Newspaper
Future landscapes
Nine key environmental and community organisations have joined forces to tackle head-on the issue of climate change, while the LIs recent Landscape 2050 conference offered a comprehensive overview of the impact it will have on the landscape by the middle of the 21st century.
Tomorrows England is an 18-month Defra-funded initiative, which brings together Beyond Green, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Groundwork UK, the National Federation of Womens Institutes, the National Trust, RSPB, Transport 2000, the Woodland Trust and WWF-UK. Its main aim is to answer the question “How will climate change affect me?” by communicating the possible impacts of climate change in ways that make sense to people, moving the issue from an abstract, global issue to a pressing, local one.
“This is a very welcome initiative,” said Nigel Thorne, LI president. “Our conference in Reading last month, Landscape 2050, was inspired by similar concerns – it is quite clear that although policy on climate change is still developing and presents some key issues for the post-Kyoto world, there is still a mountain of work to do in bringing it down to grass roots level in the here and now.
“The complexities mean that the responses of professionals involved need to be formulated in ways that the average citizen can relate to their own life. Landscape architects work very closely with communities in their design and management work, through consultations, workshops and collaborations. So, they can provide a significant route into communicating with the groups that Tomorrow’s England wants to target.
“The Institute is planning a series of activities on climate change issues next year and we will certainly discuss with Tomorrows England how its resources can contribute to getting the messages out via our members.”
Landscape 2050, held on 21 September in conjunction with the University of Reading, provided a timely forum for the membership and other professional practitioners to discuss these issues.
Peter Bisgrove, senior lecturer in landscape management at the University of Reading, gave a witty opening address entitled ‘All Change’. He stressed that although we are unable to determine or shape the future, we can influence it: the establishment of the greenbelt and AONBs are testament to this. He also warned that we will need to adjust our sense of what constitutes nature. “By 2050, we need to think about man in nature, rather than man and nature,” he said.
In her talk, Regional Development and Green Urban and Rural Spaces, Valerie Carter, rural sector director at the South East England Development Agency, provided a wealth of statistics. One of the most telling being that the South East is the 22nd largest economy in the world with a population of eight million people and that with 32 per cent natural landscape designations and 40 per cent of Englands lowland heaths, it has natural assets of both national and regional importance.
Richard Hirst, chairman of the board for horticulture at the National Farmers Union, spoke bullishly about agricultures positive influence on the landscape. He asked pertinent questions such as “Is landscape about cropping or the view?” and “Is the environment more important than a productive landscape?”
“New aesthetics, new challenges, new opportunities” was the mantra used by Peter Neal, head of enabling and delivery at CABE Space, in The Integrated landscape: Reshaping the Landscape to meet the needs of the Future. He called for a spatial planning system, where places and spaces become part of a more cohesive framework, indebted to Olmsted.
Simon Thornton-Wood, director of science and learning at the Royal Horticultural Society, set out to subvert traditional views of the role played by the RHS, going so far as to declare: “I detest a typical RHS floral landscape – it is irrelevant today.” His main argument was that for people to feel that landscapes are relevant to them, they need to be involved in the creative process for the future and that, to this end, the RHS is introducing the Britain in Bloom Neighbourhood Awards to build engagement from the community up.
The final speech of the day was perhaps the most impassioned. Dr Tony Kendles Conservation and the Landscape was a cri de coeur in which the foundation director for the Eden Project called for zero tolerance on banal language and asked where the successors to the great landscape figures of the 20th century would come from. He said: “We are a critical generation in a critical time. The 21st century will be a time of bewildering change – it will ask the best of us.”
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