Landscape and Urban Planning 49 (2000) 6781

Landscape history as a planning tool

Daniel J. Marcucci*
103 Woodland Drive, York, PA 17403, USA Received 5 February 1999; received in revised form 5 November 1999; accepted 14 January 2000

Abstract Landscapes are constantly changing, both ecologically and culturally, and the vectors of change occur over many time scales. In order to plan landscapes, they must be understood within their spatial and temporal contexts. This paper argues that the inevitable dynamism in a landscape requires planning to explain and to deal with change. However, planning has been slow to do this, in part because it is inadequately equipped to analyze both rapid change and gradual evolution. A landscape history exposes the evolutionary patterns of a specic landscape by revealing its ecological stages, cultural periods, and keystone processes. Such a history can be a valuable tool as it has the potential to improve description, prediction, and prescription in landscape planning. In proposing landscape history as a tool for planning, I specically address four questions. Why is this tool needed in landscape planning? What form should landscape history take? What are the obstacles to acquiring good landscape histories? And, what are the potential benets of using history in landscape planning? To illustrate this proposition, I draw from an example of landscape history developed for Long Pond, Pennsylvania. # 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Landscape history; Landscape change; Planning tools; Historiography; Keystone processes

1. The need for history in landscape planning There is a landscape in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania that is unique in many ways. This at tableland of 100 km2 is known commonly as Long Pond. For one, the surcial geology is unusual, being glacial till that predates the Wisconinan ice mass. During this most recent ice age, Long Pond persisted as peri-glacial tundra. Climatically, Long Pond has two distinguishing statistics. Being the rst

Tel.: 1-717-854-6259. E-mail addresses: danmarcu@aol.com, dmarcucc@gettysburg.edu (D.J. Marcucci) 0169-2046/00/$20.00 # 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 9 - 2 0 4 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 5 4 - 2

signicant elevation west of the Atlantic coast, this landscape receives the highest annual precipitation in Pennsylvania. At the same time, it has the coolest high temperatures during the summer. Such factors help explain its perennial popularity as a mountain resort. Biologically, Long Pond is distinguished by having the highest known concentration of rare and endangered species in Pennsylvania, with both boreal and temperate species existing in association (Latham et al., 1996). Starting in 1860 and lasting for over 100 years, the human population at Long Pond hovered around 200 to 300. The landscape and the culture were remote and independent, with the main marketable resource being the huckleberries and blueberries that covered the

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landscape. To foster this crop, local residents burned the landscape in rotation every 23 years. This practice persisted long after state efforts at preventing it. During this time, a plant association known as the Pocono till barrens dominated the landscape. The last 50 years, however, have wrought rapid changes on Long Pond. First, the ascendance of commercial blueberry growing elsewhere brought the demise of the wild huckleberry business here, and with it the motivation for intentional burning. Then in 1965, Interstate 80 opened, paving the way for even greater change. Now part of the New York City metropolitan area, Long Pond is situated in the fastest growing region in Pennsylvania. Current landscape planning issues at Long Pond center on biological conservation, exurban development, and tourist and recreational appeal. The end of res and the increase of houses and buildings have resulted in the Pocono till barrens being reduced to a fraction of their former size. What Long Pond shares with other landscapes across Pennsylvania and across the Earth is that it is changing. The persistent dynamism in nature and the interventions of industrial humans mean that landscape change is inevitable, and in many cases rapid. Thirty years ago, Eugene Odum wrote in his seminal article on ecosystem development: Society needs, and must find as quickly as possible, a way to deal with the landscape as a whole, so that manipulative skills (i.e. technology) will not run too far ahead of our understanding of the impact of change (Odum, 1969). To deal with the landscape as a whole and to understand change is a tall challenge for landscape planning, but I argue, is a primary contribution we can make towards sustaining landscapes that have longterm viability for humans and non-humans alike. If nothing else, the debates around sustainability indicate that successful plans must work for this generation as well as those long into the future. A landscape is a contextual phenomenon, embedded in a world that is both spatial and temporal, or, if you prefer, geographical and historical. Yet, while methods to study the geographical attributes of landscapes are increasingly understood, methods to know their temporal contexts are not.

This article is not centrally about Long Pond; it is about how we as planners can and should use landscape history as a planning tool to understand change on our way towards dealing with the landscape as a whole. As I will argue, the history of each landscape is unique it is also complicated. Trivial history will have limited veracity and little utility in planning. Although the full history of Long Pond cannot be reported in this space, highlights from it will be used to illustrate the arguments (Marcucci, 1998). 1.1. Landscape as legacy In landscape architecture and historic preservation, there is some currency in referring to landscapes as palimpsests, where ghosts of earlier times linger on the medium. With an actual palimpsest, however, the ghosts on the parchment are not connected in form or content to the new gures that are drawn there; they are only related coincidentally by occurring on the same surface. Erased parchments are fungible and interchangeable. However, landscapes are not fungible because each is a unique combination of physical, cultural, and locational features. Furthermore, a changing landscape is very much a function of historic conditions. A more accurate metaphor is to think of landscapes as legacies. A landscape existing today results from previous conditions and events in that locale, and it follows that landscapes of the future will be legacies of the elements and processes occurring today. The perspective on landscape change offered by the experience of a single human generation is too myopic to describe that landscape accurately. Such a short-term view gives the impression of an unchanging environment, or at best, a brief slice of landscape development. Without an accurate long-term history of the landscape and without an understanding of the processes which are guiding its evolutionary path, we are unable to envision future landscape changes. The long-term patterns of change in a particular landscape will be revealed by describing the landscape's seral stages and cultural sequences, and determining the keystone processes of landscape change. Keystone processes, as will be explained later, are those formative processes which inuence the trajectory of landscape change. As a legacy, each landscape has a unique story. The goal of a properly formulated landscape history, or

