An environmental landscape is what?

Rebecca Ford New Canaan
3 min readFeb 7, 2023

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The physical environment, how people experience and value it, and the social and cultural connotations connected to it all make up an environmental landscape, a dynamic area.

To solve various socioeconomic, environmental, and climate change challenges, such as food security, poverty alleviation, and biodiversity protection, landscape methods aim to manage various land uses at a landscape scale. They seek to incorporate larger integrated management concepts [2–5] into single-sector conservation, forestry, and agricultural production.

The European Union (ELC) defines a landscape as “a region whose character is the outcome of the action and interaction of natural and human elements.” A region’s distinctive landscape synthesizes time, location, and people and is crucial to regional and societal identity.

A landscape comprises several physical components, such as houses or other artificial structures, geophysically defined landforms, and live environmental components. A landscape also contains cultural components like customs or history.

The study and management of a landscape necessitate a balance between cultural and ecological perspectives since a landscape may be both an ecological and a cultural product. Many of the Sustainable Development Goals may be supported by the expanding number of landscape techniques that attempt to meet spatial and ecological aims for conservation, development, or both.

The physical characteristics of the Earth’s surface, such as its terrain, underlying geology, vegetation, and soils, are included in the natural environment. These traits impact people’s behavior patterns and capacity for environmental adaptation.

The geographic sciences aid in our comprehension of these physical settings, their evolution across time, and how people relate to them. Our study focuses on various issues, such as how cultures alter the landscape and how we may manage our world’s resources more effectively.

Climates, soils, water bodies, and the underlying geology of the landscape are just a few of the intricate combinations of biotic and abiotic elements that make up the natural environment. It is also susceptible to weather variations, earthquakes, and other climatic occurrences. This is frequently a dynamic process that keeps changing as new circumstances develop over time. This may significantly impact the variety and adaptability of the biological communities in the area. Deforestation, altered microclimates, pollution, erosion, and habitat fragmentation are a few of these effects.

People’s surroundings and landscapes are inextricably linked and contribute to their cultural identity. The European Landscape Convention’s Article 5. a, which declares that “Landscapes are vital elements of people’s surroundings, a reflection of the variety of their common cultural and natural heritage, and a cornerstone of their identity,” reflects this (European Landscape Convention, 2002).

The approach presented in this paper uses landscape ecology and network analysis at the coarser scale of the city to analyze the social production of environmental services with an emphasis on three analytical moments: generation, distribution, and articulation.

By doing this, I hope to displace the idea of “nature” as a closed-off “factory” that produces both good and bad things.

I contend that “ecosystem services” are produced and distributed primarily through social management and preservation activities. For instance, in Indianapolis, trees that shelter and shade a neighborhood would be of little use if wealthy property owners did not nurture them.

Natural resources are essential to the survival of cultures, affecting how people view their surroundings. As a result of people’s adaptation to the environment and other circumstances, we see that landscapes change throughout time and in different locations.

The constructed environment, including bridges, highways, and power lines, is the cultural context surrounding the natural landscape. It comprises fixed archaeological buildings on land or in water. Cultural landscapes are valued because of these characteristics, but they must be regularly maintained to sustain their worth. Due to this, it is crucial to develop, execute, and continuously evaluate cultural contexts as a whole.

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Rebecca Ford New Canaan
Rebecca Ford New Canaan

Written by Rebecca Ford New Canaan

Rebecca Ford from New Canaan, CT loves many things. To help those in need, Neighbor to Neighbor collects and distributes necessities.

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