The Ethics of Landscape

Abstract

This article explores the ethical implications of how we treat landscapes. It lays out a three-part, temporal and ethical analysis of landscape architecture and concludes that without an analysis of and challenge to our assumed dominance over the natural world, we will never achieve a sustainable relationship to the landscapes that we inhabit and depend upon for our survival as a species.

The three-part analysis aligns different types of landscapes with duty, contract, and consequential ethics. Duty ethics often determines how we treat places that memorialize the past in some way, whether it be where our ancestors are buried or where wildlife are protected from human intrusion. Likewise, contract ethics typically defines how we typically approach contemporary landscapes, with property rights determining who gets to manipulate the land and what activities occur there. Finally, consequentialist ethics often drives our thinking about future landscapes, how we should judge our current behavior in terms of its expected consequences.

All of this leaves us with a dilemma: however ethical we might seem in our manipulation of landscapes, how can we justify our damage of habitat and extinction of other species while we accommodate our own needs? That question leads us to virtue ethics, which puts the emphasis not on our responsibilities in altering landscapes, but instead on changing our own expectations about ourselves and our needs. In other words, we cannot fulfill our responsibility to the natural world without challenging our own beliefs and values.

Keywords

Ethics / Duty / Contracts / Consequences / Virtue

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2014 Higher Education Press