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Accepted chapter to Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American Energy
Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (forthcoming late
2019/early 2020 from Social Ecology Press & Utah State University Press).
From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good
landscape change
Kate Sherren
School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS
Abstract
Many of us, when facing landscape change such as energy infrastructure development, often
demonstrate a belief that we inhabit a ‘climax’ landscape. In successional terms, a climax landscape is
defined here as one that is perceived by those who live in and use it to have reached a stable and ideal
state after various stages of socio-cultural progress, from ‘pioneers’ on up, as humans met their needs
through landscape modification. This chapter defines a new concept, climax thinking, that is making it
difficult to adapt landscapes to new needs: e.g. renewable energy, climate adaptation, urban
densification. Understanding and easing climax thinking could smooth the way for numerous
sustainability transitions. While we often believe we will not be able to adapt to change in our
landscapes, the opposite has been repeatedly demonstrated. Not only do our expectations and norms
slowly change as generations replace one another, but landscape expectations and preferences can
evolve even within the generation that has witnessed quick and dramatic change. Ecologists have
debunked the idea of equilibrium in natural systems, and a similar development is needed in public
perceptions of lived landscapes. This chapter describes climax thinking as a powerful illusion. It describes
the pathology of climax thinking, and the need for a non-equilibrium model for managing public good
change in lived landscapes, mapping to related theories and ideas in other fields. Finally, it proposes a
cross-disciplinary research and action agenda to help avoid casting landscape futures around old needs
and old solutions while maintaining sense of place, identity and cultural heritage.
Key take-aways
• Landscapes must change in line with new societal needs, but such change is politically difficult.
• Climax thinking is fallacious thinking, but near ubiquitous in Western settings.
• Climax thinking is the privileged mobilization of ignorance and hubris across time and space.
• Forcing landscape stasis despite changing conditions and needs pushes impacts to those less
able to resist.
• Leverage points to reduce climax thinking may include improving awareness of past landscape
changes and landscape changes elsewhere that our decisions may cause.
• As in succession theory, climax thinking should be challenged by a non-equilibrium approach to
thinking about landscapes that acknowledges a range of viable futures exist beyond the status
quo
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
2
Introduction
This book is dedicated to exploring the opportunities to coordinate across scales, sources, and social
science subfields toward better understanding of energy impacts. One such barrier to coordination has
been theory to understand public resistance to landscape change. Current global challenges necessitate
wide-spread transitions that will have significant impacts for landscape appearance, function and
meaning and are thus subject to local opposition. Public good landscape changes discussed here include
those required for sustainability transitions: renewable energy but also urban densification and climate
adaptation. Explanations for this opposition has thus far been fragmented, but may have common roots.
In recent years it has become common to apply ecological concepts to society (e.g. adaptation,
resilience). Many of these instances develop into rich interdisciplinary fields of study and application.
The application of ecological concepts to society is often initiated by ecologists recognizing familiar
patterns. It is less common for a social scientist to reach into ecology, especially given the range of social
theories that capture specific phenomena as well or better. For instance, resilience has had a strong
uptake among social scientists engaged in team social-ecological research led by ecologists, as well as by
policy-makers, but has been critiqued for its lack of attention to social dimensions and human
subjectivity (Cretney, 2014; Davidson, 2010; Olsson, Jerneck, Thoren, Persson, & O’Byrne, 2015;
Stedman, 2016). I thus use ecological analogies here cautiously. Scholars have also applied succession to
other aspects of human communities, similarly not without controversy (Rudel, 2009). Yet I will build on
succession concepts to 1) describe a new concept of climax thinking in relation to a range of parallel
literatures and theories, 2) deconstruct its pathology and implications for managing landscape change in
lived landscapes; and, 3) suggest an action and research agenda to ease the process of transformation.
What is climax thinking?
We are all, from time to time, climax thinkers. That is, we seem to believe that the landscape we
currently have is the one that is the intended end point for our given context. This recalls Frederick
Clements’ concept of succession, developed in rangelands (Sayre, 2017), where a climax plant
community was defined as a stable one that dominates in a given site and set of conditions after a series
of predictable and progressive stages. In Clements’ thinking this equilibrium state is inevitable, almost
fated, and will be reliably returned to after disturbance such as grazing if that grazing is properly done.
Indeed, that return was an indication of the plant community’s vitality. We often perceive our lived
landscapes similarly as progressing from ‘pioneers’ on up to what is seen locally as a mature or ‘climax’
state. In ecology, equilibrium theories such as succession have been surpassed by non-equilibrium
concepts such as panarchy and resilience, and multiple potential stable states for given social ecological
systems (Elmqvist et al., 2003). This sequence of climax to non-equilibrium theories is an important one
for us to follow in the context of landscape change as well. This chapter suggests that in lived
landscapes, climax is only an illusion. Though ecologists have stepped away from climax thinking, it
seems that social thinking is often stuck with notions of climax (steady state landscapes of place and
attachment) that are unhelpful in the face of new challenges. Here I describe the phenomenon of climax
thinking and its implications more thoroughly, focussing not on the ways that climax thinking may arrest
negative landscape change (Hager & Haddad, 2015), but on how such thinking can be a barrier to the
landscape transformations we need to meet new societal and planetary needs, such as de-carbonization
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
3
or climate adaptation. I recognize how much nuance such a focus excludes—not all change is good, and
not all stasis is bad--but such decisions are sometimes critical for generating useful theory (Healy, 2017).
