Heritage Council

Landscape Conference 2009

Opening Speech by Conor Newman

Chairman of the Heritage Council
Tullamore Co. Offaly

13th October 2009

Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure to be here, and it’s an honour for the Heritage Council to host this, the second national conference on landscape. This conference will showcase Irish and international experiences and, we hope, signpost the path we should be on to best appreciate and manage the Irish landscape into the future.  We are delighted that speakers from so many different countries are here to share the platform with our Irish colleagues, and we hope that you, the audience, will also participate fully in this event, and leave feeling a bit more positive about the future than perhaps you do now.

As Michael has said, a lot has happened since the last national landscape conference we hosted, ten years ago. The Tower of Babel we built for ourselves in the meantime has collapsed, spectacularly, around our ears, and right now, I suppose, we’re all a bit dazed. Looking around us, the Irish landscape has taken a battering; buildings and roads have cropped up everywhere and habitats have been destroyed. We have also managed to pollute about two-thirds of our freshwater supplies. As a nation we have embarked on some serious soul searching because what we have been doing for the last decade or so was manifestly not sustainable.

This conference is not about the past, however, it ‘s about the future, about the prospect of a better future, a future that recognises the need to manage our affairs in a sustainable way that feeds both the belly and the heart, the purse as well as the soul. Landscapes are where we live, so this conference is about looking after our island home.

As a university lecturer I teach and examine about landscapes. Apart from the satisfaction of reading an excellent essay, the occasional howler is another source of relief from the tedium of correcting endless exam papers. From a geography paper:  The Narmada and Tapi river valleys are said to be old rift valleys; what are ‘rift’ valleys? A moment of inspired genius supplied the answer: Rift valleys are valleys that have fallen out over an argument.

I am not sure if that’s true about valleys, but mountains have been known to fall out over disputes and jealousies. Mount Taranaki, for instance, up-rooted itself and was banished to the west side of the North Island of New Zealand following a dispute over the beautiful Pihanga. He still bears the scars inflicted by Tongariro, the dominant, volcanic god-mountain, and all sorts of landscape features, including valleys, were created during his flight westwards.

Toponymic myths like this occur all over the world. We even have our own Irish ones. They represent early attempts to explain the world, to make sense of it, to account for its order and, above all, to locate and embed human beings within it. They are our way of finding our place and our purpose. The world, culturalised, is an enriched human habitus, one that supports us biologically and spiritually. These imaginative explanations of our forebears may seem quaint and naïve, but they address precisely the same hunger that drives much of today’s quest for knowledge. To laugh at them is to belittle a definitive aspect of the human condition.

Craving to make sense of the world is a defining aspect of our species. The human capacity to dream up worlds is what sets us apart. The dreamt-up worlds of childhood are where we first experienced what re-assurance comes from making Order. We can learn a lot from these imaginary, ordered worlds, namely that the ‘real’ world, the ‘adult’ world, is equally of our making, and that we are equally responsible for it, epistemologically and morally.

In the abstract of my paper I talk about what the word ‘landscape’ means nowadays, how it refers to the world as apprehended in the human imagination. The human imagination sees things not as they are but as how they might be; it imposes its own order on things, and shapes them accordingly. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge imagination is the “living power and prime agent of human perception”; to Henry David Thoreau “the world is but a canvas to the imagination”.  Landscape is what the human imagination has done with this canvas, and this is reflected in the wording, and indeed the sentiment, of the European Landscape Convention when it defines landscape as: ‘…an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’.

In this sense, we are all landscapers.  ‘Landscaping ’, however, is not an activity that we can dip in and out of at will. It is far more important and consuming than that. It preoccupies us from the cradle to the grave.  It is the act of making our world meaningful, and of keeping it meaningful by nurturing and developing the relationships we have with people and places, at home, at work and at play. Such relationships define and sustain us; they represent, in short, self-knowledge, auto-biography.

