The erosion of relational values resulting from landscape simplification

Abstract

Context The global trend of landscape simplification for industrial agriculture is known to cause losses in biodiversity and ecosystem service diversity. Despite these problems being widely known, status quo trajectories driven by global economic growth and changing diets continue to lead to further landscape simplification. Objectives In this perspective article, we argue that landscape simplification has negative consequences for a range of relational values, affecting the socialecological relationships between people and nature, as well as the social relationships among people. A focus Keywords Agricultural intensification Á Diversified farming Á Human-nature connections Á Landscape sustainability science Á Smallholder farming Á Socialecological systems Maraja Riechers and Joern Fischer have equally contributed to the development of this paper and can be contacted as corresponding authors.

Sustainability through landscapes: natural parks, satoyama, and permaculture in Japan

“…Thus, various ideas of human-nature relations underpin different understandings of sustainability, which can be complementary insofar as they together contribute to ecological integrity and social viability (Luederitz et al 2017). In this perspective, ecosystem simplification may impoverish the complexity of social-ecological interlinkages (Dorninger et al 2017) hence diminishing the variety of embodied experiences of nature (Soga and Gaston 2016), eroding relational values (Riechers et al 2020b), and reducing the range of ethical ways of cohabiting with the nonhuman world (Bieling et al 2020).…”

“…The perspective of landscape sustainability offers a place-based, relational thinking of human-nature interactions (Hanssen 2001;MacKenzie 2004;Berque 2013;Wu 2013;Stenseke 2018;West et al 2018;Bieling et al 2020). Many studies that adopted this perspective propose landscapes as entry points to leverage sustainability transformation from place-based instances of sustainable human-nature relations (Gu and Subramanian 2014;Uehara et al 2019;Riechers et al 2020aRiechers et al , 2020b. Among these, Riechers et al (2020a) show how human-nature relations play a critical role in the evolution of landscape and their sustainable landscape management.…”

“…Among these, Riechers et al (2020a) show how human-nature relations play a critical role in the evolution of landscape and their sustainable landscape management. Inversely, reviving a sense of connectedness might contribute to maintain the diversity and complexity of landscapes (Riechers et al 2020b). This sense of connectedness is also at the core of the study of Uehara et al (2019), which suggests that Japan's cultural seascape of satoumi could serve as a place to enhance people's relations to nature, engender relational values, and in return maintain the seascape biodiversity.…”

Making the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration a Social-Ecological Endeavour

“…Social-ecological research suggests that increasing experiential, emotional, and even spiritual disconnection of people from the biosphere is one of the most significant latent threats to global sustainability [43]. Restoration could help to reinstate meaningful and tangible connections between people and ecosystems [44]. Arguably, the goal should not be to fix any particular kind of human-nature relation, but rather to facilitate dynamic ways of 'interbeing' with one another and the natural world [45], analogous to the fluid change of ecosystems [46], to facilitate a kind of social-ecological fluidity.…”

“…Such connections include people's experiences, habits, and actions with respect to nature, but also the relationships of people in nature that are associated with a meaningful, ethically responsible, and satisfying life (including restoration or other stewardship activities) [62]. Hence, relational values enable a focus on human-nature connections as well as on human-human connections that are fostered by nature [44,59].…”