First, however, it is important to note that it is harder than it might seem to identify what is a public
good landscape change. In a context of climate change, landscape changes for decarbonization and
climate regulation create public benefits that by economic classification are non-excludable and non-
rival. Such public goods are under-provided in part because they also impose at least short-term
negative externalities on people living nearby (Stokes, 2016), driving opposition to such proposals that
increases the cost and reduces the likelihood of transition. In general it should be a good thing to have
“interest … coincident with duty” (Brennan, 1996, p. 256, citing James Madison c. 1788), but it
complicates such proposals that they do not exclusively represent public goods, but also economic
benefits to developers and town councils, both variously trusted (Hess, 2018; Parkins et al., 2017). Those
with the power to judge that something is in the public good may not reflect the demographics (class,
race) of those affected by the decision (Pasternak, 2010; Reed & George, 2011). There is very real peril
in this situation, though I largely set it aside in what follows. Exemplars of integrated landscape planning
and transitions are needed that include close attention to power and justice (Newell & Mulvaney, 2013;
Stenseke, 2016).
The idea of climax thinking has repeatedly emerged from my recent social science case study work, as
well as more informal readings of local events, bringing explanatory value to observed public responses
to proposed landscape change. Residents around a failing hydroelectric dam recently protested its
removal, as they protested its construction less than 50 years earlier (Sherren, Beckley, et al., 2016).
Many locals disagreed with the dyke realignment and wetland restoration necessary to protect coasts
from climate-related risks, although most of the agricultural land the dykes protect is no longer actively
farmed (Sherren, Loik, & Debner, 2016). It is manifest in resistance to landscape change of all kinds, but
particularly explored here in relation to public good landscape change, whether a landscape addition,
replacement or removal (Magilligan, Sneddon, & Fox, 2017). It is also manifest in debates over
reconstruction after ‘natural disasters’ like hurricanes, where to rebuild as it was (rather than in
preparation for what will be) is seen as most heroic (Birch & Wachter, 2006). Sometimes climax thinking
seems to emerge as result of ‘sunk costs’, where past effort or investment by our selves or ancestors to
build (farm, log) the current landscape makes the possibility of changing that landscape feel like an
invalidation. This kind of emotional ‘lock-in’ becomes a sort of social infrastructure that rejects change
to retain identity and honour past generations (Sherren, Beckley, Greenland-Smith, & Comeau, 2017).
Climax thinking is easiest to visualize at an individual scale, with that individual in a bubble: while we
stand on a layered landscape, we may be only dimly aware of this history (Figure 1). This drives our
ignorance, inability or lack of willingness to perceive the current landscape as only one in an ongoing
sequence. Instead we see it as the culmination of a sequence, its persistence privileged. We may assume
current solutions will meet future needs, when in fact aggregate resistance to change will inevitably
cause degradation of fit for all. Climax thinking is a luxury, afforded the socially, politically or
economically powerful who can maintain their own climax landscape at the expense of others. Such
resistance to accepting change in lived landscape to meet new public needs pushes the provision of
those needs and the implications of that provision onto to those more spatially or socially distant. In
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
4
disaster contexts it also often pushes the cost of landscape stasis (or restoration/rebuilding) onto
governments, who are forced for political ends to prolong current uses.
Figure 1 Climax thinking, illustrated
Climax thinking is a significant problem given the scope of land use change that is required to meet
current climate challenges: climate adaptation and decarbonisation of the economy, our lifestyles and
energy sector. New landscapes need to be written into this crowded space, such as renewable energies,
new urban forms, restoring ecosystem services and finding space for sea level rise. This is sometimes
described as landscape transformation, a step-change rather than incremental change (Pelling, O’Brien,
& Matyas, 2015). Instead, climax thinkers pick a winner, a particular time period and ‘strategy’
(Shepheard, 1997), in which to arrest the lived landscape and its meaning. This subjects new land uses
to former needs, much as those who seek to maintain landscapes in specific conditions, such as the
sheep-managed Cotswolds, rather than re-wilding abandoned agricultural land (Monbiot, 2014). Silvia
Crowe summarized it best sixty years ago in Landscape of Power (1958, p. 38):
The superficial approach to a landscape, seeing only its appearance at the moment,
without realizing its past, its essential character or its potential future, can have a
stultifying effect at the time we need a broad-minded vision. The humanized
landscape is a constantly changing pattern, and cannot be arrested at one point in
history.
In conservation settings the idea of historical fidelity is being discarded (Higgs et al., 2014), perhaps
because it is increasingly clear that future conditions are unlikely to easily support past ecosystems, ,
although the public still prefers for instance to support native species conservation than immigrant
species following shifting climate bands (Lundhede et al., 2014).