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what might also be called a landscape biography, is to explain the temporal context of the current landscape. The proper form for this landscape history will be discussed the following section. Sufce it to say now that history here is used in the ecologist's sense to refer to past events that contributed to ecosystem development not necessarily just human actions or recorded events (Christensen, 1989). 1.2. Planning in time As an activity, planning is imbued with time. Through description, prediction, and prescription, planners of landscapes intend to perpetuate environments that provide the materials for comfort and sustenance for a still increasing human population and to provide the milieu for a meaningful and interesting life. Yet, these landscapes must also protect biological diversity, functioning natural communities, and, in the longest timeframe, genetic evolution. Three temporal aspects of planning necessitate history as a tool. First, landscape planning has both short-term and long-term motivations. Second, the creation of the current landscape is dependent on values that people had and continue to have with respect to their environment. Finally, planning itself, once implemented, becomes another historical process on the land and must be understood within its context. At its core, landscape planning has both short-term and long-term motivations (Marcucci, 1998). In 1986, Tonn argued that the nature of environmental problems should compel us to undertake 500 year planning. His advice is well heeded for landscape planning. The special challenge this poses to landscape planning is that it cannot ignore landscape change or the processes which cause it. The genius of the debate about sustainability is that it forces a long-term vision of goals and outcomes. The irony is that much of the literature strives to create a perpetual cycle of resource use through maximized efciency and thereby disregards the temporal factor altogether. Literature that focuses on this idealized system misses the inevitability of environmental change, random events in nature, and ongoing human population growth. By heeding the advice for a 500 year outlook, landscape planning can capture the critical genius of sustainability that long-term goals will best preserve options for future generations.

One major cause of change in many landscapes is humans. However, cultural systems themselves are in ux. Values and activities of people change. This is important to landscape change because there is a feedback loop between culture and the physical landscape which manifests itself through time. Nassauer (1995) notes that culture structures landscapes while landscapes inculcate culture. This holistic view of landscape describes an environment that is a legacy not only of ecological conditions but also successive values. Today's landscape is in part the result of historical cultural values. It follows that future landscapes will reect on our collective values and beliefs about the environment as well. Planning a landscape for human communities and environmental integrity, therefore, requires a historical understanding of changing human culture. Landscape planning is itself a social activity. Once implemented, it becomes part of the historical processes in a landscape (Hackett, 1971). There is no certainty in environmental predictions. Similarly, there is no certainty in the outcomes of planning prescriptions. In order for long-term landscape planning to be effective, it will have to be ongoing. Thus, planning will become one of the processes in the bundle of keystone processes that determine a landscape's future. Many others, including market-driven economic activity, will have a great impact also. The temporal context of landscape planning itself is then another reason to place the outcomes of planning in historical perspective. 1.3. History in planning The point then is, understanding landscapes as dynamic legacies and planning as a temporal activity should convince planners and citizens that history is an important element in the planning process. As early as 1928, Benton MacKaye was urging regional planners to undertake 100 century histories. He argued that the ``environment is the product of history (MacKaye, 1962, p. 52).'' In chronicling the genesis and development of New England, MacKaye provided such a `100 century' review. This he broke into three periods: primeval, colonial, and metropolitan. Sadly, his advice went largely unheeded as physical planning in the ensuing decades was directed towards maximizing resource development and constructing highways.

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Planning during this period relied on short-term goals and objectives that were largely socio-economic. With the new environmentalism in planning that began in the 1960s, awareness of landscapes as biophysical systems naturally led planners to the realization that change and evolution was an ongoing issue. Contemporary landscape planning theory contains a group of literature that recognizes the inevitable change of landscapes (McHarg, 1969; Hackett, 1971; Fabos, 1979; Laurie, 1986; Berger, 1987; Stokes et al., 1989; Steiner, 1991). However, even when history is called for, there is limited guidance on its form or use in planning. The works generally call for land-use history as a prelude to a planning process which is largely one of suitability analysis and landuse decision making, or for documentation of historic resources. The strongest call for planning with change comes from the landscape planner, Brian Hackett (1971). He argues that large-scale landscape change is precisely the domain of the landscape planner who should be engaged in sequential planning. Hackett identies studying landscape evolution as one of four operations in his Landscape Planning Techniques: ``the major task of this particular technique is to reconstruct the various stages of the landscape's evolution and particularly those in the natural pre-humanized stages (Hackett, 1971, p. 33).'' Although there is precedence in theory for the use of history, examples of planning that are attuned to landscape evolution are rare in the United States. Steiner (1991) cites two landscape plans from 1980. One, the Pinelands in New Jersey, used a broad-view, 10,000 year history to understand the dynamics of the current landscape. The other, the Makah Coastal Zone in the Pacic Northwest, took a centuries-long look at how the Makah people traditionally looked to the sea for their livelihood. Making the connection between 100 century histories and 500 year plans requires a history that conforms to certain attributes of landscapes as evolving, changing legacies. The seminal landscape scholar, J.B. Jackson, feared that much of what was called landscape history was ``little more than local history with a spatial dimension thrown in for good measure.'' He preferred instead the rare glimpses ``of the history of the landscape itself, how it was formed, how it has changed, and who it was who changed it (Jackson,

