ABSTRACT
The European Landscape Convention (ELC) provides a carefully crafted and well established definition of landscape: ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe, 2000: 9). Acknowledging landscape as a matter of human perception has profound implications for the distinctions between landscape and ‘environment’, some of which are explored elsewhere (ESF, 2010). In brief, landscape exists in the mind, created when the information it receives from our senses about an area is coloured by our mind’s cognitive fabric: the cultural understanding we bring to bear from our knowledge, experience, beliefs, interests and prejudices. It follows that landscape is a plural, subjective and dynamic concept, accommodating the numerous and developing cultural perspectives of any given area. By contrast, environment is external, singular and objective, unattainable by our minds but about which we gather data, hypothesise and test to seek ever closer understanding, which may be proven or disproven but not both.
