Conference topics include:
- Conservation at the crossroads
- The impacts of changes from subsistence, often rural, communities and landscapes to technology driven agri-industry and urbanisation, and the consequences for local people
- Commons in the urban landscape and community involvement
- The historical and current uses and management of traditional ‘commons’
- The ‘common’ uses of landscapes and environmental resources now and historically, from medieval coppice woods to deer parks, from alpine pastures to grazing meadows, from coastal flats to peat bogs and fens
- The debates around perceived ‘re-wilding’ of natural areas or ‘abandonment’ and
- ‘dereliction’ of cultural landscapes
- The decline of biodiversity and ecology
- Future visions and actions
Visit the conference website for details of the programme.
Cultural Severance & Climate Change
The impacts of cultural severance, of human-induced climate change and natural climate change each individually and also in combination, present great challenges to environmental sustainability
Cultural severance and associated land-use changes have impacted on and influenced climate – through destruction of vegetation, of soils, and particularly the loss of fens, bogs, heaths, moors, and other lands with extensive organic soils. These losses have released massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
Moves to petrochemical technologies and urban living have released huge amounts of carbon dioxide and massive quantities of waste energy as heat into the environment
With cultural severance from traditional landscapes and fuelled by petrochemicals agri-industry and industrial forestry have combined with urbanisation to destroy and fragment habitats and to bring about gross transformation of entire landscapes.
These transformed landscapes and their fragmented habitats have only limited ability to respond to climate change – to moderate impacts and to mollify adverse trends – so species cannot move or adapt. The landscapes no longer respond to climatic pressures or for example, to extreme weather events and both floods and droughts have become commonplace. Basic ecosystem services and functions are under stress and increasingly under threat.
Draft of conference programme (word file)
Booking Forms and all enquiries to:
Email for more information
Media & other enquiries:
Christine Handley on 0114 272422
or
The conference Guest of Honour is world-renowned environmentalist Professor David Bellamy
** Professor Ian Rotherham’s new book ‘The End of Tradition – how cultural severance threatens our world’ will be published this autumn