1984, p. xi).'' The question before us is: how do we construct such a landscape history? 2. A form for landscape history Landscape planners require a history that describes and predicts the patterns and causes of evolution and change. I argue that a such history has three essential requirements. It covers a specic place or geography. It describes a holistic system. And, it reveals the keystone processes that shape the landscape over multiple time frames. Adhering to these three conditions yields a landscape history that chronicles successive cultures, ecological stages, and keystone processes. 2.1. Place history All landscapes are local. By denition, landscape history must be about a specic place. The theme of geographical signicance runs through the literature on landscape history (Jackson, 1984; Crumley, 1994; Flores, 1994) and landscape planning (Hackett, 1971; Riley, 1995). The historical geography of a landscape is signicant in two ways. First, it should place the landscape in regional context. Second, it recreates, to the extent the data allow, the ecological stages of the land. By placing a landscape in regional context, landscape history addresses exogenous variables that affect landscape change. The ow of energy, material, and organisms, including people, into and out of a landscape has a profound impact on its evolutionary path. History of the internal geography of a landscape is a study of the sequence of land mosaics and possibly of ecotopes themselves. It is in the area of spatial analysis that landscape ecology is best developed and provides important tools for landscape planning (Forman, 1995). These are the basic building blocks in understanding ecological and physical stages in a landscape's history. 2.2. Holism In current landscape theory, there is considerable consensus about conceiving landscapes holistically.

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That is to say, understanding the landscape as a whole cannot be done merely by analyzing its elements. The interaction of the elements must be considered, especially the interaction of natural and cultural ones. It follows that landscape history must also take a holistic view of a landscape, integrating natural and human activity as parts of a single evolving system (Crumley, 1994; Flores, 1994; Patterson, 1994; Nassauer, 1995). One implication of a holistic history is that cultural systems themselves should be represented as sequential phenomena related to place. Each culture, or cluster of cultures modies a landscape that is the legacy of previous cultures. Even within the historical continuum of a single ethnic group, signicant cultural evolution occurs; but as argued earlier, over time, landscapes inculcate culture (Nassauer, 1995). In this way, landscapes embody ``the story of different but sequential cultures occupying the same space, and creating their own succession of places (Flores, 1994, p. 12).'' This essential interrelatedness can be presumed throughout the history and prehistory of humans in a landscape, which may easily represent 10,000 years (Hackett, 1971; Crumley, 1994). At Long Pond, there have been several recognizable cultural periods. Human presence at Long Pond dates back at least 100 centuries to PaleoIndian culture. This was followed by other Native American cultures in succession: Archaic, Woodland, and Historic. Each culture's impact on the landscape was different as they possessed different technological skills with respect to agricultural, hunting, and tool making. The last group existed in the 17th and 18th centuries and was a cultural system that was highly altered by contact with European travellers and immigrants. Ultimately, Indian cultural systems throughout the Pocono plateau and ultimately Pennsylvania were overcome by European inroads. For a period of roughly 35 years, between 1765 and 1800, Long Pond was largely unpopulated as it was the setting for frontier strife between warring groups. Around 1800, permanent European settlement began that initiated a distinct Long Ponder culture. This group was organized around a subsistence economy based on mountain resources and income from travellers and resorters. Long Ponder culture was closely connected to the natural landscape. By 1965, a transition was begun for a Metropolitan culture that is supplanting the Long Ponder culture.

No longer attached to the connes of the Long Pond landscape, this group is connected to a regional identity and economy. The transition to the Metropolitan culture is fueled by the tenfold increase in population during this period. The condition of holism for the landscape history of Long Pond requires not only identication of successive cultures but also description of how each was connected to its physical environment. This latter requirement we will revisit in the discussion of keystone processes. One important ramication of this condition to stress now is that natural resources and the keystone processes that accompany their exploitation must be identied as cultural phenomena. The motivations for removal, conservation, or protection of certain landscape elements cannot be understood otherwise. A physical element may exist in a place for centuries or eons without being a resource. It only becomes one if the cultural system and the related economy make it so. In this way, the wild huckleberries at Long Pond, that were an important landscape resource throughout the Native American and Long Ponder periods, have ceased to be a resource for the Metropolitan culture. Many other resources have had similar cycles or have been depleted completely so that they cease to be a factor in the economy. Ice and lumber are two that had major signicance in the Poconos in the past. Fish and game were, for many cultures, elements of subsistence living. In modern times, they are part of the recreational resources of the mountain lands. The most signicant resource use impacting Long Pond today and in the near future is water extraction. This is because of the importance of this resource to the regional metropolitan culture. The Bethlehem Water Authority, the single largest landowner at Long Pond, extracts water from the landscape for use in a distant city. 2.3. Keystone processes Landscape history needs to tell how and why the landscape developed. This means it must explain the genesis of a particular landscape, if appropriate, and the long-term processes associated with change through the sequence of landscape periods. Landscape change occurs when ``over time, the ow of energy and consequent movement of materials in a landscape

