Print PageThis paper asks whether pervasive cultural norms for the appearance of care in landscapes might be strategically employed to promote environmental stewardship. Stewardship may seem remote from people’s everyday lives because it refers to care of something that ultimately is not one’s own, and because stewardship may or may not be noticeable. In contrast, landscape care is often noticeable and elicits immediate aesthetic and normative responses. I will summarize a substantial empirical literature describing these responses.
Results/Conclusions
People take immediate pleasure in the appearance of landscape care. In addition, noticeable care or neglect has a halo effect: people seeing the landscape make assumptions about those who appear to be responsible it and about its environmental health. While landscapes that look neat actually may be unhealthy (and efforts to achieve a neat appearance often undermine environmental health), the halo effect that associates unseen characteristics of people and processes in a place with its appearance provokes people to change or maintain a landscape to achieve a desirable appearance.
However, we may be able to employ the halo effect of landscape care to promote environmental stewardship. Policy, planning, design, and marketing strategies can incorporate visual cues that evoke approval and pleasure even when the act or consequences of stewardship are not noticeable. Bridging from the scale of care of one’s own place to the time and space scales of collective stewardship suggests heterogeneous approaches to governing the commons, in which individual actions aggregate upscale to accomplish more than the individual actors intend. Employing evidence of care as a tactic may tap into behavioral propensities that account for the successes of microfinancing rather than requiring top-down models of governance. While landscape care does not intrinsically promote environmental health, the appearance of care (and its halo effect) in different cultures and different land use contexts may promote local engagement to sustain a landscape pattern that has been designed to embody stewardship while it also displays care in a way that is recognized by local people.