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
5
Lived landscapes are layered landscapes
There are few if any places on earth where the hand of humans cannot be seen, but we do not have
good descriptors for such places. It is now widely acknowledged that we live in the Anthropocene, the
geological time period in which human forces have dominated natural processes, but that term refers to
time rather than landscape (Robin & Steffen, 2007). The term ‘landscape’ itself is widely acknowledged
to encompass the combined outcome of both cultural and natural forces, but these are more commonly
referred to as ‘cultural’ landscapes (Council of Europe (CoE), 2000). I introduce here the term ‘lived
landscape’ to encompass the range of places where we live, work and extract natural resources. Most
lived landscapes are mundane, yet are no less the combined effort of humans and nature: farms, mill
towns, suburbs, hydroelectricity reservoirs, working forests (through fire suppression and plantation
forestry). Lived landscapes may well be the most mature available representations of a given culture as
it is currently practiced, but they often do not meet established definitions of cultural landscapes (Box
1). It frankly doesn’t seem that they’re ‘making’ any more cultural landscapes as defined by some, but
lived landscapes are ubiquitous as we meet our needs for food and fuel, shelter and community, beauty
and inspiration. While the idea of lived landscapes emerges from the ‘working’ landscapes of resource
management (Abrams & Bliss, 2013), it includes sites of resource consumption as well as production.
Box 1 about here
Lived landscapes represent a significant planning challenge (Plieninger et al., 2015). This is in part
because of the subjectivity in how they are experienced and interpreted by individuals, which may not
be directly connected to the physical meanings or affordances of the place or typical demographic
characteristics (Stedman, 2016). Individuals in the same physical place may effectively ‘read’ a different
landscape ‘text’, depending on any number of personal variables and experiences. Within this diversity,
however, there may be clusters, some of which may become dominant, normalized, depending on the
power dynamics within the place (Cresswell, 1996; Stokowski, 2002).
Decades of scholarship has described landscape as palimpsest (Drenthen, 2015): a reused surface upon
which a story of current livelihoods is legible, at the same time as evidence of past ones remains visible.
Landscapes have many constituencies and thus many ways of being read and thus meaningful (Widgren,
2004). D.W. Meinig’s famous essay, The Beholding Eye, enumerated ten ways to read landscape: as
nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, and aesthetic (Meinig, 1979).
Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) made a smaller list: landscape as scenery/spectacle, institution/rules, and
resource. Architect Paul Shepheard (1997) would counter these with legible landscape ‘strategies’—e.g.
reason, defense, economic exploitation, restoration—that play out at large scales. Shepheard also
reminds us that a lack of coherent landscape strategy does not arrest landscape change, it just makes it
more emergent, fragmented and potentially maladaptive: “Incremental changes happen all the time,
[and] … accrue to big changes in what there is in the world, and whatever you are up to, you will be
involved in these already. … be aware of the strategy that governs what you do.” (Shepheard, 1997, p.
233).
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
6
Box 1: Lived landscapes are not the same as cultural landscapes
There is a rich vein of research in specifically cultural landscapes. The European Landscape
Convention definition of cultural landscapes is oft-cited: an “area, as perceived by people, whose
character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of
Europe (CoE), 2000, p. 2). The cultural landscapes protected since 1992 under the UNESCO World
Heritage system are “combined works of nature and humankind” (UNESCO World Heritage
Convention), typically examples of human landscape modifications for the purposes of aesthetics,
spirituality or livelihood. These are usually but not always representing land uses, meanings and
practices that are now archaic or at least quaint. These landscapes are manifestations of past
resource, lifestyle or spiritual problem-solving. Their protection by UNESCO has often come as a result
of having fallen into disuse or use being somehow ruptured (Kasemets, 2015), and thus ‘paused’ at a
specific stage of cultural problem-solving. By contrast, many former cultural landscapes in areas of
high pressure for development such as river deltas may be long buried under layers of newer
landscape solutions. Any such landscape artefacts serve, as described Dutch writer Willem van Toorn
(translated by Martin Drenthen), to “remind us … that there is a past, that people who lived in that
past had to deal with the world just as we have to; that they had to protect themselves against nature
and use its resources” (Drenthen, 2015, p. 66). UNESCO cultural landscapes are thus archetypal and
rare, exemplars and celebrations of localized problem-solving.
Lived landscape overcomes limitations of cultural landscape as a concept for the purposes of this
chapter.
• First, balance between human and nature is generally a characteristic of cultural landscapes.
In lived landscapes such as cities, however, human forces and technologies have sought to
overtake nature. This happens despite the fact that many cities today seek to mimic, if not
(re)integrate, ecosystems in order to ensure and leverage ecosystem service supply (Depietri,
Renaud, & Kallis, 2012).
• Second, scale is also an important variable. Cultural landscapes often function as symbols of
smaller scale and arguably more sustainable human endeavour, encompassing discrete
complexes of human habitation, resource exploitation and cultural identity. Lived landscapes
are more difficult to delineate, representing multiple connections across sometimes large
distances for livelihoods, relationships, resources and meaning.
