Recasting geomorphology as a landscape science

Abstract

There is a common acceptance that the Anthropocene epoch is characterized by the increasing dominance of human activity as a driver of global terrestrial change. Geomorphology, with its historical roots in geology and geography, would seem to be ideally positioned as a geoscience to tackle the well documented, rapidly degrading health of that environment. However, the word ‘geomorphology’ is problematic outside the academy in a way that ‘landscape’ is not. A more explicit identification of geomorphology as a landscape science would encourage engagement by geomorphologists in one of the most urgent environmental questions of our time. If humanity is indeed the most important driver of environmental change, we propose that geomorphologists need to engage more seriously with the cognate landscape sciences, such as landscape architecture, anthropology and political ecology. In particular, there are landscapes that are more threatened than others and critical zones in landscapes that must be protected and enhanced with greater care than others. We argue that recasting geomorphology as not only a geoscience but also a landscape science would highlight issues of human well-being at different spatio-temporal scales and we illustrate this in three case studies from our respective countries: UK, Canada and Austria. As traditional geoscientists, we are not used to thinking of coastal flooding, permafrost degradation and snow depletion as centrally important to our science. But as landscape scientists the inclusion of these and all other components of the cryosphere's interaction with human wellbeing is entirely logical and the distinction between systemic and cumulative environmental responses provides a key to unravelling the variable contributions of local actors, managers and decision makers to environmental degradation. Decision making at zonal, regional and local scales are integral to the way in which geomorphic systems function. This argument clearly has wider application. It is up to geomorphology, acting as a landscape science, to provide the underpinning principles that identify landscape-changing actions as being unsustainable and in providing better-informed future pathways away from such actions.