What don’t we see
when we look at a landscape?
Looking at a landscape for the first time is a bit like
seeing a stranger – you see their appearance, their body, but until you get to
know them you don’t see their personality – or know anything about what makes
them tick. Generally when we look at
landscapes we see a view, or, if it’s somewhere we know well, we see places.
Places which may have special meanings to us:
a personal history that colours our view. As with people there are places we fall in
love with, places we seek out when we feel sad and need cheering and places
where we walk which give us perspective and literally can shape our views.
Nature and wild places can be healing for both mind and body and if also for
spirit too.
To understand a living landscape we need to see beneath the
surface; to look just a bit deeper, and certainly working in nature
conservation to try and heal a living landscape we need to really love that
landscape, study it before we act and come to know process as well as place. To
illustrate this concept another way, imagine if you had to go hospital for an
operation, would you want your surgeon just to know about your anatomy? Or would
you like a doctor with some understanding of your physiology, the processes,
like blood flow and breathing, that keep you alive?
Well it’s just the same with living landscapes. As well as
the anatomy of place they also have their physiology. We don’t easily see the
flows of energy and materials that connect place to place, and landscape to
landscape, but it is these flows that deliver the ecosystem services we rely on. And it is through understanding these flows,
these natural connections, that we can like the doctor, assess the health of a
landscape. It is these flows that make a Living Landscape.
When we look at landscapes in this way it’s a revelation –
the rain that falls on our nature reserves, or indeed your garden, may perhaps only days before have been water from
the Atlantic ocean, evaporated by sunshine half a world away, brought here to
this Norfolk landscape in clouds carried on winds the swirl across ocean and
continent. The rain falling here today, may, depending on the local soils and
geology, seep down into the slow time of deep underground aquifers, remaining
underground for decades or centuries, or be carried by stream and river to the
distant sea in a matter of days or weeks. The hidden flows of nitrate,
phosphate and carbon through a landscape determine the health of its ecology
and ultimately the health of our planet. Flows of carbon and oxygen move between living creatures and the
atmosphere and the balance of these flows determines our climate. Human impact on a landscape always changes the
ways energy and materials flow. For
example the way rainfall flows off a ploughed field is totally different to the
way it moves through a grassland, let alone a natural wetland. The impact of flows of nutrients from
fertilizers used on fields many miles away will affect the ecology of habitats
lower down a river catchment. The sulphur dioxide from power stations and
industry in continental Europe bring subtle but significant changes to our
landscapes here in Norfolk.
Habitats and landscapes that appear isolated and fragmented
in terms of their anatomy are still intimately part of an amazing and
awe-inspiring network of natural connections.
The warblers and nightjars that sing on our heathlands, or the swallows
that swoop over broad and fen, link our Norfolk landscapes to very different
ones in sub-Saharan Africa. The geese
that fly in skeins across our winter skies connect Norfolk to their Russian and
Icelandic breeding grounds. Events and actions in one place have surprising and
sometimes unpredictable consequences elsewhere. As John Muir so eloquently put
it, whenever you examine any one thing in nature you find it hitched to the
rest of the universe! The challenge in understanding landscapes, measuring
ecosystem services, or evaluating natural capital in landscapes, is one of
understanding the physiology of landscape. When as conservationists we want to
create A Living Landscape then our challenge is to understand the importance of
what we don’t see in landscapes, rather than be beguiled by their seductive
anatomies and see only the beauty of place. We need to become landscape
physiologists, to reconnect the natural flows of energy and materials through
our landscapes. Fully functioning ecosystems, or to put it another way, healthy
living landscapes, are ones in which both energy and material flow across,
through and between habitats and landscapes to deliver the ecosystem services
that ultimately we depend upon. Nature conservation on a landscape scale is
ultimately about restoring and delivering our own life-support systems as well
as protecting the amazing wildlife these Norfolk landscapes support.
David North, Head of
People and Wildlife.
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