ABSTRACT
The subject matter of economics is the use of scarce resources to satisfy the competing wants of humans (and arguably of other sentient beings). Wants are taken to embrace both physiological needs and psychological desires: economists do not on the whole seek to distinguish the two categories. Among these wants are aesthetic ones, and among the scarce resources are the land and sea and sky, which are referred to as natural resources, although all are now pervasively modified by human activity. If the subject is seen in this way, discussion of landscape inevitably has an economic dimension.
