ABSTRACT
The European Landscape Convention (ELC), while applying to all landscapes, and very cautious about attributing ranking qualitative values to landscapes, nevertheless accepts that some landscapes need to be conserved, some to be managed and some enhanced; and this threefold distinction makes for useful sectional headings in this final part, though they are far from being exclusive categories. People’s ideas of what constitutes landscape quality, as we have seen, have changed dramatically over time, and different people will still rank landscapes quite differently depending on a host of factors (Penning-Rowsell and Lowenthal, 1986). Probably most animals rank them differently again – any keen birdwatcher will be aware how often the birdlife is much richer in a scruffy and untidy bit of unused land than anywhere else. So there are very few landscapes where even all humans would agree that every feature should be preserved and, at the other extreme, where every feature needs to be removed in an enhancement programme, as in the 1960s with that dread phrase ‘comprehensive redevelopment’. Every landscape needs management, including some protection and some enhancement. Even the most natural landscape needs management even on those few occasions, such as in Antarctica perhaps, where that management consists largely of restricting access. So the division applies more usefully to human actions on the landscape than it does to discrete places. There are other terms which need to be used with care also and these include ‘conservation’ and ‘preservation’. In British usage ‘preservation’ implies the maintenance of the landscape, building or site in its current state, so far as possible, without allowing for change, as with a museum artefact, whereas conservation allows for change over time and is a much more flexible, though hotly disputed, concept. In American usage conservation applies primarily to fauna and flora, the natural landscape, whereas preservation is used for the built environment. The term ‘protected area’ is perhaps more useful and is used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). They use a definition which has international authority grouping Protected Landscapes into categories dependent largely on the degree of power of the responsible organisation.