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results in a new structure and new functional characteristics (Thorne, 1993, p. 25).'' Landscape change can be wholesale or incremental. Wholesale change occurs through wide-acting phenomena such as re or rapid suburbanization. Incremental changes, that is ecotope by ecotope, cause landscape change when they are persistent and the ecotopes are not resilient. These incremental changes over space and time aggregate into an overall pattern of change and evolution. Not all processes acting through a landscape are equally signicant in their effects, especially with respect to change. A history of landscape evolution should focus on what I shall call keystone processes: the ones that are inuential in the evolutionary trajectory of the landscape. An alteration or cessation of a keystone process will result in a new trajectory. Other processes may cause localized, usually short-lived change but do not contribute to the overall pattern of change. Each landscape has a specic set of keystone processes, a set that changes over time. The set of keystone processes inuencing a landscape today is not the same set existing 1000 or even 100 years ago. There is no a priori means of identifying the keystone processes of a particular landscape. Recognition of keystone processes in particular periods can only occur once the landscape history has commenced. Furthermore, this recognition may depend upon viewing process at the proper scale. Pattern recognition across time and space in ecology is dependent on scale (Levin, 1992). An initial enquiry into the history of a landscape should take a multiple view of the temporal scale and consider the full range of possible keystone processes. In temperate and northern latitudes, a 10,000 year perspective on the landscape will take us to a point where global climatic conditions were signicantly different and humans were present in many landscapes. Besides this 100 century view, it is also important to consider the millennial, centennial, decennial, and annual scales, for in each, keystone processes may occur that are not apparent from other scales. Identifying processes at different scales will also allow the planner to correlate them to the time frames of planning interest. Fig. 1 shows the time frames for select keystone processes to affect change. There are ve general categories of keystone processes: geomorphological processes, climate change,

colonization patterns and growth of organisms, local disturbances of individual ecosystems, and cultural processes (Forman and Godron, 1986; WilmannsWells, personal communication; Nassauer, 1997). Each category potentially contains a wide array of actual keystone processes. The rst two are what Forman and Godron (1986) call foundation variables. They tend to be long-term natural processes occurring over thousands or millions of years. Geomorphological processes refer to the creation of landforms (Ritter, 1978). They involve plate tectonics, erosion, deposition, and glaciation. Climate is a crucial variable of landscape change especially as it relates to cycles of glaciation and the long-term migration of species. There is considerable scientic debate about the human role in climate change through alteration of the atmosphere. Such a phenomenon may require climate change to be considered as a short-term as well as a long-term process. Processes in the third general category, colonization patterns and growth of organisms, may occur over long or short periods, and may be natural or anthropogenic. Because the biology of a landscape is such an important aspect of its ecology, the establishment of life forms plays a critical role in landscape evolution. The migration of plant species across a land area is a complicated scenario studied by paleobotanists (Delcourt and Delcourt, 1987). Particularly, during major climate change, vegetation populations undergo dramatic alterations in their ranges. Colonization patterns of animal populations, especially in the case of large herbivores, may have a signicant impact on a landscape's sere. Humans have been responsible not only for their own colonization of new landscapes, but also for introducing many alien plant and animal species (Crosby, 1986). Pathogens can virtually wipe out a species across its range in less than a century. The fourth category contains the keystone processes that are the most difcult to predict. Again, they may occur over long or short periods, and may be natural or anthropogenic. Landscape disturbances is a broad category that includes both random events and chronic occurrences. Disturbances, which may be endogenous or exogenous, can affect the direction and speed of landscape change. On the other hand, many disturbances occur which do not affect landscape change and, therefore, do not rise to the level of keystone processes. The impacts of disturbance may be mini-

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Fig. 1. Length of time for select keystone processes to affect landscape change.

mal, limited only to an ecotope. Alternately, disturbance may be pervasive and chronic leading to an entirely new landscape. Natural disturbance of entire landscapes can be re, volcanoes, and oods. Complicating the role of disturbance in landscape change is the class of human disturbances that are unprecedented, cause total landscape change in the space of years, and remain unpredictable with respect to their long-term outcomes or reversibility. The fth category of landscape-forming processes is cultural. As landscapes are a holistic manifestation of natural and human elements, it follows that cultural processes can lead both to physical change or to change in the cultural system itself. We can think of cultural systems as composed of culture, society, and economy. Culture refers to the beliefs and values of the people in a region. Often, the overall culture is a plurality of beliefs coming from differing groups that are related solely by geographical proximity. Society

refers to the relationships and interactions of individuals to individuals, groups to groups, and individuals to groups. Economy refers to the connection between individuals or groups and resources. Conceiving a cultural system this way is useful for analyzing its relationship to the landscape. As this is a growing area of landscape investigation, a denitive list of landscape-forming cultural processes is not possible. However, a working listing can be speculated. This list includes perpetuation and change of values, political and legal control of land, settlement patterns, technology advances, and economic activity. 2.4. The resulting landscape history Once the conditions for landscape history are satised, how do we organize the information? The purpose is to describe the generation of landscape periods based on the ecological stages, cultural periods, and