• Finally, cultural landscapes typically have meaning beyond their boundaries, for instance
representing a cultural group and its traditions, even with ‘associative’ UNESCO category
landscapes where there is no material evidence of human use. By contrast, many lived
landscapes may seem aesthetically compromised or culturally bereft to an outsider, while for
locals they may inspire strong (and likely diverse) senses of personal attachment and cultural
identity (Stobbelaar & Pedroli, 2011). These lived landscapes are not cultural by most
definitions, but they are made by humans of nature and even if they are utilitarian and
industrialized, they are variously inhabited, used, perceived and cherished.
The shared nature of lived landscapes, albeit with their many constituencies over place and time, make
them useful to conceptualize as containers for—as well as outputs of—multiple and overlapping rules
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
7
and behavioural regimes. Institutions are simply “structures for exchange” (Hotimsky, Cobb, & Bond,
2006, p. 42), and generally refer to the intangible social inventions such as law, education, markets,
more than their physical manifestations (courthouses, schools, banks). Turner (1997, p. 6), however,
described institutions in a way that anchors them to problem-solving and resource use:
[as] a complex of positions, roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of
social structures and organising relatively stable patterns of human activity with
respect to fundamental problems in producing life-sustaining resources, in
reproducing individuals, and in sustaining viable societal structures within a given
environment.
Goodin’s thinking on institutions echoes Shepheard’s, earlier: “[they] can be the product of intentional
action without … having been literally the intentional product of anyone’s action” (Goodin, 1998, p. 28).
Giddens (1979) described structuration cycles that drive and reinforce behaviours. Landscape is thus a
physical manifestation of those norms and the way we solve problems in a particular place, and the
landscape in turn enables and thus recursively reproduces those patterns. Others have called these
sociotechnical landscapes, stable “taken-for-granted backdrop[s]” that do not drive action but “[exert]
power and influence … provid[ing] deep-structural ‘gradients of force’ that make some actions easier
than others” (Geels & Schot, 2007, p. 403). Changing society means changing landscapes, and vice versa.
Thinking of the interactions between landscapes and institutions is instructive to understanding how
change and perhaps transformation should be approached (Pelling et al., 2015). If we can agree that
landscapes are institutions in the sense of being commonly held, and reproduced by humans playing out
rules and regimes to sustain viable communities in a changing environment (to paraphrase Turner, 1997,
above), we can more easily see that succession beyond any perceived current ‘climax’ is an obvious
outcome. Handmer and Dovers identified four approaches to institutional change that can be applied to
landscape planning (Handmer & Dovers, 1996): stability, where the goal is the status quo; incremental
or superficial change, often marginal or symbolic; adaptability, where the goal is resilience amidst
change; and, flexibility, with the concomitant risk of maladaptation. Given the tendency of future
options to be narrowed by past choices (so-called lock-in, or path-dependency (Simmie, 2012)), it is
appropriate for landscape change processes to face interrogation, as well as some rigidity or resistance.
We must balance rigidity and flexibility, consider how much cost or benefit accrues to whom, and find
ways to avoid widespread grief and loss from imposed change (Marris, 2014; Mels, 2016) as well as the
solastalgia that results from environmental degradation in cherished places (Albrecht et al., 2007).
A pathology of climax thinking
The attenuation of time and space operate powerfully on us to create climax thinking. Blindnesses or
lapses of empathy across temporal and spatial dimensions seem to drive the problem, though whether
these emerge as a result of hubris, exceptionalism, ignorance or uncertainty is unclear (Table 1). First,
climax thinking manifests as an apparent belief that current landscapes are how they are meant to be.
This may be linked by genuine ignorance of former land uses, or to a sense that former generations (and
their land uses) were more primitive. Second, climax thinking suggests a failure to imagine alternative
future landscapes that are equivalently viable and desirable. This might be caused by an assumption that
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
8
current landscapes will continue to meet the needs of current and future generations, or simply a sense
that future people matter less: temporal discounting of generations to come. Third, climax thinking may
arise from a lack of willingness or ability to adapt to landscape change. Fourth, climax thinking could be
linked to the belief that forcing local landscape stasis harms no one, i.e. there are no losers. This could
be either spatial discounting of distant individuals, or a true ignorance of our ability to impact faraway
places and their people by our landscape decisions. Each dimension is described more fully below.
Table 1 A multi-dimensional pathology of climax thinking.
Dimension
Pole
Hubris/exceptionalism
Ignorance/uncertainty
Time
Past
Previous generations and land uses
were paving the way for this one.
There were no previous land uses.
Future
Future generations matter less
than this one.
Current solutions will continue to
work in future.
Space
Self
I should not need to accept
landscape change.
I am not able to adapt to landscape
change.
Other
People in other places matter less.
Local landscape decisions do not have
implications elsewhere.
Specific aspects of this proposed pathology of climax thinking overlaps with others that have been
advanced to explain mired public processes about landscape change, in the years since such processes
became commonplace. Most of these have emerged from social science, and explain defaults to the
status quo rather than leverage points for alternatives. Here I try to include links to a wide range of
literature that touches upon this concept, without pretences of being exhaustive. The closest concepts I
have found in the literature to date are: immutability, what Pasqualetti (2011, p. 914) described as “the
expectation of landscape permanence” in his quest to understand drivers of opposition to wind energy;
and, continuity, where adaptive capacity depends in part whether “places remain continuous and
provide same attributes and meet certain needs, giving continuity to identity” (Fresque-Baxter &
Armitage, 2012, p. 254). These concepts, however, suggest that of landscape is stable-state, i.e. no
change has yet occurred or been experienced.
