Conservation and landscape maintenance in Germany: Past, present, and future

Three main sources of landscape maintenance and nature conservation in Germany are identified: the British landscape garden, the official conservation activities, and a private association of nature park promoters. Among their achievements are the German Nature Conservation Act of 1935, the establishment of about fifty nature parks and one national park, a well-developed theory and practice of landscape planning, and three university departments of landscape architecture. The three sources, however, have not yet generated one comprehensive stream of activity, and they seem to lack a common basis of work. To overcome these difficulties, the author proposes a landscape strategy based on a pattern of ecosystems in different successional stages. The strategy is derived from the history of land-use in Central Europe and from the resulting Man-Nature relationships. They created a characteristic landscape pattern defined as the 'European savanna', the diversity of which provided for a high degree of ecological stability. The diversity can be maintained even in today's land-use, which consists of four main types. In a given area, one of these types is allowed to prevail, but there is repeated inclusion of the three other use-types in a finely-grained mixture. This should result in a diversified make-up of the landscape, which is both productive and ecologically stable enough to provide for an optimum natural environment of balanced Man-Nature relationships.