The Concept of Landscape Health

The degree to which a landscape is healthy should be one of the measures against which landscape designers and managers can test the need, direction and effectiveness of their work. Landscape design and management could act to heal and care for individual landscape sites. To give focus to such an effort, this paper presents a specific definition of landscape health. In human beings, health can be understood through the concept of homeostasis. A healthy person is characterized by a self-maintaining balance. When necessary, human medicine aims to aid homeostatic processes to speed the return to equilibrium. The behaviours of two aspects of landscapes, biotic communities and watershed morphology, show that landscapes are homeostatic systems exhibiting conditions of health and disease. In a biotic community, a state of homeostatic balance is represented by the climax community, maintaining itself in a condition of dynamic equilibrium. In a stream system, a condition of dynamic equilibrium is represented by discharges of water and sediment equal to inflows to the system. Each aspect of a landscape, when disturbed, undergoes succession, morphologic adjustments and other processes to re-establish equilibrium. Care of landscape sites must be founded on analysis of conditions both within the limits of the site, and in the larger landscape systems of which on-site phenomena are part. Landscape design and management, while accommodating human use, should aim not to tip a healthy landscape out of its homeostatic equilibrium, not to restrict the operation of natural homeostatic adjustment mechanisms, and, when necessary, actively to support the landscape in its effort to seek equilibrium in response to stress.