Ecology and environmental planning

Abstract

In its broadest sense environmental planning is an attempt to balance and harmonise the various enterprises, which man, for his own benefit, has superimposed on natural environments. Although these enterprises are often designed to complement one another, possibilities for conflict and imbalance can arise at many levels. On the global scale, some observers fear that our present commitment to industrial growth will lead to increasing environmental damage and resource depletion, and result eventually in the collapse of society (Meadows, et al., 1972; Goldsmith et al., 1972). Economists see an equal danger in the incomplete industrial growth characteristic of many developing countries. They point out that industrialisation at this level frequently creates problems of rural depopulation and loss of food production, without sufficiently increasing prosperity to allow food supplies to be purchased from other countries (Mountjoy, 1975). Whatever the validity of these somewhat pessimistic assessments, and certainly there are some dissenting voices (Maddox, 1972), they are not the subject of this book. Here it is our intention to concentrate on the prospects of successfully integrating different enterprises at the more restricted, regional level.