Dear IPSI members and friends,

Some of you may remember me, but for any readers whom I am not fortunate enough to know yet, I served in the IPSI Secretariat for around seven years until my contract ended at the end of the year, and was lucky to communicate with many IPSI-related friends as focal point for membership issues. I have already been in touch with many of you via email, and thanks again to those of you have sent kind messages on my departure. While our work with landscapes and biodiversity conservation is something to be proud of, for me the most precious takeaway from the past years has been getting to know so many wonderful people, and I hope we will all remain friends for years to come.

I have been asked to provide some thoughts for this newsletter, and although I am reluctant to seek attention or presume to have insights of interest to anyone, I am now in the USA visiting an ailing parent for a few weeks, and between this and the end of my time at UNU-IAS, as well as all that is happening in the world with the COVID-19 pandemic and everything else, it is after all a good time for reflection.

To be honest, my years of working with landscape approaches and having the opportunity to visit many friends in their own landscapes have opened my eyes to things that I would never have otherwise considered about life here in the USA. While there is much to love about my hometown, I now see serious problems in the physical landscape here. Local laws require people in my neighborhood to live in single-family homes on large plots, surrounded by wide swaths of mown grass. Because of the distance between houses, public transportation is not viable, so every household needs at least one car to go anywhere. We drive through the city without stopping to communicate, and in most cases do not even know our neighbors. Virtually no time is spent in public spaces, and in any case there are few other people in the spaces that do exist. All of this private space, however, demands huge costs in maintenance of lawns, roads, and other non-productive infrastructure. The very layout of the landscape seems designed to prevent the creation of community and force people into unsustainable lifestyles, thanks in large part to policies that make it literally impossible to design the landscape in a way that would increase population density and make the land productive for human well-being. Society, the environment, and the physical form of the landscape are all tied together in ways that ultimately determine nearly every aspect of our lives, for better or for worse. The COVID-19 pandemic has only helped to underscore this by forcing people even further away from each other.

The pandemic has had, and continues to have, an incalculable cost economically, environmentally, and perhaps most importantly in human terms, that must not be ignored or understated even as we start to return to normal with wide-scale rollout of vaccines. Still, the spirit of a landscape approach is to see things in broader context and with a holistic view, and in this sense it is worth asking whether the current challenges are really an outlier situation, or whether it is one more spike in an ongoing cycle of crises and short-term solutions that will continue indefinitely unless we find a more sustainable way of living on earth.

For this purpose, my suggestion based on these reflections is that readers also take a moment to really look at your own place and how your physical landscape influences society, and vice versa. Would it be possible to design the landscape in a way that fosters a more fulfilling life for the people who live there, and how? In the spirit of the multiscale landscape approach, what can we do at the global level, the national level, the local level, and even in our personal lives, to make life fulfilling and worthwhile?

For me, the weather here is unseasonably cold, and the flowering trees are covered with April snow. In the neighborhood, people inevitably get older, and some get sick and pass on. Governing bodies resist change and make well-intentioned policies that can have unintended consequences. Pandemics and other disasters will likely continue to come and go. We all have to live in some kind of a landscape. What I take away from the past few years is that, if we work to make our landscape a good one, it just might allow us to live a better life.

Thank you all again for all of your help and friendship over these years.

William Dunbar