Past
One driver of climax thinking is a limited awareness of past landscapes. Any individual’s time in a given
place is limited, and so also are their experiences of it. As Simon Schama described, “landscape is the
work of the mind. It’s scenery is built up from strata of memory as much as from layers of rock”
(Schama, 1996, pp. 6-7). That time-in-place may cover periods of slow incremental change such as
suburbanization, as well as potentially faster, more significant changes such as hydroelectricity
inundation. Changes often involve layering the landscape, from one use to another and consequently
one memory to another, as new needs are met. Artefacts of past uses are sometimes still visible to
those who know how to see them, but can be equally easily ignored by those who do not (Hirsh & Jones,
2014). Individuals often demonstrate post hoc adaptability to both kinds of change (e.g. ‘shifting
baselines’ with subsequent generations (Keilty, Beckley, & Sherren, 2016; Pauly, 1995)). Before this can
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
9
happen, however, opposition to public good proposals manifests as efforts to keep the current
landscape ‘solution’ intact.
The palimpsest of lived landscapes implies some level of erasure, and this can make the past somewhat
illegible to those who did not directly experience it. Paul Shepheard draws a parallel between
domesticated dogs, who are happy with their lot without understanding it, and humans: “How many
humans are simply domesticated? Living in our civilization – our cultivation – without knowing why it
exists?” (Shepheard, 1997, p. 19). He goes on later to explain,
“As you retreat in time, the evidence [of past lives] becomes so scanty and so
contaminated by the process of being passed down the generations that you can be
sure about nothing.” (p. 30)… “If it’s hard to perceive the ancient, simple landscapes,
it’s harder still to see the ground beneath the clutter of the modern world” (p. 49).
Our resistance to change in our lived landscapes may thus come in part from simple ignorance of not
only what has come before but that something came before. Our perception that our lived landscape is
somehow fated might be weakened by awareness that previous decision-makers or inhabitants may
have chosen to overwrite previous versions of the same place to fill erstwhile needs.
Better awareness of past landscapes will not necessarily combat climax thinking, however, because of
what Carl Sagan (1997) called temporal chauvinism, or what C. S. Lewis (1955) called chronological
snobbery: past landscape change being dismissed as irrelevant to present day occupants because of a
sense that earlier generations were lesser or primitive. In either instance this past blindness or current
hubris serves as a very real barrier to sustainability transitions. This is a failure of local historical
knowledge, as well as demonstrating ignorance of the broad strokes of human civilization, and our place
in it, indigenous and settler. There is a good link to this in succession theory, as Clements defined it. He
viewed early successional plant communities as laying the groundwork for later ones, thus facilitating
them while clearly less desirable.
Future
Individuals cannot be faulted for the bias introduced by the ‘ordinality’ of time: simply not knowing what
is to come. As Barbara Kingsolver (2009, p. 240 ) wrote in The Lacuna, “The past is all we know of the
future”. But it does seem that we are guilty of a kind of paternalistic presentism: assuming that what we
have built for current generations will serve future generations. Two fallacies may be associated with
this kind of thinking: that current solutions will continue to work in future, e.g. in a context of climate
change; and that future humans are less important than today’s if their needs differ. Futurist Jim Dator
has described this phenomenon as temporal crackpot realism: the “fully understandable but quite
misleading belief that the world of the present will dominate the future” (Candy, 2010, p. 68). Such
thinking is a failure of the sociological imaginary (Castoriadis, 1987), in that what we collectively hold as
possible and desirable is often limited by what already exists. It is also, however, a failure of our capacity
to fully consider future generations as equally important to our own (Karlsson, 2006). Such temporal
discounting is a persistent challenge to implementing the full intentions of sustainable development,
that which meets “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 1987).
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
10
Intergenerational equity is thus a cognitive challenge as well as a challenge to hubris. Pop culture
commentator Chuck Klosterman explores the limitations of the “informed imagination” (2016, p. 259) in
What if we’re wrong? Thinking about the present as if it were the past (p. 30):
Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the
world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind. This is not easy
(even with drugs). But it’s not even the hardest part. The hardest part is accepting
that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist.
Uncertainty lies at the heart of some of these concepts. For instance, prospect theory is sometimes used
to explain resistance to landscape change: the tendency for loss aversion to outweigh the uncertain
possibility of future gain (Holtorf, 2015; Rogge, Dessein, & Gulinck, 2011). For instance, Kate Reilly and
others recently found that locals around a hydroelectric dam headpond were able to map current
ecosystem service provision, but could not imagine those that would follow scenarios such as dam
removal (Reilly, Adamowski, & John, 2018). Such uncertainty is generally associated with fear (of change
or the unknown) or flawed logic (cognitive dissonance, status quo bias). Some conceptualizations come
with implied opprobrium for those said to hold them, so-called NIMBY (not in my backyard), or the more
awkward NOOMBY (not out of my backyard) (Fox, Magilligan, & Sneddon, 2016), with their echoes of
the deficit model (Burningham, Barnett, & Walker, 2015). In renewable energy settings these have been
superseded by place-protection, which builds on a significant literature of sense-of-place and place
attachment (Devine-Wright, 2009). More informal and perhaps mean-spirited conceptualizations of
climax thinking include “last one in, close the door”, also called the ‘gangplank’ or ‘last-settler’ syndrome
(Graber, 1974; Voss, 1980).
