Cultural Landscapes as a Methodology for Understanding Natural Resource Management Impacts in the Western United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Multicultural demands on public lands in the United States continue to challenge federal land managers to address social and cultural concerns in their planning efforts. Specifically, they lack adequate knowledge of cultural concerns, as well as a consistent strategy for acquiring that knowledge for use in decisionmaking. Current federal approaches to understanding such issues as access, use, and control of resources include public participation, conservation partnerships, government-to-government consultations with American Indian tribes, cultural resource inventories, and landscape analysis. Given that cultural knowledge arises from humannature relationships and shared perceptions of natural environments, and that landscapes are the ultimate expression of such knowledge, an exploratory methodology was developed to provide a different approach to understanding cultural concerns through landscape perceptions. Using cultural landscape theories and applications from the natural and social sciences, this study examines the landscape perceptions of four groups concerned with management planning of the Baboquivari Wilderness Area in southern Arizona: the Bureau of Land Management, the landowners of the Altar Valley, recreationists, and members of the Tohono O'odham Nation. The methodology is based on a human-nature relationship rather than cultural aspects or features. It takes a holistic approach that differs from other perception studies in that it includes: emic aspects of data collection and analysis; a spatial component (triangulation of data collection through narrative and graphic descriptions); ethnographic, on-site interviews; and cultural consensus analysis and small-sample theory. The results include: verification of four cultural groups; two levels of consensus (in the population of concern, and in each group) that overlap in some aspects of landscape perception; descriptions of four cultural landscapes that illustrate similarities and differences among the groups, and include patterns and representations of spatial relationships; and an effective methodology for revealing cultural concerns that are not identified through public forums, and which has potential for application by agencies at the field-office level.

Landscapes with Araucaria in South America: evidence for a cultural dimension

“…In this context, it seems clear that there is a need to understand interactions between cultures and their environment, the influence of human populations on the construction of different landscapes around the world, and how these relationships alter or maintain the biodiversity and resources of interest to them (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003, Toupal 2003, Berkes and Davidson-Hunt 2006, Torri and Hermann 2010. This approach is based on the idea that the landscape must acquire a dimension of cultural phenomenon for researchers and conservation managers, where the biophysical space, in this case, Araucaria forests, is a product of the history of human societies and reflects the uses, values, learning and the particular cosmovisions of the societies that have used it (Caparelli et al 2011, Prober et al 2011.…”

Seeing the landscape through new eyes: identifying and incorporating indigenous landscape values into regional planning processes

“…Contemporary planning processes have acknowledged the need to embrace regional scale recognition of the values that constitute and give meaning to the regional landscape. Simultaneously, a rapidly increasing body of academic literature is highlighting the relationship between indigenous communities and traditional land within the Australian context (see for examples works by (Toupal 2003; Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) 2006;McDermott 2006;Venn and Quiggin 2007;CSIRO 2008;SEQTOA 2008;Kijas 2010).…”

From LTER to LTSER: Conceptualizing the Socioeconomic Dimension of Long-term Socioecological Research

“…fulfill their social functions because the supply of goods and services was no longer constrained by local resource availability or costly transport. The connections between people's way-of-life and their cultural landscapes weakened (Berglund 1991, Toupal 2003), and it became increasingly difficult to link local and regional ecologies with the behavior and consumption patterns of their human inhabitants.…”