Using the word ‘landscape’ reminds us that biography becomes attached to places and thus to the people and histories associated with those places. That’s what I meant when I said that places are biographical: collective social knowledge is located in places. Landscapes “R” Us.

The reason I emphasise this is because I want to remind us all at the start of this conference of the profound significance of landscape not just to our biological survival but also to our spiritual well-being. This reflects precisely the principle, and the sentiment, informing recommendations by the Heritage Council in its landscape policy proposal to the Irish Government in 2002: the vision put forward there was that “The Irish Landscape will be a dynamic landscape, one that accommodates the physical and spiritual needs of society with the needs of nature in a harmonius manner, and as a result brings benefits to both”. Others will address the contribution that landscape can make to our fiscal well-being, an important consideration to be sure but one that must be kept on a tight leash because, as we all know, fiscal prowess can sometimes be nothing more than a hollow drum that drowns out the rumblings of a deeper need. The great American anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes human beings as a species that cannot survive without understanding the meaning of its own existence. There is an existential ache in all of our hearts that money cannot reach.

We need beauty, we need landscapes, cityscapes, streetscapes and seascapes that edify and inspire us, that nuture and empower what is best in us, that locate us and reflect what is best about us. We need to start looking at our landscapes not in terms of subsistence but in terms of sustenance. This conference sets us all a challenge, a challenge to get things right by ourselves for ourselves.

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented change in the Irish landscape, for many the result has been dislocation, for even more, disorientation. Many places just don’t look or feel the same. They were changed without our say. For many people quality of life has disimproved not improved. Those who measure the world in pounds, shillings and pence, who govern economies not societies, may scratch their heads about this one, but the rest of us know that real, deep-down contentment is a richly textured fabric, a blend of threads and hues that are natural and cultural, old and new, microscopic and monumental, concrete and ethereal. Like any fabric, if you start pulling the threads in different directions, or pulling them out willy-nilly the thing will disintegrate, leaving us naked, cold and exposed.

Imagine for a moment the landscape is this fabric. And now imagine how many government departments, local authorities , individual landowners, tenant farmers, community groups, sports associations, individual homeowners, and so on, have responsibility for just one thread. Imagine also how many threads there are for which nobody seems to have responsibility or that no-one really cares about. When you think about it like this it is nothing short of a miracle that our landscapes have any integrity left at all. The reality is that landscapes, by very definition, require joined up thinking. And while State agencies, departments, and so on, struggle gamely to hold up their end, some even to co-ordinate their respective roles, sectoralisation remains a permanent obstacle to getting it right, to achieving integration. Heads will have to be knocked together.

The European Landscape Convention challenges Member States to get serious and to get co-ordinated about the management of our landscapes. Care for the landscape is not an impediment to economic growth. On the contrary, landscape conservation represents sustainable product because it addresses both people and nature.
People are attached to the places they live in because they have a shared identity. This is why the management of change has got to be an inclusive process; not top-down but bottom-up. Navigating the complex web of histories and emotions that link people to places can be very difficult and protracted but is made immeasurably more so if a deaf ear is turned to the concerns of locals for whom such places are home. At the very least it creates distrust. The Heritage Council has consistently advocated the principle of inclusive dialogue and shared stewardship of the Irish landscape because this is the only way to sustain its heritage values and contextualise what opportunities arise to reveal or reinforce such values. As experience from around the world demonstrates, if such principles are not front-loaded at all stages, the process will not work.

As I speak, the Irish landscape is under threat from another direction, that of so-called Green Energy. Herein lies a paradox that we will have to navigate very carefully. On the one hand, we absolutely have to reduce our carbon emissions and our reliance on imported fossil fuels, on the other hand the sites and locations best suited to renewable energy as it is presently conceived, namely wind, water and tide, represent some of our most beautiful and iconic landscapes and habitats. The energy potential cannot be harnessed and distributed without infrastructure but we must not let this be at the expense of these landscapes and habitats. Now is the time to start planning, now is the time to start talking…and doing!