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Fig. 2. Timeline of landscape periods, ecological stages, cultural periods, and keystone processes at Long Pond.

keystone processes. Each landscape period represents a changed landscape with respect to its structural and functional characteristics. A timeline is a useful graphic device that allows historical information to be layered. Thus, landscape periods, ecological stages, cultural periods, and keystone processes can be viewed contemporaneously. Such a timeline should have a logarithmic time scale, giving greater weight to the events of this century, but going back to the period of glacial retreat over 10,000 years ago. As an example, the timeline for Long Pond is given in Fig. 2. There have been ve distinct landscape periods at Long Pond: Glacial Recovery, Woodland Adaptation, Frontier, Mountain Livelihood, and Metropolitanization. For each period, the history describes, the ecological communities on the land, the cultural groups occupying and using the land, and the processes maintaining or changing the land. In this landscape, where anthropogenic re played a large

role, there was close correlation between cultural periods and keystone processes. The historical record of the last 200 years was signicant enough to describe causal relationships. 3. Difculties in landscape history research A history that attempts to explain a landscape's evolution by describing its seral stages and cultural sequences, and by determining the causes of landscape change will not be easy to write. The two main problems are: landscape history is unconventional and not standardized; and the data requirements are hard to satisfy. 3.1. Lack of conventions Landscapes are complex systems for which decisions must be made with imperfect knowledge. Land-

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scape planning requires tools which synthesize conventional methods and use both qualitative and quantitative data. Landscape history in the form described in the previous section is one such tool. However, this landscape history is unconventional. Although some examples from environmental history (Christensen, 1989; Flores, 1994; Whitney, 1994) and historical ecology (Crumley, 1994) are consistent with a landscape approach, it is not a purely conventional ecological inquiry nor is it precisely public or environmental history. Ecological science and environmental history might both review an individual landscape history as inadequately rigorous (Ingerson, 1994). Nonetheless, planners are compelled to facilitate decisions even in the face of imperfect knowledge. Therefore, landscape history will have to synthesize its own conventions, keeping in mind the ultimate utility for landscape planning. Flores (1994) challenges his fellow environmental historians to recognize the persistent dynamism in landscapes. This, he says, is required if they make any claim to apprehending reality. He argues that in its efforts to cover vast regions, like the arid west, what is missed in much environmental history is the historical reality of place. Because of his appreciation of ecological and cultural processes of change and their connection to place, Flores advocates for what he calls a `bioregional history,' which is virtually synonymous with landscape history as dened here. According to Flores, a good bioregional history is place specic, temporally deep, and examines environmental change across sequential cultures. Whitney (1994, p. 4) notes the difculty of meeting ``the rigorous ecologist's demand for quantication or statistically veriable change.'' The story of environmental change and causal agents has several characteristics which render a strictly scientic analysis impossible. One, environmental issues generally have quantitative components that are hard to determine. Two, environmental changes are rather complex, resulting from an interaction of a variety of forces. Positive and negative feedbacks may be hard to discern. Three, simultaneous occurrence of two events does not establish cause and effect. Landscape history that is developed within the framework of landscape ecological theory is likely to overcome some of these objections since landscape ecology is that form of ecology which is credited with

bringing ecology and history together (Cronon, 1990). Haber (1990) notes that landscape ecologists are beginning to expand their paradigm: ``Natural history, so long neglected or even despised as being unscientic, is gaining a new scientic importance.'' The form for landscape history proposed in the previous section is devised to articulate a convention that will be adequately rigorous for planning. 3.2. Obscure data The other signicant problem confronting the researcher of landscape history is that the necessary data may not exist, be unavailable, or be difcult to locate (Hackett, 1971; Stirling, 1990; Whitney, 1994; Marcucci, 1998). All historical research is part detective work, but the writer of landscape histories is especially burdened to search a myriad of sources to glean pertinent information. This results largely because landscape is an unconventional and relatively new research topic there are no standard or centralized repositories of the necessary information. Further complicating the task, many landscapes that are valued for their biology and other natural features have been historically remote. As was true at Long Pond, this remoteness is often the single most important factor perpetuating both rare natural ecosystems and distinctive local culture. This remoteness also leads to a paucity of historic data (Stirling, 1990; Marcucci, 1998). In dealing with incomplete or inconsistent data, landscape historians are advised to build redundancy into their research with multiple lines of inquiry (Whitney, 1994). Evidence for landscape history can be found in two broad categories: documentary evidence and eld evidence (Whitney, 1994; Marcucci, 1998). Documentary evidence includes both primary and secondary data. This data may come in the form of written documents, such as journals, notebooks, correspondence, guidebooks, deeds and contracts, histories, and periodicals. Alternately, documentary evidence can be found in drawings and paintings, photographs, maps, census statistics, insurance and tax records, and historical scientic data. Documentary evidence is particularly useful to the landscape historian for the more recent `historic' periods. The documentary evidence for Long Pond's history came in many forms at a variety of locations. Both the

