Abstract
Excerpt: What is a wise use of nature? This perennial issue, always controversial due to conflicting human interests, has in the last decade tended to be clothed in the context of ‘sustainable development’. The rapid breakthrough of this concept in political and scientific spheres has brought to our attention the dependence of human survival and well-being upon ecosystem supports (e.g. Baskin, 1997, Costanza et al., 1997, Daily, 1997), as well as the susceptibility of ecosystems to human influences. How can such a political and scientific attention to ecosystems be translated to good public policy? One necessary prerequisite is likely to be the adoption of a landscape perspective. Such a perspective implies studies of the biological and physical interactions among a mosaic of ecosystems in heterogeneous land areas that together comprise landscapes.