Dancing with cranes: a humanist perspective on cultural ecosystem services of wetlands

Abstract

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are important spatial elements providing humans with recreational, esthetic, spiritual, and other benefits. Yet, because of their immaterial, subjective, qualitative, and unmeasurable nature, this means that scientists, decision-makers, and general public often find their value difficult to grasp. We enrich the CES approach with theoretical insights from humanist geography, where we frame CES as arising from perpetual interactions between humans and their environment. Places are formed through various processes, both organic and planned, which endow people with unique identities, experiences, capabilities, knowledge, and skills. We use the rural wetland area of Lake Hornborga, Sweden, with its complex history of restoration phases, to explore the profound interrelations between environmental spaces and cultural practices expressed in the everyday activities of learning, playing, creating, caring, producing, and consuming. The data was collected through qualitative methods, including interviews, observations, and a focused group interview, in order to capture these unique senses and experiences. Thefindings outline CES as key drivers behind the formation of place, rather than mere labels for inventorying benefits people receive from nature. The presence of the iconic migratory crane is especially conducive to a positive sense of place and the practice of various activities, including tourism, around the wetland. We frame the implications for planning and future research of our findings within a context of ethics.

Broadening the scope of resources in nature: an explorative study of nature-based tourism firms

“…This value is not solely economic, but also emotional, social, and cultural, as humans connect to and interact with natural elements (Faarlund et al, 2007;Kellert, 1997;Powell et al, 2009). Through outdoor recreation, the economic and social acceptance of using specific resources in nature to perform activities bestow upon these resources social, cultural, and economic value (Aanesen et al, 2018;Clawson & Knetsch, 1966;Margaryan et al, 2018;Navrud & Strand, 2018). As a consequence, when recreational activities are organized and charged for by tourism firms (Margaryan & Fredman, 2017), the commercial value of the resources, as inputs to the tourism production process, increases (Dissart & Marcouiller, 2012;Smith, 1994), which also is recognized through the experience economy (Jensen & Prebensen, 2015;Pine & Gilmore, 2015).…”

Opportunities for Ecosystem Services in the Protected Areas in the Coastal–Rural Area of the Nemunas Delta and the Curonian Lagoon (Lithuania)

“…Each of the services are given short explanations, including cultural heritage, mentioning that many societies place high value on the maintenance of either historically important landscapes (cultural landscapes) or culturally significant species [19]. Cultural ecosystem services (CES), as Margaryan et al [21] notice, are important spatial elements providing humans with recreational, aesthetic, spiritual, and other benefits. Cultural ecosystem services research is in a somewhat tumultuous state, as Gould et al [22] notice, the cultural ecosystem services (CES) idea is seen simultaneously as a welcoming, expansive addition to conservation policy-making, and as a strange, square-peg-in-a-round-hole concept that should be replaced by a more appropriate metaphor or conceptual structure.…”

Nature on a Plate: Linking Food and Tourism within the Ecosystem Services Framework

“…Ecosystem Services (ES) describe the services provided by nature and used by humankind [19]. Although the foundations of this concept were laid in the 1960s, its popularity has grown significantly since the 1990s.…”

“…The paper addresses this problem by employing the concept of Ecosystem Services (ES). The latter concept is closely interlinked with the idea of sustainability and attempts to explicitly recognize linkages between humans and their environments and include these considerations into decision-making [19]. Such an approach responds to the increasing need to understand the interplay between the physical and the social in the origin and production of foods [20], especially in a tourism and hospitality context.…”