ABSTRACT
As we approach the twenty-first century, the environmental concerns and values that began to take root in the 1960s have brought into sharp focus an acute awareness of the earth’s fragility as a natural system. We have begun to understand human beings as biological creatures immersed in vital ecological relationships within the biosphere; with the need to live within its limits, sharing the planet with non-human life. These perceptions are leading us to a view that there must be a transition from a society preoccupied with consumerism and exploitation, to one that gives priority to a more sustainable future. Notwithstanding the Bruntland Commission’s essentially homocentric (and perhaps necessary) interpretation of sustainability as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own’,1 there is the ultimate need for an ethic that recognizes the interdependence of all life forms and the maintenance of biological diversity. Sustainability, therefore, becomes everyone’s concern. When we consider a world population projected to be 10 billion by the year 2025, 4.5 billion people in developing countries estimated to be living in urban areas by the end of the century, and the massive impacts of human activities on world ecosystems, then it is clear that the links between nature, cities and sustainability have profound implications for survival. McHarg, Lewis and others concerned with bringing together nature and human habitat, have shown eloquently that the processes that shape the land and the limitless complexity of life forms that have evolved over evolutionary time, provide the indispensable basis for shaping human settlements. The dependence of one life process on another, the interconnected development of living and physical processes of earth, climate, water, plants and animals, the continuous transformation and recycling of living and non-living materials, these are the elements of the self-perpetuating biosphere that sustain life on earth and which give rise to the physical landscape. They become central determinants that shape all human activities on the land.
