Landscape study of the interactions between nature and society : a training course to analyse an agrarian system in a territory
Résumé
The space is a simple way to aboard the complexity of the interactions between society and its natural environment. In countries where agriculture is the dominant activity and where cartographic documentation is non-existent or inaccessible, the landscape study becomes a precious tool to analyse agrarian systems. Experience shows that by working quickly ( 2 days) on a given area with a group of students on 5 subjects (the organization of the biophysical environment and changes of observation sites; water in the landscape and its use ; the demographic trend and results seen in the urban part of the landscape ; land structure and evolution of the cultivated space; inheritances of the past and current interventions on the land), we are able to describe: 1) that a landscape is dependent on the chosen observation sites (all the parts of the landscape are not visible from a single viewpoint), 2) that a landscape evolves (requiring historic surveys to trace its evolution), 3) that the determining factors of its evolution can be outside the study zone (requiring the study zone to be placed in relation to its environment). The training course combines three types of teaching tools which will be presented in the poster : the teaching film, the field trip and the analysis of an information file.