Ecology gives us numerous analogies for this phenomenon. In resilience terms, climax thinking relates to
the desire to unnaturally prolong the ‘fore loop’ of current landscape settings (Allen, Angeler,
Garmestani, Gunderson, & Holling, 2014). A frequent analogy is fire-suppression in a forest, which
otherwise would naturally recycle nutrients and initiate secondary succession, leading to increased risk
of catastrophic fire. In social systems also, extending the fore loop can lead to a more brittle and
maladaptive system (Slight, Adams, & Sherren, 2016). This is an excellent corollary for climax thinking –
the desire to hold in stasis, or force stasis, despite changing conditions and the need to re-use some of
the various capitals otherwise locked-up. Repeatedly rebuilding after disaster may be another example:
a political decision but a poor collective investment. Clements used the ability of a rangeland to return
to its identified climax state after disturbance as a critical diagnostic for the health of that system. A
non-equilibrium model sees it differently.
Space and Place
Our desire to hold our lived landscape in stasis can force those of others to change. Thanks to a highly
interconnected society and economy, local decisions can have far-flung landscape and livelihood
implications. The decision to reject hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in one place, for instance, may
mean a continued reliance on conventional fuels produced elsewhere, perhaps in places with weaker
safety and environmental regulations, and may exacerbate sea level rise in yet another. This is a failure
of intragenerational equity—concern for other members of the same generation elsewhere in the
globe—which is another persistent challenge to sustainable development (WCED, 1987). To some
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
11
degree this explains why climax thinking is characteristic of developed nations. It is a privileged form of
buffering against environmental signals that only those with capital can undertake (Meyfroidt, 2013),
particularly those with livelihoods outside the primary and secondary economic sectors and thus
decoupled from nearby siting and land use decisions.
The scholarship of place has been particularly concerned with the multiplex relationships between
people and landscapes, and how those can best be sustained. While useful here for how it explains
place-attachment, in terms of subjective meanings (Brehm, Eisenhauer, & Stedman, 2013; Stedman,
2016) and time in place (Smaldone, Harris, & Sanyal, 2008; Vorkinn & Riese, 2001), though place theory
makes reference to iteration, in practice it seems to validate stasis. The difference may simply be
semantics; place attachment is positively framed climax thinking. It has been shown, for instance, that
place attachment and identity can reduce transformational capacity, such as in changing commodities in
the face of climate change in Australia (Marshall, Park, Adger, Brown, & Howden, 2012). While we may
believe we will not be able to adapt to change in our lived landscapes, the opposite has been repeatedly
demonstrated as today’s landscapes have emerged. Indeed, landscape expectations and preferences
can evolve even within the generation that has witnessed quick and dramatic change (e.g.
hydroelectricity development) (Keilty et al., 2016). Even if current settings or features are perceived as
irreplaceable in terms of place attachment or other ecosystem service supply, there may be significant
elasticity in the sources of values derived from landscape (Daw et al., 2016).
Leverage points for landscape transition
We need to develop our knowledge, imagination and empathy to change our landscapes and perhaps
our cultural infrastructure in the face of new challenges. Most importantly, we must do this without
cultural obliteration, environmental degradation and rupture in human-environment relationships
(Hourdequin & Havlick, 2015). This section proposes three key leverage points to tackle climax thinking,
illustrating with examples of research gaps across a range of fields, including social science,
environmental assessment, spatial science, Big Data and digital technologies (Table 2). Importantly,
none of these leverage points, or specific suggested directions to action them, would have the outcome
of disempowering valid resistance in the face of development proposals which did were not seen to
represent a public good; arguably, they would help in identifying such instances.
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
12
Table 2 A cross-disciplinary research and action agenda for climax thinking.
Field
Past
Future
Self and Other
Spatial Science
Expose past layers
and trajectories
Show challenges and viable
scenarios
Reveal how our energy
choices propagate globally
Big Data and
Digital
Technology
Track cultural
trajectories through
landscape change
Digitally conserve past
solutions to make space for
new ones
Reach outside online
bubbles to develop empathy
Environmental
Assessment
Convey past
trajectory
Interrogate ‘public good’ and
incorporate end-of-life
planning
Document inter- and intra-
generational implications of
status quo and proposal
Social Science
Do tools to reveal
past and possible
trajectories ease
climax thinking?
How does place re-
attachment occur and how
can it be facilitated?
How does knowing where
your energy comes from,
perhaps locally, affect
attitudes and consumption?
Heal our link with the past, without anchoring there
What the above makes clear is that landscape is not ever completed. We need to reveal the fact that
landscape is an ongoing trajectory of problem-solving, without somehow getting stuck in those past
visions. If a blindness to past landscapes drives climax thinking, this is in part because of their erasure.
