Seascapes

The “GEF-Satoyama Project” (the “Project”), a global project funded by the Global Environment Facility since 2015, aims to mainstream conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS) for a society in harmony with nature. This paper showcases the experiences of ten demonstration projects in SEPLS from the Indo-Burma, Tropical Andes and Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands regions, which were selected through calls for proposals in these three regions and received financial support by the Project, focusing around the three questions that are important for SEPLS. These are: How can various stakeholders become aware of the values of SEPLS; how can traditional knowledge gained from SEPLS be maintained and used; and how can the governance of SEPLS be strengthened?
Review and analysis of the demonstration projects showed that they were tackling the issues pertinent to the values, traditional knowledge and governance as vital and interconnected constituents of SEPLS. The preliminary outcomes of their efforts were illustrated in various ways, such as reduced negative drivers affecting biodiversity (particularly resource overexploitation, land use and land cover changes, climate change and pollution) as well as stronger institutions to promote biodiversity conservation and sustainable forms of production in SEPLS. More specifically, we found that: • SEPLS provide a wide array of values to people. Collaborative research on threatened species in SEPLS, and local entrepreneurship harnessing core values of SEPLS, particularly food, help people better recognize these values. • Traditional knowledge is an integral part of SEPLS that enables people to use and manage various resources sustainably, but is in decline. Effective measures to address this decline include community schools that complement modern education and that facilitate knowledge exchange between elders and youths; reinforcing traditional ecological production; and institutional efforts to integrate traditional knowledge into science and policies, e.g. through adaptive co-management. • Governance in SEPLS can be strengthened through effective collaborative management schemes and involving local communities in rule- and decision-making processes. Effective collaborative management consists of effective communications between all stakeholders, financial support and policies.
There are interlinkages among perceived and realized values, traditional knowledge and governance. This means that the development and implementation of polices related to SEPLS must systematically take into account the values of the different ecosystems that are relevant to the affected communities. They should, furthermore, draw from both scientific and traditional knowledge and be inclusive of and coherent between the different sectors and levels of governance. Effective communication and consensus-building between all the stakeholders is, therefore, key. In other words, public policies that are coherent among the different sectors and levels of government, and that recognize local values, traditional knowledge, customary rights and community institutions would provide enable environment for sustainably managing SEPLS.

This paper discusses new evidence of long-distance interaction networks in Island Southeast Asia obtained from geochemical analyses using SEM-EDXA and LA-ICPMS of 101 obsidian samples from 25 locations including seven obsidian sources and 19 archaeological sites. Given that there are obsidian sources distributed throughout much of Island Southeast Asia, the potential for obsidian studies to provide greater understanding of patterns of mobility and exchange in the Pre-Neolithic and Neolithic periods would seem to be considerable. This potential, however, remains largely unrealised as obsidian sourcing has hitherto only been carried out intermittently in Island Southeast Asia using PIXE-PIGME, XRF and other methods.

Roots in Antiquity Artists have been painting the landscape since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans created wall paintings of landscapes and gardenscapes. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of depicting pure landscapes declined, and the landscape was seen only as a setting for religious and figural scenes. This tradition continued until the 16th century when artists began to view the landscape as a subject in its own right. The artistic shift seems to have corresponded to a growing interest in the natural world sparked by the Renaissance.

Abstract for paper presented at the conference "Sailing with the Gods: Religion and Maritime Mobility in the Ancient World." Scheduled for June 2020, Malta, but postponed to June 2022 due to Covid-19. An earlier version of this paper was also presented at the AIA conference in 2021.

http://classics.emory.edu/home/news-events/samr.html

The Dutch (VOC) trading empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought with it to South Africa not only the world of powerful merchant capitalism, but it would also construct a new imaginative geography and order of the land to that which had been known by its ancient inhabitants, wherein the very idea of the land would be rewritten.

Through visual sources, the study analyses firstly the discursive, imaginative, and physical appropriation of landscape as represented in Dutch and British colonial-period maps and pictures in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Secondly it explores the representation of colonial ‘others’ who are depicted therein, and to what extent it may be possible to recover some aspects of marginalised narratives and spatial practices.

According to Yitzy Rosengarten, an American landscape painter, the sea has been a great source of inspiration for many artists throughout history, but where some have seen reasons for peace and tranquility, others have captured how violent and deadly it can be. At a time when many were engaged in maritime trade, the sea was portrayed as a place of care and a changing temperament, the paintings were a reflection of the fear of going out to sea and never returning, most of the paintings showed storms and boats being destroyed or fighting with the impossible waves that the sea gave.

A catalogue copy of the estate sale of Louis-Michel Van Loo (Paris, December 1772) contains pencil sketches by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, which, along with other relevant data, allow the identification of many of the artworks. The present paper discusses two seascapes, one by Claude Lorrain, the other by Joseph Vernet, which hung as pendants in Van Loo’s residence, with paintings at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge respectively.

Effectively managing human pressures on tropical seascapes (mangrove forests, seagrass beds, and coral reefs) requires innovative approaches that go beyond the ecosystem as the focal unit. Recent advances in scientific understanding of long-distance connectivity via extended ecosystem engineering effects and ongoing rapid developments in monitoring and data-sharing technologies provide viable tools for novel management approaches that use positive across-ecosystem interactions (for example, hydrodynamics). Scientists and managers can now use this collective knowledge to develop monitoring and restoration protocols that are specialized for cross ecosystem fluxes (waves, sediments, nutrients) on a site-specific basis for connected tropical seascape (mangrove forests, seagrass beds, and coral reefs).

The aim of the paper was to introduce the explicit use of a landscape approach to the study of sealing and whaling drawing on the authors Bass Strait experience (two months in a leaky boat running around the islands landing on the beaches...etc). The paper attempts a synoptic view, setting out thoughts on how a landscape approach might be applied to the littoral environment.

From nuptial chests decorated with episodes of the Trojan war to manuscript chronicles adorned with lavish depictions of siege and fight, from celebratory mural panoramas to pocket-size printed maps, Renaissance Italy teems with images of naval and terrestrial conflict. Despite their variety in format and content-drawing on mythological, chivalric and contemporary subjects alike-these images appear to increasingly emphasize the role of seascapes and landscapes as agents rather than passive backgrounds of military action. Before the emergence and consolidation, in the seventeenth century, of artistic genres prioritizing one theme over the other, these images often feature a common intent to find new ways of articulating geography and history, space and time, environment and human action, in response to changing paradigms of visual culture and historical thinking. Citational patterns, recycling of models, as well as operations of framing and sectioning thus inform, before the rise of the genres, a family of images on which a particular pressure was exerted-to function as historical evidence, to provide an emblem to patrons, to stage military deeds within renewed geographical horizons. This panel welcomes proposals to investigate any aspect of the visualization of landscapes or seascapes in relation to military narratives in Early Modern Italian art, in order to magnify the place of such depictions in the wider scholarly discussion of geographical and historical representations in Renaissance art.