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county and the state historical society contained correspondence and maps that related to the condition of the land during the 19th century. The archives of the Pocono Forestry Association contained photographs, correspondence, and records concerning 20th century re prevention. These were supplemented by re records of the Bureau of Forestry. Long Pond has had a long tradition of inspiring natural history. The results of these early scientic investigations were located in local and research libraries. Also in libraries were drawings, maps, books, and articles documenting past landscapes and especially the huckleberry business. Private family records added to this line of inquiry. The county planning commission provided census data for the study area. Once found, historical documents must be scrutinized for accuracy. In many sources, references to landscape elements and descriptions are incidental and careless. Travellers' descriptions are often unspecic or inaccurate with respect to vegetation. Colonial land surveys, often the earliest comprehensive record of a landscape, may be poor indicators of species distribution and other natural features because of fraud, timing of survey, misidentication of trees, sampling bias in the types of land, and bias in tree selection (Wilkinson, 1958; Whitney, 1994; Price, 1995; Dando, 1996). Another common source, 19th century county histories, concentrated on biography, towns, catastrophes, and manufacturing. Often inclusion of one's family in such a history was guaranteed by an advance purchase. Field evidence is valuable for understanding both `historic' and `prehistoric' periods, as well as the contemporary landscape. Field evidence includes ecological data, archeological data, and anthropological data, especially oral histories. There is a strong historical element to much standard ecological research, and ecological reports can yield good historical data. Fortunately, the Pocono history covered an area which has long attracted scientic interest. Recent ecological studies have been prompted by a compelling need for biological conservation (Thompson, 1995; Latham et al., 1996). In establishing long-term vegetational history, paleobotanical studies are crucial. Similarly, archeological investigation is historical in nature. Where they have occurred, archeologists' ndings are important sources for landscape historians. However, not all landscapes under investigation will have

been the subject of direct scientic research. If they have not occurred within a given study area, then speculation based on analogous landscapes may be the best that can be offered until such studies are undertaken. One form of eld evidence that was especially important to the 20th century history of Long Pond was oral history. Since Long Ponder culture was closely connected to the land and persisted through several generations of a small cluster of families, residents of Long Pond had a deep understanding of their landscape. Furthermore, they provided me as a researcher with a rich understanding of the people and the place. First person memories went back to the 1920s, with local stories going back decades before that. Even as the techniques of landscape historical research become more sophisticated, individual landscapes will have distinct data requirements and unique sources. In this respect, each is a puzzle not only to its specic history but also to its research protocol. Nonetheless, it is a puzzle whose pieces do exist in libraries and archives, in scientic labs, and on the land itself. 4. Realizing the potential benets of landscape history as a planning tool In its motivations, landscape planning seeks to improve human conditions and environmental communities. In its methods, landscape planning involves description, prediction, and prescription of conditions in the landscape (Tomlin, 1990). Landscape planning, which implicitly includes management, is best undertaken as an ongoing and iterative process. Four phases in the landscape planning process can be generalized from various landscape planning techniques (McHarg, 1969; Hackett, 1971; Laurie, 1986; Steiner, 1991). They are: inventory of the ecological and cultural systems; identication of issues, problems, and desired outcomes; plan making, including analysis, forecasting, scenario writing, and decision making; and implementation, including physical intervention, institutional design, monitoring, and evaluation. These four are not discrete, sequential activities, but rather clusters of iterative, interactive activities which may be going on simultaneously. I argue that landscape history has the potential to improve planning in the inventory, issue identication,

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and plan making phases. The example of Long Pond indicates some of the ways in which the history is useful. In proposing landscape history as a planning tool, I also hypothesize additional benecial outcomes. Very possibly, there will be other benets of this tool that I do not anticipate. Only when a body of applied landscape histories has been accumulated and analyzed will we have a full picture of their utility. 4.1. Enhancing the inventory The purpose of the inventory phase is to describe the landscape accurately. History is valuable to this phase of planning because it expands landscape description by revealing ecological stages, cultural periods, and keystone processes. The history explains how new landscapes are legacies of earlier ones. If we accept that landscapes are dynamic phenomena, then histories are useful and essential in describing them. The history is especially valuable because it explicitly describes the nature/culture interaction through time. Although holism is espoused in landscape theory, we do not always realize it well in planning where an initiative often focusses on either conservation or development. By its very design, the form of history proposed here chronicles these important interactions for a particular landscape. Therefore, citizens and planners have a means of conceptualizing the landscape as a whole. Better description by itself is of little value if it is not disseminated to citizens and incorporated throughout the planning process. Involving citizens yields an indirect benet of landscape history. Most landscape planning stresses the importance of citizen, or stakeholder, involvement throughout the process. Initiating historical inquiry at the very beginning provides a means of engaging citizens in landscape planning. It also allows citizens to be experts. Long-time residents will be key informants to the history, especially with respect to the recent past. Citizens of Long Pond were eager to participate with histories of their communities and local landscapes. Furthermore, they are a vested audience for the completed history. In general, historical research can be a nonconfrontational way of initiating citizen interest in planning. Of course, it must be noted that once attached to policy decisions the history may be scrutinized differently (Mandelbaum, 1985).

