ABSTRACT
This chapter considers issues of human impacts on biodiversity and landscape with a particular focus on perceptions and objectivity in relation to decision-making. The context of the discussion is the massive scale of biodiversity extinction currently underway and the widespread need to find radical and imaginative solutions to long-term conservation and sustainability. The UK situation is taken as an exemplar of principles and case studies. It is concluded that decision-making may be based on rational objective science but is itself a subjective process of choice which we often fail to admit. The idea of reconstructing nature and landscape is an attractive one. However, it is suggested that whilst some ideas to introduce species presently missing from UK ecosystems such as large herbivores or top carnivores are new, the general principle of landowner buy-in to create new, large-scale, dynamic, park-like ecological systems is not so novel. The great landscape parks of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries bear witness to this as do the acclimatization societies and the wild gardeners. Whilst the details and the objectives differ, the great landscape parks provide at least a model for private landowners potentially taking a lead in future biodiversity recovery.
