Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
unrecognized until recently (Rotherham, Egan, and Ardron 2004). Ancient wood-
lands are among Britain's most highly valued conservation sites, but former manage-
ment strategies, such as coppice for fuelwood and charcoal, often go unnoticed, and
the historic drivers of change that determine the contemporary ecology are frequently
ignored. These drivers are the dynamic forces of politics, economics, and society at lo-
cal and, frequently, subsistence levels. Such landscapes and associated ecologies are
often mistakenly considered to be “natural” (Lambert et al. 1961). This lack of histor-
ical context is troubling because medieval woods, heaths, commons, and bogs across
western and Mediterranean Europe supplied most people with fuel, building materi-
als, and food for many centuries. Local landscapes provided community needs in tra-
ditional agrarian, early industrial, and subsistence societies. Most people depended on
limited land resources, often held in common, for arable pasture, fuel, and building
materials. Understanding the implications of historic land use and its impacts, both
drastic and subtle, on soils, water, and vegetation is important in informing future
management. Many sites now managed for conservation are unrelated to former cul-
tural uses. Others are intensified or abandoned; in all situations the original ecology,
altered, slips away or is destroyed outright.
Changing Values and Cultural Severance
Human resource use in landscapes is a fundamental driver of ecosystems, interacting
with ecology and other environmental factors through complex social, legal, eco-
nomic, and political mechanisms that facilitate and constrain usage. Almost all Euro-
pean landscapes, and many others elsewhere, are cultural palimpsests that were man-
aged in traditional ways for millennia (Crumley and Marquardt 1987; Agnoletti 2006).
Traditional cultural practices, not always sustainable, generated many landscapes
we now value highly. The mechanisms or drivers of this relationship are complex,
ranging from direct environmental impacts (e.g., lowering nutrient levels and mi-
crodisturbance) to indirect effects through social and economic impacts (e.g., re-
source abundance that allowed people to remain in an area). With modern agricul-
tural and industrial revolutions came “cultural severance,” the break between local
people, nature, and landscape (Rotherham 2009). Communities and supplies of food,
fuel, and building materials or other needs have been separated so each has become a
commodity often produced outside the local or regional ecosystem. As industry and
agriculture became increasingly technological and driven by cheap fossil fuels, previ-
ously used resources and solutions to subsistence needs were largely abandoned. Lo-
cal landscapes from which they came have been radically altered; transformed eco-
nomically, politically, socially, and ecologically. There was also a shift from rural to
urban populations; for those left behind, their traditional environment becomes dis-
puted space. Eventually squeezed out, the former landscapes are abandoned to be-
come backdrops to tourism and weekend recreationists, and the leisure grounds of the
wealthy. It is widely recognized that traditional rural economies may be replaced by
leisure and tourism. Indeed, these changes are welcomed by many British conserva-
tionists who see farming use as twentieth-century techno-exploitation. Critical actors
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