Urbanisation and globalised environmental discourse do not help to protect the bio-cultural legacy of rural landscapes

Abstract

Europe’s rural landscapes have been shaped by the long-lasting systems integrating husbandry with local ecologies. In Polish Subcarpathia, such a farming model survived until the early 1990s. The subsequent socio-economic changes caused its large-scale decline and, locally, countryside urbanisation. The urbanization effect on recognition of the importance of traditional farming for conservation values was investigated in the fast-growing SE Polish city. The data was collected with an internet survey addressed to the city inhabitants. The collected information included both respondents’ characteristics and their opinions on conservation and farming issues. Subjective declarations and assessments were compared with the surveyees’ evaluation of four photo-elicited alternative management/conservation scenarios of the city’s popular urban, recent forest, incorrectly reknowned as a “remnant of ancient forest”. The recorded strong affinity and positive attitude to traditional farmland expressed by respondents was poorly aligned with their dominat conservation awareness, reflecting the appeal of “pure wilderness” (the most preferred scenario) typical for city dwellers and to global environmental concerns, rather than reflecting personal experience and observation. The positive association of the restored original wood-pasture scenario (the second most favoured of the four) with a declared attachment to traditional husbandry and concern about urban sprawl demonstrated that choice being consistent with inherited, though already blurred, rural family experience. Globalised environmental discourse, replacing traditional ecological knowledge, can turn a dangerous competitor to local conservation issues, such as the decline of traditional farmland’s bio-cultural legacy.

Topics & Concepts