4.2. Improving issue identication One of the important ways that improved description is valuable to planning is that it provides a valid context in which to identify issues, problems, and desired outcomes. This would not occur without specic historical enquiry because the knowledge presented through landscape history is not intuitive or automatic. The expert planner from out of town would not know the dynamics of change or recognize landscape legacies merely from a survey of current conditions. Even citizens, who are intimately familiar with a landscape and its workings, will not necessarily understand the consequences of common events. There are three distinct benets to this phase of planning resulting from a better substantiated planning context. First, by describing the cultural system, history provides a context for contemporary issues and problems. History explains the beliefs and values of the local culture, especially with respect to land. Understanding the source of conicting beliefs and values is necessary to identify areas of common interest. Thus, a planner confronted with the need for conict resolution will nd this useful. The process of framing and reframing issues is an n and Rein, 1994; important activity in planning (Scho Hamin, in press). Through landscape history, the issues, problems, and outcomes for a specic landscape can be reframed in a valid historical context. Enriching the popular perception of a changing landscape has the potential to alter the political willingness of a society for collective action directed at planning and managing the common landscape. Ultimately, this change of perception may result in a change of attitudes towards the land. Perhaps most importantly, the landscape history will change attitudes by educating people about the impact of human actions on the land and about the signicance of place to the local culture. At Long Pond, as in other similar landscapes, the issue of controlled burning had been set only in the context of the last 30 years, thereby missing entirely the historical authenticity of frequent res. Second, the goal of landscape history is to present a long view. Continuing this long view into the future forces consideration of potential issues and problems that are essential to long-term landscape sustainability. A 100 century history of a landscape makes the

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conceptual leap to a 500 year plan easier. Plans made today will not contain detailed prescriptions for 500 years hence, but they can sustain environmental options (Tonn, 1986). Moreover, a landscape history that chronicles previous landscape periods provides ideas for future and alternative landscapes. Third, by revealing keystone processes, history allows connections to be made to agents of change that come from outside of the landscape. Examples of imported issues that might not be immediately apparent are acid rain, global warming, intercity highway construction, water authority projects in distant cities, or state or federal policy decisions. 4.3. Inuencing plan making Plan making is a wide array of activities that lead to decisions. It includes analysis, scenario writing, and forecasting. This phase builds on the two previous phases in the planning process, inventory and issue identication. Plan making involves descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive techniques in envisioning and deciding upon future landscapes. Landscape history improves plan making merely because it improves description in the earlier planning phases. Landscape history can directly improve predictive and prescriptive techniques as well. History is valuable because it has the potential to improve the predictive scenarios of landscape planning. This derives from more accurate descriptions. By improving prediction, I do not mean to suggest that history is deterministic. Prediction does not imply certainty, but rather it presents a probability of potential outcomes. History shows that the actual course of a landscape is determined by thousands of events, actions, and decisions. One form of predictive scenarios is to build geographic models to extrapolate the current trajectory of a landscape. These models are built on algorithms where the future outcome is a function of keystone processes, time-series of ecotope conditions, assumptions about landscape function, and hypothetical interventions. Such models are a valuable use of historical information that is spatial and quantitative. Another way of building predictive scenarios which is cruder, but quicker, and therefore, more easily employed, uses qualitative historical information. It involves comparing a landscape with other similar

landscapes. When planning draws on analogous case studies to help predict the future of a landscape, the object is to search for cases which share key features. Typically, size, rates of growth, economy, or proximity to urban centers are the studied characteristics. In searching for analogies, it is best to not only compare the structure and function of the landscapes, but also the history of change, especially with respect to the keystone processes. The most useful comparisons will be made when similar processes and similar patterns of evolution are found. This is especially critical when it comes to cultural processes. As a growing body of landscape histories develops, predictive analogies will become more possible. Many general patterns of landscape change have been identied, and no doubt many more remain to be found. Forman (1995) notes six widespread causes of land transformation which have a variety of recognizable mosaic sequence patterns: deforestation, suburbanization, corridor construction, desertication, agricultural intensication, and reforestation. Patterns of change can be dominated by natural processes. The shifting mosaic in forested ecosystems is one such theorized pattern. Climate change and species migration cause other patterns of change. Many of the most important patterns for landscape planning will have human-caused keystone processes. For example, commercial forestry has been a dominant keystone process in the mountain districts of Pennsylvania for over 100 years. Coal mining has had an even longer history in dening and creating landscapes. In this century, industrial agriculture has dominated the limestone valleys in the state leading to a particular way of organizing the landscape. Prior to this, low technology agriculture was a keystone processes dating back a thousand years on some Pennsylvania landscapes. A pattern of urbanization is identied by Forman and Godron (1986) as the `Landscape Modication Gradient' and by Rodiek (1988) as the `Landscape Development Continuum.' It describes a linear process of human induced land-use change. Five distinct phases along the continuum are: natural, managed, cultivated, suburban, and urban. This model describes many landscapes' histories, but urbanization comes in many patterns and is not necessarily so sequential. On the southern Pocono plateau, for example, suburbanization is occurring directly in pine barrens where

