Is It Possible to Keep Heritage Landscapes Original Functions? Remarks on Land Degradation Threats and Monitoring Indicators

ABSTRACT:The most important value contained in the territory is the cultural landscape in which heritage appears as the structuring value in its invention. In fact, the authors have been studying problems concerning the valorization and sustainable development of heritage landscapes, through cultural parks and related monitoring indicators, and often facing problems how to deal with land degrading problems. Those are clearly related not only with the future of heritage landscapes, but also concern the improvement of rural population quality of life, land's memories preservation and sustainable development new practices. This challenge is particularly important what Mediterranean landscapes concern because they are disturbance-dependent features modified by anthropogenic factors since millennia and its ecodiversity is particularly threatened. Therefore, finding out and developing new means of land management is a central issue mainly in the context of the actual rural world paradigm, where farmers need to move towards multifunctional activities and society is demanding both a broad spectrum of products and a high environmental and landscape quality level. That is why land management policies and planning have to deal with the maintenance of landscape original functions monitoring indicator the authors are analyzing as being aware of the numerous factors of landscape degradation.Keywords: cultural park, heritage landscape, monitoring indicatorsIntroductionMost of landscapes are a result of men activities; that is why most of them are cultural landscapes. Nowadays this is an issue that concerns everybody and experts and governments try to organize policies to manage those realities. In time, some of them tend to became heritage landscape and have a place in the UNESCO papers and guidelines rules; Cultural Landscapes can be considered as 'illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic and cultural forces, both external and internal' (WHC, 2005, paragraph 47). There is no State that did not intend to present a project to classify these heritage landscapes. Of course, as Fowler states, this concept is dynamic since cultural landscape is the product of a long-term, scientifically demonstrable nature/human interactive process (Fowler, 2006). On the other hand, it is easy to recognize that from here 'linkages of present with past are felt to need not just isolated heritage icons but the cultural landscape's embedding framework' (Lowenthal, 1993, 5). The character of many of these landscapes is a 'palimpsest of elements from the past and present' (Aplin, 2007, 430).What to do with the rest - and we mean the most part of natural and cultural realities that once in the past used to be the support of Man and are now our ground of life? They have not enough dignity to be classified and they have not any natural and cultural structure to be pointed out, but they were and they are still 'hidden landscapes' that deserve to be preserved. By doing that, we are giving a chance to the rural world and the rural way of life as an alternative to the urban area. Finally, we are keeping our human memories and qualities.Policies and experts have presented several possibilities to keep these rural and common landscapes within ordinary, natural and cultural heritage values. We should recognize the fragile success of most of them. Natural parks and landscapes protected areas, natural monuments, land management radical policies used to be important but not anymore. The real desertification of rural world, the building necessities, overwhelming attractiveness of urban life justify the search of new land management policies and land intervention tools to overcome the situation; this huge desertification dynamics is threatening with bringing irreversible damages in landscape' natural and cultural quality. …