescription in landscape planning. In proposing landscape history as a tool for planning, I specifically address four questions. Why is this tool needed in landscape planning? What form should landscape history take? What are the obstacles to acquiring good landscape histories? And, what are the potential benefits of using history in landscape planning? To illustrate this proposition, I draw from an example of landscape history developed for Long Pond, Pennsylvania.