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anthropogenic re practices were only recently abandoned (Latham et al., 1996; Marcucci, 1998). The landscape history of Long Pond shows rapid change from natural and semi-managed ecotopes into suburban ones. Knowing the historical patterns of change in many landscapes and the underlying keystone processes will greatly facilitate comparative studies of landscapes. As the body of landscape histories grows, its value to planning will increase. Prescriptive scenarios are directed towards problem solving (Tomlin, 1990). History complements the total planning process. As such, history alone does not yield prescription, but is part of a process that leads to prescriptions. By improving the landscape inventory and the context for discussing issues, problems, and outcomes, history indirectly improves prescription. A history is closely connected to prescription when the keystone processes themselves become the object of planning and management decisions. Through a planning process which includes history, potential landscape change can be determined to be desirable or undesirable. Landscape intervention is then directed at creating, suppressing, or altering potential change by manipulating keystone processes. The connected processes of re suppression and afforestation is one clear example of how knowing keystone processes is connected to planning prescriptions. Managing this keystone process is crucial for biological conservation efforts at Long Pond. Without it the Pocono till barrens are doomed. The history also shows how re suppression is connected to other keystone processes in the current landscape period. Many different keystone processes are potentially the direct object of planning prescriptions. These keystone processes will be revealed to planners through landscape history. 5. The outlook for landscape planning I agree with the prospect and potential for landscape history that J.B. Jackson expressed 15 years ago. I admit that I hold the peculiar belief that the value of history is what it teaches us about the future. But I think that I am on firm ground when I say that most of this landscape history deals with an infinitely small fraction of the landscape

whether of the 18th or 19th century. The reason is simple: the origin and history of only a very few spaces, very few structures are on recordF F F I believe that with the use of modern archeological techniques, with the use of aerial photography, above all with the use of more imagination, more speculation we could immensely expand our knowledge of the landscape of the past (Jackson, 1984, p. xi). I am optimistic about the outlook for landscape history. Landscape-scale planning is, I believe, of vital importance given the current conditions of the environment and humanity. We need to move quickly from scattered examples of planning landscapes as a whole to widespread application across many contiguous ones. Landscape history will be essential in this effort because of the inherent dynamism in nature, the ux of cultural systems, and the resulting patterns of change in landscapes. As a relatively new tool in our planning methods, writing and using history will continue to be rened. I have discussed some concerns about developing landscape history. Others have not been discussed but can be anticipated. For example, how much will it cost to prepare landscape histories and who will do it? Should there be professional historians working closely with planners? Planning without landscape history has little prospect of engendering realistic long-term planning. We cannot sustain our environmental options without knowledge of keystone processes and patterns of change over multiple temporal scales. Planning would even suffer in the short term as our ability to understand the current landscape as a legacy of previous ones is compromised. By using landscape history as a planning tool, we as planners can describe a landscape more accurately and engage in meaningful exchanges with citizens. In turn, this will lead to more effective and complete prescriptions. Ultimately, our intentions are to plan landscapes that will be valued legacies to future generations. Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the comments on early versions of this research by C. Dana Tomlin

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D.J. Marcucci / Landscape and Urban Planning 49 (2000) 6781 persisting on soils favoring forest. Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 123 (4), 330349. Laurie, M., 1986. Introduction to Landscape Architecture, 2nd Edition. Elsevier, New York. Levin, S.A., 1992. The problem of pattern and scale in ecology. Ecology 73 (6), 19431967. MacKaye, B., 1962. The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Mandelbaum, S.J., 1985. Historians and planners: the construction of pasts and futures. J. Am. Planning Assoc. 51 (2), 185188. Marcucci, D.J., 1998. Planning a Changing Landscape: Ecology, History, and Planning at Long Pond, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. thesis. University of Pennsylvania. McHarg, I., 1969. Design with Nature. Natural History Press, Garden City, NJ. Nassauer, J.I., (Ed.) 1997. Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology. Island Press, Washington, DC. Nassauer, J.I., 1995. Culture and changing landscape structure. Landscape Ecol. 10 (4), 229237. Odum, E.P., 1969. The strategy of ecosystem development. Science 164, 262270. Patterson, T.C., 1994. Toward a properly historical ecology. In: Crumley, C.L. (Ed.), Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM, pp. 223237. Price, E.T., 1995. Dividing the Land: Early American Beginnings of Our Private Property Mosaic. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Riley, R.B., 1995. What history should we teach and why? Landscape J. 14 (2), 220225. Ritter, D.F., 1978. Process Geomorphology. Wm. C. Brown Co., Dubuque, IA. Rodiek, J., 1988. The evolving landscape. Landscape Urban Planning 16, 3544. n, D., Rein, M., 1994. Frame Reection: Toward the Scho Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. Basic Books, New York. Steiner, F., 1991. The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning. McGraw-Hill, New York. Stirling, D.A., 1990. Site histories in environmental site assessments: a new opportunity for public historians. Public Historian 12 (2), 4552. Stokes, S.N., Watson, A.E., Keller, G.P., Keller, J.T., 1989. Saving America's Countryside: A Guide to Rural Conservation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Thompson, J.E., 1995. Interrelationships among vegetation dynamics, re, surcial geology, and topography of the southern Pocono Plateau, Monroe County, Pennsylvania. M.Sc. thesis. University of Pennsylvania. Thorne, J.F., 1993. Landscape ecology: a foundation for greenway design. In: Smith, D.S., Forman, R.T.T. (Eds.), Ecology of Greenways: Design and Function of Linear Conservation Areas. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 2342. Tomlin, C.D., 1990. Geographic Information Systems and Cartographic Modeling. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Tonn, B.E., 1986. 500-year planning. J. Am. Planning Assoc. 52 (2), 185193.

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Daniel J. Marcucci is a landscape planner teaching environmental studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning, both from the University of Pennsylvania. His research centers on the importance of dynamic landscapes and the human and natural factors that change them.