Abstract

landscapes, Vol. 15 No. 1, June, 2014, 1–2 Graham Fairclough and Paul Stamper There was a lot of weather in NW Europe whilst we were constructing Landscapes 15 1. Our front cover, and its corresponding article on Corsham’s hiddenscape, may remind us about world-threats of a few decades ago (whilst distantly-related anxieties were returning to our newspapers via Crimea, reminding us of the vivacity of landscape-related issues such as identity and community), but this winter in southern England it was the weather and climate change which hit headlines. Looking back, we have often uncovered links between landscape and climate matters, notably in volume 3:2 (2002) themed on Landscape and Climate Change, and several of the underlying issues exposed this winter were already in papers lined up for the present volume: ‘Islandscapes’, landscapes in which the weather is often the foreground not the background of both landscape character and biography; a critical review article of the recent polemic ‘Feral’, which reflects climate change worries without appreciating the historical, human and cultural background; and sustainable agriculture at global scale, a broader territory in terms of food security. There is thus much in Landscapes (although not yet in ecosystems services rhetoric) which