Agri-environmental complementarities: Challenges and opportunities in an old world

We think of the old world represented particularly by countries in Europe \nand Japan in rather loose terms as areas where land has been in continuous \nhuman use with the application of relatively constant technology over periods \nof several hundreds or even thousands of years. 1 This is not to say that land in \nother parts of the world has not been in some sort of continuous use. Rather, \nthe point is that in the old world, the land has been used in a similar way, \nrelatively intensively and more or less continuously over this very long period \nof time. In contrast in the "new world," typified by the United States and \nAustralasia, European settlement has brought in a different technology and an \napproach to agricultural production that has made a significant break in the \ncontinuity ofland use. B. Green comments: It is the gradual development of farming over millennia that has permitted the largely spontaneous colonization of cultural landscapes by \nindigenous species recruited from naturally open habitats such as dunes, \ncliffs, wetlands and woodland glades grazed by wild animals ... The \nfamiliarity to the European of cultural landscapes composed of aggregations of these semi-natural managed ecosystems should not obscure the \nfact that such landscapes are virtually absent from those parts of the world \nwhere Western human intervention is more recent. Even in seemingly \ncomparable and superficially similar parts of eastern North America, \nforest clearance and farming have resulted not in species-rich seminatural ecosystems of native species but in species-poor examples of \nmeadow and pasture dominated by common European grasses and herbs \n... None of these [new world] countries has anything comparable to our \n[European] semi-natural heaths and downs.