To provide observations and information on the emerging fields of landscape scale conservation, heritage preservation, and sustainable community development.
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Bills designating new National Heritage Areas have been introduced for several Congressional sessions, but nothing happened. That is until this year, when with surprising speed and overwhelming majorities, the Senate and House passed the Natural Resources Management Act. This bill is already being celebrated and rightly so for permanently reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund,creating three new national monuments, expanding park boundaries and so on. What has been less discussed in the over 600 pages of this legislation is the designation of six new National Heritage Areas.
It should come as no surprise to readers of the Living Landscape Observer that conserving large landscapes in the current political climate is no easy task. There are threats to our public lands and proposals to defund the federal programs that conserve our cultural and natural resources. However, the bigger issue is the underlying erosion of landscape scale work throughout our national government. There are systemics challenges to all these efforts that need to be better understood.
On November 13-14, 2018 US ICOMOS welcomed experts from 15 countries across six continents to a gathering at the Presidio in San Francisco. Titled Forward Together: Effective Conservation in a Changing World, the goal of the symposium was to share a range of ideas on how to integrate culture and nature and to explore ways to shape cultural and natural heritage for long-lasting conservation. Building on earlier international nature/culture journeys, the focus was taking action on the ground.
There is a growing recognition that cultural resources as a part of the larger landscapes. The idea that there is a unity of nature and culture has created a significant opportunity for cultural resource practitioners to contribute to the new field of landscape scale conservation. There are compelling reasons to partner up with this emerging movement. The nature conservation field has long recognized that threats to natural resources occur at multiple and much larger spatial scales than those usually addressed in cultural resource preservation. Ecosystems are adversely affected by impacts that transcend political and disciplinary boundaries. Threats include urban expansion, air and water pollution, deforestation, agriculture intensification, mineral extraction, and of course climate change. The nation’s cultural heritage faces the same threats. Responding with a landscape or regional approach is a better match to the scope of the problem.
The Network for Landscape Conservation has just released a report Path Ways Forward: Progress and Priorities in Landscape Conservation. The report documents the thinking of 200 leading landscape conservation practitioners from the United States, Canada, and Mexico at a November 2017 National Forum on Landscape Conservation. The report also documents the growth of the movement not just by the number of landscape scale projects, but more importantly by the growing understanding of what it means to successfully sustain them.
Bills designating new National Heritage Areas have been introduced for several Congressional sessions, but nothing happened. That is until this year, when with surprising speed and overwhelming majorities, the Senate and House passed the Natural Resources Management Act. This bill is already being celebrated and rightly so for permanently reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund,creating three new national monuments, expanding park boundaries and so on. What has been less discussed in the over 600 pages of this legislation is the designation of six new National Heritage Areas.
It should come as no surprise to readers of the Living Landscape Observer that conserving large landscapes in the current political climate is no easy task. There are threats to our public lands and proposals to defund the federal programs that conserve our cultural and natural resources. However, the bigger issue is the underlying erosion of landscape scale work throughout our national government. There are systemics challenges to all these efforts that need to be better understood.
On November 13-14, 2018 US ICOMOS welcomed experts from 15 countries across six continents to a gathering at the Presidio in San Francisco. Titled Forward Together: Effective Conservation in a Changing World, the goal of the symposium was to share a range of ideas on how to integrate culture and nature and to explore ways to shape cultural and natural heritage for long-lasting conservation. Building on earlier international nature/culture journeys, the focus was taking action on the ground.
There is a growing recognition that cultural resources as a part of the larger landscapes. The idea that there is a unity of nature and culture has created a significant opportunity for cultural resource practitioners to contribute to the new field of landscape scale conservation. There are compelling reasons to partner up with this emerging movement. The nature conservation field has long recognized that threats to natural resources occur at multiple and much larger spatial scales than those usually addressed in cultural resource preservation. Ecosystems are adversely affected by impacts that transcend political and disciplinary boundaries. Threats include urban expansion, air and water pollution, deforestation, agriculture intensification, mineral extraction, and of course climate change. The nation’s cultural heritage faces the same threats. Responding with a landscape or regional approach is a better match to the scope of the problem.
The Network for Landscape Conservation has just released a report Path Ways Forward: Progress and Priorities in Landscape Conservation. The report documents the thinking of 200 leading landscape conservation practitioners from the United States, Canada, and Mexico at a November 2017 National Forum on Landscape Conservation. The report also documents the growth of the movement not just by the number of landscape scale projects, but more importantly by the growing understanding of what it means to successfully sustain them.