New media may have a role to play. Thanks to archives and online and mobile mapping, improved
transparency is well within our ability. We need a better sense of how many times, and in how many
ways, our lived landscapes have already been written and re-written (Hanson, 2012). Archival photos
and maps can reveal many different versions of a place over time, but their display is limited by
cartographic convention. Instead such resources can be brought to life using online applications such as
storymaps to remind viewers of past occupants and some of the past viable landscapes they created
and/or overwrote as needs changed. Digital archives and social media can also be used to help us track
cultural trajectory alongside landscape change, including that resulting from energy transitions (Sherren,
Parkins, Smit, Holmlund, & Chen, 2017). Such insight on past land uses at sites facing land use change
could be co-created as well as shared with the public via dialogue in more collaborative environmental
assessment and stakeholder engagement processes (Eaton, Burnham, Hinrichs, & Selfa, 2017). Further
research is needed to explore whether exposure to site-specific trajectories of past and current
landscape solutions eases transitions to new ones. There is some evidence for the former: in research on
changing woodland cover in the UK, exposure to maps of past woodland arrangements (as well as
literary perceptions of the same) made survey respondents significantly less likely to opt for status quo
scenarios (Hanley et al., 2009).
Learn layering: we can’t keep everything
Transition will require learning how to negotiate the editing of lived landscapes. This chapter does not
endorse replacing landscape preservation with layering: it is critical that some cultural landscapes are
maintained as records of past landscape solutions and associated cultures, but we cannot keep
everything. Heritage experts have been grappling with questions about the risk of cultural erasure
(Holtorf, 2015), as well as the practical need for controlled forgetting (Harrison, 2013; Holtorf &
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
13
Kristensen, 2015) to leave space for new culture (e.g. nuclear domes (Holtorf & Högberg, 2014)).
Landscape planners may have things to learn from archaeologists and heritage specialists. Those fields
are developing an increasingly wide range of opportunities for ‘conservation by record’ thanks to 3D and
immersive technologies (Champion, 2017; De Reu et al., 2013; Seif, 2009). Techniques like this have
already been used in many landscape change settings to simulate scenarios of future conditions, but
rarely to conserve or reconstruct those becoming past. Tools such as digital globes and phone apps can
also augment our understanding of current landscape values and challenges such as sea level rise to
public stakeholders (Bishop, 2015; Harwood, Lovett, & Turner, 2015). Research is required to
understand how such immersive digital archives or renderings might be experienced and perceived by
those who see landscapes-at-risk as entangled with their own or ancestors’ efforts and identities.
Moreover, we need to better understand how to facilitate processes of place re-attachment after place
disruption (Keilty et al., 2016).
Collaborative planning processes could perhaps also be improved with more transparent end-of-life
planning discussions at the proposal stage. It is important to emphasize to local populations the
reasonable lifespan of new infrastructure and what might follow. A proposed dam, for instance, has a
limited lifespan, so proponents and affected landowners should be able to consider its implications at
the outset of the project. We should also be more willing to remove old uses as well as add new ones,
which in the context of energy Martin Pasqualetti has called “recycling” landscapes, consistent with
nutrient cycling in forests, given the varying permanence and ‘temporal qualification’ of energy
landscapes (Pasqualetti & Stremke, 2018). More research is needed on whether early and transparent
end-of-life planning can ease transition related to specific infrastructure, by casting it as temporary, or
whether the spectre of future disruption in fact increases resistance. It may also be that certain kinds of
baselines (status quo landscapes) operate differently, for instance in terms of expectations of
permanence, or perceptions of naturalness, desirability or ‘blank slate’.
Climax thinking is in part a failure of imagination (Ingold, 2012). We may need to reconsider our
landscape strategy (sensu Shepheard, 1997) to recast landscape to meet new challenges. One
alternative landscape strategy, for the purposes of illustration only, could be ‘local energy’. Unlike with
‘local food’, in North America there seems a lack of interest in taking similar ownership of and
responsibility for energy use, generation choices and their carry-on effects. Europe is ahead on such
thinking, perhaps because of the need to ‘overwrite’ their smaller landmass earlier (e.g. de Waal &
Stremke, 2014). Rejection of renewable energy proposals for instance may prolong reliance on imported
fuels and electricity with remote negative externalities. A local energy ethic would expose energy
consumers to environmental signals, and thus might inspire energy conservation. It might also reduce
opposition to local renewable energy infrastructure in contexts where local alternatives (e.g. fracked
natural gas) may represent environmental or health risk. The negotiation and implementation of such
new landscape strategies may be able to ease landscape transition and give meaning to disruption, but
must be informed by more research. A local energy strategy raises important hypotheses that need
testing, for instance, to establish if people generally know where their energy currently comes from, and
whether places currently supplied with locally produced energy consume less of it. Moreover, we may
be able to reduce the impacts of climax thinking if we shift our thinking about renewable energy as a
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
14
commodity no different than forestry or agriculture; why should opportunities for export be anathema
and drive so much resistance to development?
