FROM SILOS TO JAZZ IMPROV

As Sunderland explains, stiff definitions and categories can perpetuate just the kind of “silo mentality” that the landscape approach seeks to transcend. “Of course, we’re all scientists and logical people,” he acknowledges – so the urge to order and categorize is understandable. “But it really is constraining.”

“Out there in the world beyond our research institutions, landscape approaches are anything but orderly,” he says. “It is more a case of muddling through and being flexible enough to adapt to change, and integrating multiple objectives for the best possible benefits.”

Sunderland likens the process to that of a band playing improvisational jazz: “From A to B everyone does their own thing, but at the very outset, there is agreement on how to achieve the end product by following a basic structure.”

So any proposed frameworks must be necessarily loose, he says. Otherwise, we risk imposing systems and processes “from above” at the expense of listening to those who know the landscapes in question more intimately.

“I think that people’s understandings of landscapes at the intrinsic level is far greater than us at the so-called high level. And I think that we should be promoting the bottom-up understanding of this approach rather than the top-down imposition of it.”

GRASSROOTS KNOWLEDGE

After all, says Sunderland, the approach of looking at a landscape in its entirety, rather than its composite parts, is really nothing new. Having spent a lot of his career in the field, he firmly believes that the farmers and hunters he worked with “actually inherently understand what landscapes are,” in ways that agricultural and forestry scientists likely do not.

He evokes the image of a smallholder farmer in one of his research sites setting out on the daily journey from home to farm, and walking through a very diverse set of land systems to get there. “And they don’t think of it as separate entities, they don’t think of it as this is this bit, this is that bit – they think of these landscapes in their entirety.”

Revisiting his appearances at the GLF, Sunderland points out that the GLF aspires to spark a movement to make one billion people aware of sustainable landscapes. “But I suspect that a billion people already understand the concept of landscapes far better than we do.”