ABSTRACT
Many disciplines abut landscape. Particularly strong connections are with local history, archaeology and cultural geography with its emphasis on iconography. All have contributed to landscape history, but disciplinary cleavages have often prevented it from being seen as a united endeavour. The chapter first examines landscape subjects that intertwine values and landscapes, such as cultural landscapes, landscape urbanism, the histories of institutions, professional ethics, environmental history and national parks. The speaker’s paper majors on the cultural landscapes approach and how the landscape professional’s skills in understanding and manipulating the dynamics of the landscape will be a valuable asset in tackling the enormous scale of landscape planning that will be necessary to achieve COP15 targets for climate change and delivering solutions that simultaneously protect natural and cultural values in the landscape whilst creating new landscapes of beauty worthy of landscape appreciation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of those land uses that have formed the present landscape and will be essential elements of the new ones, including grazing and agricultural histories, hunting, rewilding and forestry and skills to ‘read’ a landscape archaeologically and through historical ecology and describe its landscape character.
