 The empirical study of environmental preferences has long been of interest to planners, and largely represents the bottom-up mode of inquiry referred to above (see  Section 2),  as the aim is to discover what people in general like rather than to assess their likings against the normative constraints of connoisseurs and philosophers. Topics explored include the differences in preference across age groups, ethnicity, education and income (e.g., Kaplan &amp; Talbot 1988). One conclusion often drawn is that there is a widespread, perhaps universal, human preference for savanna landscapes, even among communities whose own historically stable habitat is very different, and that this preference is reflected in the design of parks and gardens (Falk &amp; Balling 2010). It is further asserted that this is the product of our evolutionary development in an East African context (E. O. Wilson 1975 is an early source of this idea); for detailed discussion, references, and some reservations see S. Davies 2012: ch. 6.