People and Their Environments

In 1992 the World Heritage Committee introduced ‘cultural landscape’ as a new category of World Heritage cultural site in an attempt to reconnect culture and nature within the context of the 1972 World Heritage Convention. The committee was responding to the near absence of World Heritage properties reflecting the diverse and complex relationships between humans and their environments, and in particular those that characterise traditional and indigenous cultures (Fowler 2002: 19). The separation of nature from culture in the processes for inscription of properties on the World Heritage List had been identified as limiting recognition of non-Western perceptions of landscape, relationships to animals, plants, landforms and the sea, and the roles of traditional owners and custodians (Titchen 1996).