Taking stock

In January 2019, almost a year before COVID-19 entered popular parlance, I wrote my first editorial for Landscape Research as the incoming Editor-in-Chief. I anchored that editorial to the theme of “change” and declared that changes were both “inevitable and necessary” (Waterton et al., 2022, p. 2) for a journal such as this, particularly given the length of time Landscape Research has been in operation. Within the year, the changes I had been referring to had been vastly overshadowed by the far bigger challenges of the pandemic, which quickly and inevitably affected almost every aspect of the journal’s operations. Everyone connected with the journal— authors, reviewers, the editorial team, and our colleagues at Taylor and Francis—had to adjust their established working practices in response to the converging pressures of health, home, and work. At the same time, many of us found ourselves simultaneously dealing with significant and rapid changes to the earth’s climate and the politics that surround it. My own experiences of such crises were largely delivered via Australia’s climate emergencies where, as Tony Birch (2020, p. 27) writes, we were living in a “storm of our own making”: fighting the development of new mines, grappling with soil exhaustion, gaping at drying rivers, hurtling from fires to floods, and witnessing the disappearance of at least three species—a bat, a rodent, and a skink (Muir, Wehner, & Newell, 2020). In the summer of 2019/2020, my family was forced to evacuate our fire-encircled home as unprecedented bushfires devoured more than 60% of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area to the west of Sydney. Three months later we found ourselves surrounding that same home with sandbags as nearly 400mm of rain fell on us in a single weekend. In retrospect, these were not the best circumstances in which to take on the role and responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief for Landscape Research! And the world continued to change. To borrow from Nick Mansfield, decisions we had already made kept arising “out of our past” and coming “at us from the future” (cited in Rose, 2013, p. 213). Unsurprisingly, the editorial work involved in steering a journal as large, prominent, and established as Landscape Research never got any easier. In fact, it became rather more complex with the acceleration of each new crisis. The last four years have thus at times felt very long and yet they have also passed in a flash. This is my fifth and final editorial as Editor-in-Chief; change, after all, is inevitable and necessary. As I look back over my tenure and inspect it for its failures and successes, it is probably fair to say that there is a lingering feeling of discontent. My time as Editor-in-Chief has unfolded in ways that look radically different to the plans I had started to formulate in 2019. Yet, overall, I shall remember it as being a largely rewarding experience. This is because although many crises punctuated my time at the helm of Landscape Research, those same ruptures also presented me with opportunities to rethink some of our editorial practices through the lens of ‘care’. I commenced this rethinking in close collaboration with Trustees of the Landscape Research Group and detailed updates on our efforts have been published in two editorials (Vicenzotti & Waterton, 2021; Waterton et al., 2022). Ultimately, our ambition has been to push back against