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Abstract
The National Environmental Policy Act requires all agencies to develop techniques to insure appropriate consideration of all environmental amenities and values, including those presently unquantified, by all federal agencies in all their activities. These obviously include the values associated with the landscape and its visual resources. The visual resource, however, is inseparably intertwined with people's prior experiences and expectations, as well as nonvisual dimensions of experience; and its values include not only preferences but also cultural norms and ecological functions. Many valuable techniques have been developed for visual resource management, especially recent ones which move beyond traditional inventories of landscape characteristics and attempt to identify perceptual preferences; but much remains to be done. Comparative analysis of existing techniques in case studies would be fruitful, as well as more attention to (1) relationships between preferences, cultural norms and the landscape's ecological functions, (2) relationships between people's preferences and their knowledge and expectations of the landscape, (3) holistic approaches to landscape analysis and management, and (4) wider dissemination and use of existing methods within existing permissive statutes.
Parent Publication
Citation
Andrews, Richard N. L. 1979. Landscape values in public decisions. In: Elsner, Gary H., and Richard C. Smardon, technical coordinators. 1979. Proceedings of our national landscape: a conference on applied techniques for analysis and management of the visual resource [Incline Village, Nev., April 23-25, 1979]. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-35. Berkeley, CA. Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Exp. Stn., Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture: p. 686-692
