Countryside and biodiversity: New conservation ideas for an ancient land
The preservation of the European countryside has long been a cultural endeavour. Architects, planners, archaeologists and historians have guided decisions about landscape management, including nature reserves and national parks. In the neo-Europes, like Australia and the United States, managing the unbuilt settler landscape has been the domain of science, with ‘production landscapes’ typically understood through agricultural science and forestry and ‘nature reserves’ informed by ecology and wildlife biology.
Science and management draw closer as Conservation Biology styles itself a ‘science of crisis’, but the challenge is to explore the ‘human’ narratives embedded in landscape management. An article in Nature in 2001 described “countryside” as a ‘new’ concept of landscape where ‘ecosystem qualities are strongly influenced by humanity’.(1) This idea may be ‘new’ for settler societies where biophysical science has been sharply separated from history, and conservation biology has focused on ‘empty’ (or emptied) lands, particularly National Parks and reserves. By contrast, ‘countryside’ is hardly a new concept in places like England and Wales, where over 350,000 people live in National Parks – and in Sweden where parks like Ängsö National Park (established in 1909) are preserved as ‘traditional cultivated archipelago landscape’.
I will talk about the evolution of a distinctive form of conservation biology that now considers people in the ancient, megadiverse land of Australia, with its 60,000 year history of human management of landscapes, and what it might learn from Europe’s experience with the ‘countryside’ concept.
(1) Gretchen C. Daily, ‘Ecological forecasts’, Nature, 411, 17 May 2001, p. 245.