Build empathy for other lives and our impacts on them
Climax thinking is also in part a failure of empathy. Again, new media has an important role to play in
building empathy and system knowledge. So far it has not. As Marshall McLuhan is oft-quoted as saying,
“We shape our tools and afterwards they shape us”. Cosmopolitanism is a philosophy that emphasizes
our duty to consider the global community of humans in our actions. Cosmopolitanism is typically
associated with calls for wider education in the humanities (Fischer et al., 2007; Sherren, 2008), for
instance literature to develop a sense of empathy and the capacity to envision the experience of other
lives (Nussbaum, 2002). More ubiquitous than literature is that other potential ‘empathy machine’, the
internet. Ethan Zuckerman (2013) observes that ready access to global media and culture is making us
think we are worldly, despite the fact that we tread relatively worn, familiar paths when we visit there.
Such paths delineate the echo chamber, which reinforces prejudices through news feeds fed by
algorithms and social networks (Jasny, Waggle, & Fisher, 2015). International news coverage in
American media has declined with the rise of access to online sources, but our bubbles make sure we do
not become exposed to such coverage (Zuckerman, 2013). So what might it look like to ‘do internet
differently’? We could learn about what life is like where our energy sources currently come from. Faced
with a landscape change, we could seek out a vicarious experience from someone who has faced similar
landscape changes. More substantively than recreational internet use, it may be possible to integrate
intragenerational considerations into environmental assessment processes (Gibson, 2006; Winfield,
Gibson, Markvart, Gaudreau, & Taylor, 2010)? Climax thinking may be reduced by understanding how
needs (e.g. energy) are currently met, and the impact of that provision on others, as well as how those
impacts of new proposals might be distributed.
Conclusion
This chapter draws on the ecological concept of succession to present a new concept, climax thinking,
uniting and adding to ideas related to public resistance to landscape change emerging from a range of
disciplines. Public good landscape transitions are hampered due to climax thinking, our erroneous
perception that our lived landscape is in its peak state. Any perceived summit is only a powerful illusion:
land uses must continue to change and layer as new needs and priorities are encountered. That said,
this contribution is not meant to provide ammunition to those endorsing unexamined opportunities for
large-scale landscape change. This chapter describes lived landscapes as layered landscapes that present
us with challenges to adapt for new needs. A multi-dimensional pathology of climax thinking is proposed
that covers time and space, including hubris or ignorance as potential drivers. Three broad leverage
points are proposed to help us ease transitions across those dimensions: 1) healing our link with the
past, 2) learning layering, and 3) building empathy. A cross-disciplinary mix of directions are proposed to
make progress across those leverage points. This research and action agenda should only be a starting
point as we learn how to adapt our shared landscapes in the face of significant local and global
challenges.
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
15
Acknowledgements
Thanks to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive advice, John Parkins and Tom Measham for
reading and commenting on an earlier draft, and to Jaya Fahey for graphic design. Thanks also to Dylan
Bugden, Nichole Dusyk, Weston Eaton, Josh Fergen, David L. Kay, Leah Stokes, Jeremy Weber, John
Whitton, and other attendees for discussions of this work at the NSF-funded Energy Impacts Symposium
in Columbus, Ohio, in July 2017, where this work was first presented, and to the symposium organizers
for financial support to attend that event. This work was supported in part by grants from the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the author, as PI (430-2012-0641) and as co-I
(435-2012-0636, Parkins PI).
Summary
In the absence of strong political will, public resistance to landscape change is a significant challenge to
the kinds of transitions needed to make to achieve long-term sustainability. Such resistance happens
across the urban-rural gradient: from protesting the condo development next door that will house more
people in a smaller area and reduce our need for cars, to residents opposing a large-scale wind farm to
reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. Such arguably public good landscape changes are always
challenged by those living nearby, a phenomenon well explored in energy research. This chapter draws
upon succession theory to describe the phenomenon of ‘climax thinking’, the sense we have that the
landscape we currently live in is in its ideal, perhaps even intended, state. The pathology of climax
thinking is dissected into temporal and spatial dimensions of ignorance or egotism. The past dimension
is being unaware of any previous land uses or, if aware, seeing those past landscapes as lesser, along
with past residents who had to suffer change for today’s landscape to emerge. The future dimension is
assuming current land uses will continue to work in future, or feeling that we have no duty to anticipate
the needs of future residents. The spatial dimensions are anchored in the self—our feeling that we
should not need to, or cannot, accept change—towards incomprehensible others, elsewhere, whose
landscapes change precisely because we seek to hold ours static. The pathology, once described, is
tackled by outlining a potential set of leverage points for easing each dimension: healing our link with
the past, learning layering, and building empathy for other lives. Returning to succession theory, the
chapter advocates for a multi-disciplinary research and action agenda across the social and
computational sciences to facilitate a non-equilibrium way of thinking about landscapes in the face of
sustainability transitions.
Sherren, K. (in press), From climax thinking toward a non-equilibrium approach to public good landscape
change. Forthcoming in Energy Impacts: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American
Energy Development, co-edited by Jeffrey Jacquet, Julia Haggerty and Gene Theodori (Social
Ecology Press & Utah State University Press)
16
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