Landscape and Urban Planning

Care may be a way to engage people in planetary stewardship by connecting their responses to what they notice in everyday life with their effect on larger environmental systems. Care is a deep, pervasive cultural norm that is imposed upon what is noticed and noticeable to others. At the same time, care often evokes an immediate aesthetic response. Both responses provoke behavior to change, maintain, and protect landscape appearance. This essay examines whether the immediacy of the care response can be extended to effect stewardship at broader time and spatial scales. It describes how landscape evidence of care has a halo effect in which an overall impression of the appearance of the landscape affects assumptions about the people who are responsible for providing care, as well as assumptions about resource characteristics. Finally, it suggests that this halo effect of care can contribute to design and planning strategies that benefit environmental health and ecosystem services at broader scales. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Care may be a powerful concept for promoting sustainability because it is a response to what is noticed and noticeable to others, it is a deep, pervasive cultural norm, it can evoke an aesthetic response, and it is a form of intervention. We have come to understand that humans, wittingly or not, dominate global ecosystems, andwe are searching for effective ways to intervene. Caremay be a way to engage people in planetary stewardship by connecting their responses to what they notice in everyday life with their effect on larger environmental systems. Care means: • “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something, and • serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk.” World Dictionary. Oxford University Press 2010 It means protecting or maintaining what we pay attention to: anything from a work of art to a restored wetland, anyone from a child to an ailing friend. For example, we care for the deteriorating, weedy, littered, dirty, fearful, or ill. Care is also a particularly relevant concept for effecting landscape change because it connotes a response to what is noticeable, and the etymology and contemporary definition of landscape emphasize visible characteristics of land. Stewardship is a particular type of care, invoking broad scales of time or space, and connoting care of something that ultimately belongs to others rather than only to oneself. We are stewards of institutions, water or soil. Gardeners are not often described as stewards, but farmers are described as stewards of the land. ∗ Tel.: +1 734 763 9893. E-mail address: [email protected] Visible evidence of care and stewardship often elicits a response that is not only normative (reflecting on the way the landscape should look, given cultural norms), but also aesthetic (immediately eliciting pleasure or displeasure). The look of the landscape reflects on thosewhoare responsible for it. Aplace that looksneglected suggests that those who care for it are irresponsible or overwhelmed, and they probably are not desirable neighbors. Anticipating this normative response by others is a powerful motivation for conforming behavior. In addition, because an aesthetic response is immediate, itmaybeevenmorepotent in affectingbehavior. Sometimes the look of a well-cared-for landscape makes us feel good, and we may act to get or to share that good feeling, an aesthetic response. While stewardship seems tobe theappropriate scale forprotectingglobalhealth, themore inclusive term, care,mayaffect everyday behaviormore directly, especiallywhen care is visible and elicits an immediate response. Itmaybeuseful to consider howthe challenge of resource stewardship can tap into the immediacy of noticeable care and the deep cultural norm of taking care of one’s own circle of life and one’s own particular place. Bridging the scale of individual ownership to collective stewardship suggests heterogeneous approaches to governing the commons, inwhich individual actions aggregate upscale to accomplish more than the individual actors intend. It may tap into behavioral propensities that account for the success of microfinancing more than its calls on top-down models of governance for managing common pool resources. And it could tap into the behavioral rewards of aesthetic experience, that is, the pleasure of viewing a well-cared-for landscape. Can the immediacy of perceptions and behaviors that are associated with care of one’s own place and companions extend to something that ultimately belongs to others, to stewardship of 0169-2046/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.02.022 Author's personal copy 322 J.I. Nassauer / Landscape and Urban Planning 100 (2011) 321–323 resources? Can the propensity to care for what is noticeable also be enlisted to care for ecosystem functions that are not known or understood to be evident in everyday experience? Can any type of care, including stewardship, extend to environmental functions that are invisible or to spatial and temporal scales that are too vast to be comprehended even when our planet is viewed from beyond its atmosphere? Ihave investigatedhowweperceiveevidenceof care in the landscape ina long series of researchanddesignprojects beginningwith a study of aesthetic preferences for Iowa landscapes. Results of this work consistently suggest that people value characteristics of landscapes that display care, but different groups of people sometimes see evidence of care in different formal characteristics. When we interviewed residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana, we learned that the care apparent in freshly painted tanksmade the landscape of an oil and gas storage facility look attractive. When I interviewed Illinois farmers I learned that they read the actions of people in field patterns, perceiving strip-cropping as attractive partly because it was a visible sign of good stewardship (Nassauer, 1988a). That people consistently associated landscape attractiveness with evidence of care suggested to me that: Care may be a global construct of aesthetic quality that is exhibited in different forms in different local conditions. If so, identifying forms of care and introducing new formsof caremay be a useful tool for landscape ecology and sustainable development. (Nassauer, 1988b, p. 27) I termed evidence of human intention that is visible in the landscape, cues to care (Nassauer, 1995). Many studies have investigated forms of landscape care in metropolitan, rural, and wild settings. The conclusions from this body of literature are summarized below, andwhile I have omittedmuch relatedworkpublished elsewhere, (see Nassauer et al., 2009 and Gobster et al., 2007 for a fuller listing), work published in Landscape and Urban Planning has been essential in advancing this area of research. Drawn from the journal, all of these studies have tested or supported the relevance of cues to care (Asakawa et al., 2004; Burel and Baudry, 1995; Coeterier, 1996; Gobster and Westphal, 2004; Hands and Brown, 2002; Helfand et al., 2005; Jorgensen et al., 2002; Jorgensen et al., 2007; Kaplan and Austin, 2004; Lewis, 2008; Lindemann-Matthies and Bose, 2007; Nassauer et al., 2009; Todorova et al., 2004). Cues to care vary with culture and landscape context, but may