Abstract Landscape is an objective reality that can be studied scientifically. The discipline of landscape history seeks to examine the influence of human and non-human agents on this reality. Historical ecology, a closely related field, investigates ecology (the relations of plants and animals to each other and to the environment) over time. Landscape history began with seventeenth-century disputes over former open-field arable. Since 1960 it has grown into an identifiable academic discipline. Historical ecology remains a less organised and more dispersed activity. Both disciplines have been associated with England, but there is no reason why this should be so: research can be carried out anywhere, and has been done in North America, Scandinavia, Italy, Crete, Japan, and Australia, among other countries. Landscape history and historical ecology are multi-disciplinary, and need to pay equal attention to history, archaeology and ecology. Amateurs often do this with more success than professionals. Landscape historians need to be wary of grand theories and of extrapolating ideas developed in one country to another where the environment and the human, plant and animal inhabitants are all different. However, some wide-ranging processes call out for explanation, such as the spread of open-field agriculture across Europe at a particular period. Both disciplines have tasks in setting the agenda for conservation: in recognising abnormalities and distinguishing them from extreme but normal events; in identifying what is conservable and what is not: and in identifying what is special and worthy of conservation in the landscape of any particular country.
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