The cultural landscape is the environment around us which has been shaped by our interactions with all the constituent parts of that environment -- the trees, plants, weather, houses, cars, other people, bugs, and a rather large number of other elements.

In the twenty-first century, we are made quite aware of some of the problems involved in our relationship with our environments -- many people are also in a position to enjoy their environmental interactions considerably.

Although the study of the cultural landscape has many social and political goals, at a most basic level, it is an attempt to understand the processes by which we engage our environments, with the most obvious goals of adding insight to these processes so that we might better understand both the possibilities and problems involved.

I find the cultural landscape fascinating for a number of reasons. The record that our creative interactions with the circumstances of everyday life leaves around us interests me aesthetically, morally, and practically: I read in the landscape a tremendous number of stories about what people have done in the past and what they have hoped for the future; I am continually delighted by the complexity and beauty of cultural and natural systems; and I find a great sense of equanimity in the ongoing adaptation and resiliance of both these natural and cultural systems in the face of disruption, change and stresses that serve as constant reminders that the unknown is always much larger than the known.

Ongoing, active involvement with the processes of the cultural landscape around me seems to me one of the best ways I have to remain engaged with both the culture and the environment of which I am a part. The modernization of the built environment has brought problems which our culture has often responded to with an attitude of escape; I find in my interest and interaction with the cultural landscape a compelling way to engage these problems at a scale appropriate to what is plausibly achieved in everyday life.

Many of the most pressing issues of culture and environment at the turn of the twenty-first century are themselves products of or exacerbated by our sense of the natural environment as a medium for escape -- and our sense of culture as something from which we need escape! Attention to the cultural landscape not only allows us to gain insights into the way we do and might behave in our environments, but also provides us access to an understanding of our environments that includes us as part of the landscape, and that helps us to understand the natural environment not only as something apart from us which our modernization has exploited furiously, but also as a series of processes of which we are part, and within which we have had a long history. This rich sense of our constant participation in the processes which surrounds us not only helps us see continuity along with change in the context of modernization and globalization, but it also helps us to get a sense of the profoundly social nature of our environmental experience.