Exploring taskscapes: an introduction

In his 1993 essay 'The temporality of the landscape', Tim Ingold argued that landscape develops through processes of temporality, that is time as it emerges in the unfolding of life through action. This association between temporality and landscape was expressed by the term 'taskscape'.In our introduction to this section, we return to the concept of taskscape to assess its usefulness in light of a number of developments in the understanding of human-environment relations. These include the changing conceptualisation of 'landscape' and the emergence of new approaches for understanding relations across species. We explain the ways that the three authors in this section use taskscape to think through political tensions and to explore how landscapes are achieved through inter-relating actions of humans and other beings. We conclude by emphasising the heuristic value of taskscape as a means of thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene. Both taskscape and Anthropocene are concepts that draw together human history and the shaping of the world and, as such, the taskscape offers a novel means to explore and understand the dynamics of Anthropocene environmental relations.