ABSTRACT
The countryside is an aggregation of landscapes. Countryside conservation is the care and protection of these landscapes to exploit the benefits they offer whilst maintaining the capacity of the resource to provide them. Agriculture and forestry have been the main systems of landscape exploitation; protected areas the main mechanisms of protection of the core resources. This is fine for so long as the agricultural and forestry landscapes in which protected areas are set are exploited at levels which help buffer and maintain them. This has been a feature of traditionally husbanded European landscapes, less so in other parts of the world, where land uses are more intensive and landcover types more polarised. Landscapes everywhere are now becoming more intensively used and protected areas more isolated, leading to a substantial reassessment of conservation policy and practice.
