TABLE OF CONTENTS Sustainable site design must include broad considerations of the environmental role of the site. The site exists as part of a larger landscape and ecosystem. Sustainable design must recognize and retain as many of the functional elements of a site as is possible.
The study of landscape ecology has made important contributions to our understanding of how development impacts the environment. Still a fairly young science, landscape ecology is concerned with the fragmentation of habitat, biological diversity, the design and management of the land resources, and sustainable development. Landscape ecology studies the cause-and-effect relationships between elements in the landscape. Having emerged as a distinct science only as recently as the 1960s or 1970s, it has done well to promote a recognition that the reductionist approach to science is inadequate to wholly describe the complexities of landscape ecosystems. Landscape ecologists also work closely with and promulgate the concept of the total human ecosystem that is, the understanding that humans, along with all of our activities and cultural complexities, are an integral part of the landscape. To attempt to describe or study the landscape without considering the influence of human activity upon it would be a pointless exercise. For these reasons the products of study in landscape ecology are substantially more than just flowcharts of energy and materials.
A reading of the underlying theory of landscape ecology reveals it to be a broadly interdisciplinary science. Ecologists, physicists, biologists, and geographers are as concerned with values and ethics as they...
