Bruce Eitzen has a BSc in Botany and a Masters in Landscape Architecture and has variously been a practising commercial landscape architect, environmental, heritage and visual planner for over 35 years in Southern Africa. The field of landscape heritage is hugely overlooked in development planning and features of the cultural/cultivated landscape such as trees, especially exotic trees like gums and pines, street trees, garden trees, historic avenues, etcetera are routinely destroyed by private owners, developers, municipalities and the planning environment.

Open space and peri-urban space is regularly advanced over by expanding urban areas and even rural areas suffer degradation by wind turbines, agricultural greenhouses and shade cloth orchards that are getting bigger by the day. The scenic value of landscapes which has high tourist and cultural value is constantly eroded by human activity. Landscape heritage is not even a field of study in South Africa, the region or continent and the focus on indigenous and endemic species has come at the price of a generational attack on the cultivation of ornamental and exotic plants and species.

Landscape Heritage Southern Africa (LHSA) is focussed on drawing focussed attention, legal and planning processes, and public awareness to the plight of the ubiquitous elephant-in-the-room of planning practice and human behaviour, namely, Landscape Heritage. Landscapes of all kinds, natural and cultural, regional and local, indigenous and colonial, ancient and modern, have huge social benefits and value to all people everywhere, being critical to our human health and well being and delight.

Any of these topics can be discussed according to the needs of the occasion. Bruce Eitzen is based in the Cape Peninsula.