Accounting for sustainability: challenges to landscape professionals in an increasingly unsustainable world

Global human population growth presents compelling challenges to todayʹs landscape professionals. In the final analysis, it is the worldʹs landscapes from which must be coaxed, at feasible cost and indefinitely into the future, the productivity to provide an acceptable quality of life for a large, rapidly growing, and increasingly demanding human population. Landscape professionals ought, thereby, to be on the front line in addressing this challenge. They are uniquely qualified to play a critically decisive role in achieving a timely and stably productive compromise between humans and their landscapes. They must provide urgently needed substance to the currently ill-defined concepts of sustainability, carrying capacity, human ecosystem productivity, and quality of life. Such definition is essential to effective management. They must, as well, develop an understanding of the principles of human ecosystem productivity in preparation for a much-needed leadership role in catalyzing the increased landscape productivity necessary to provide a very large population an acceptable quality of life on a sustained basis. Most critically, they must apply the tools of landscape planning to develop systems for monitoring human ecosystem productivity to determine progress toward sustainability as well as its costs. To be useful, this monitoring must occur at local jurisdictional levels where effective management is possible, yet standardized sufficiently that synoptic analyses are possible involving the many remote areas that may affect local sustainability.