It is more and more evident that our living system is completely
disturbed by human intrusion. Such intrusion affects the functioning of
entire systems in ways we do not yet fully understand. We use paradigms
such as the disturbance to cover large and deep gaps in our scienti?c
knowledge. Human ecology is an uncertain terrain for anthropologists,
geographers, and ecologists and rarely is expanded to include the social
and economic realms. The integration of different disciplines and the
application of their many paradigms to problems of environmental
complexity remains a distant goal despite the many efforts that have
been made to achieve it. Philosophical and semantic barriers are erected
when such integration is pursued by pioneering scientists. Recently,
evolutionary ecology has shown great interest in the spatial processes
well described by the emerging discipline of landscape ecology. But this
interest takes the form of pure curiosity or at worst, of skepticism
toward the real capacity of landscape ecology to contribute to the
advancement of ecological science. The past two centuries have been
characterized by huge changes occurring in the entire ecosphere. Global
changes are the effects of human intervention at a planetary scale, with
consequent degradation of the environment creating an e- logical debt
for future generations. On the other side of the issue, new technologies
have improved the welfare of billions of people and have given hope to
many other billions that they may also see such improvement in the near
future.
