The Material Base of Sustainable Development—The Landscape

The concept of the sustainable development requires an exact formulation of the main object of our interest—the landscape—in the sphere of science, politics, decision-making, planning and projecting. The different approaches to the landscape offer different possibilities for their implementation in legislation and real planning processes. The decisive step is the functional integration of landscape-ecological knowledge into existing management and planning processes. With simplification we can state that we need to integrate two groups of knowledge: the first and initial is the definition what actually is to be planned and managed. This is the “demand” from humans. The second one is the knowledge of the landscape, the landscape “offer, supply”. The confrontation of these two groups should lead to a process referred to as the ecologization of the landscape management. The landscape is a comprehensive integrated spatial-material entity—the environment for the life of people and other organisms rather than just its separate components. At the same time it is the only space which we must all fit into. So, the landscape resources are used for different purposes for different activities that compete with each other and they cause mutual conflicts. Relevant environmental-political documents starting with Agenda 21 issued on Rio Summit 92, namely the Chapter 10 entitled “Integrated approach to the management of land resources” justified the need for the integrated landscape management as a major instrument of sustainable development. All above-mentioned principles can be realized if the landscape is understood systematically, as a geosystem. This understanding has become the base for the legally defined and nowadays routine planning tools—the landscape-ecological planning LANDEP and projecting the territorial system of ecological stability TSES—as transmitters of the landscape-ecological knowledge into the spatial planning processes.