Rural Planning from an Environmental Systems Perspective

This book will focus on planning at a relatively large scale of space and time. It will focus on rural areas, which are changing so rapidly globally. It is based on the principle that if we have an adequate context to organize information and we bring the appropriate information to the table, the success of planning will be enhanced and the degree of controversy reduced. The context will be that of systems analysis in which the earth is treated as a mechanical model, which acts in predictable ways under the laws and principles of the natural and social sciences. This approach is a way to begin the planning process; it identifies gaps in knowledge and areas of conflict.

The decision-making processes involved in rural planning require historical, contemporaneous, and predictive information on the state of the natural environment. Rural planners have in the past made extensive use of both aerial photography and topographic maps to provide such perspectives. Since 1972, rural planners have also had access to images taken from space. The photo interpretation and conventional map-reading skills employed in the analysis of these data continue to play an important role in rural planning.

Human communities develop their activities in an environment or system that is the result of the interaction of physical, biological, and anthropological elements throughout history in the same geographical space.

There may be no greater constraint on the biota and human societies of a region than climate. Climate can be viewed as a resource, offering immense benefits, but it also can produce episodic “events” that are hazardous to living things. Along with the topography (Chapter 3), it provides the foundation on which all land-water processes take place.

The hydrological cycle is the movement of water from the atmosphere, through the soils and rocks, into river channels and to the sea. An important part of this cycle is the atmosphere and that is dealt with by Meentemeyer in Chapter 4 of this book. In this chapter we concentrate on water in the vegetation canopy, in the soil, as groundwater, and in rivers.

Soils support terrestrial ecosystems and human life. They largely determine the agricultural capacity of the land in spite of the increasing artificial inputs in cropping systems.

Throughout the world it is now generally realized that pressure is increasing on the rural environment from factors such as pollution, agriculture, and urbanization. Many countryside habitats that were formerly widespread are now becoming scarce, as widely recognized by conservation organizations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the British Trust for Nature Conservation. These voluntary organizations, in addition to government agencies, reflect an international consensus that it is necessary to maintain and enhance habitats for scientific, aesthetic, genetic, and cultural reasons.

Life of plants and animals is based on a constant flux of energy. This input of energy is used in me-tabolism, growth, and reproduction. From this perspective, individuals can be regarded as complex metabolic machines that process energy and materials. Green plants, which account for more than 99 percent of the total biomass present in the planet, fix a fraction of the electromagnetic solar radiation. This energy is stored in organic compounds of very high energy which, in turn, are the basis of the networks that maintain life on earth.

In the previous chapter, the process of production was presented as a universal property of vegetation, which provides the organic energy transformations that operate the living part of the biosphere. The discussion not only described the physiological actions that lead to the production that humans or other animals can use but also describes the regional patterns of production and then, in the final section, applies this information to forest systems. This is a logical place to begin because forest systems dominate the earth, considering the gradient of the boreal, temperate and tropical forest, with variants such as the Mediterranean, Pacific coast coniferous, and other forest types that make up the world biomes. Grasslands, tundra, and deserts represent other biomes that are unforested and have lower rates of production because of environmental limitations.

Rural areas have traditionally been identified with agrarian zones, the primary reasons being that rural societies have until recently been mostly agrarian and also the perception that these spaces and the way of life there was obviously different from urban life and thus visually recognizable as the “country” (Clout, 1972).

The diversification of rural areas has resulted in a transformation of policies and assignments of public and private training development agents. The following pages are the result of personal experience as a trainer in the CIHEAM Institutes, which is a good observatory from which to detect the transformation of Mediterranean regions through the concerns of students of many nationalities.

All human activity takes place within a context shaped by certain relationships between society and the biophysical environment, or the rest of nature. This interaction is of particular importance in the case of agriculture, an activity that “artificializes” the environment through the management of natural resources. Development necessarily entails the transformation of these relationships. The interaction between man and nature has evolved gradually over time, and above all in response to the degree of development attained. This, in turn, has given rise to different forms of agriculture, ranging from traditional forms (based essentially on animal or live energy) to intensive or modern forms (involving high fossil-fuel consumption), by way of today’s ecological or low-input forms (using environment-friendly technology). These and other, intermediate forms of agriculture correspond to different models and aims of development throughout history, each of which assigns to agriculture a different role. This chapter will provide a broad context for rural planning from an economic perspective. The planner needs to understand and apply this perspective in order to suggest viable and sustainable alternatives.

Natural resources are a pervasive part of any economy and they pose particular problems for any society trying to plan their use. By natural resources we mean all resources that are produced by very long, slow geological processes which are not easily reproduced by human activity. Major natural resources in-dude land, water, and the earth’s atmosphere. They are natural resources in the sense that they cannot be reproduced and that their management has profound effects on the welfare of whole populations. Because of their special characteristics they are particularly difficult to allocate to appropriate uses through unfettered markets, and planning and policy systems have evolved in developed countries in an attempt to improve their use. In this chapter we review the economic underpinning of resource management, as practised through the planning system.

The absence of externalities is one of the conditions required for competitive markets to achieve efficient resource allocations. Externalities occur in situations where the activities of one economic agent affect or spill over into the technology, consumption set, or preferences of another agent. Externalities, which may be positive (in that case, they have beneficial external effects) or negative (in that case, they have adverse external effects), are one example of market failures. They mainly arise from the fact that environmental goods and services often have no market. The environment is considered as a free resource, which is zero priced and therefore overused. When interaction between private agents does not result in an efficient resource allocation, government intervention is required in order to internalize external effects. Nevertheless, even in the absence of market failure, government intervention may also be justified mainly for equity or national industry protection reasons. This chapter addresses only the problem of externalities and environmental policy strategies, emphasizing those relevant for agriculture activities and resources.

Physical planning with an ecological basis appears in response to the need of solving conflicts arising from land use. It is a systematic analysis of land suitability and alternatives of use, which are the basis for the selection of the best choices to put into practice. The best choices are to be understood as those fulfilling social needs in the present, always bearing in mind that the future of new generations is not to be jeopardized.

For decades, the analytic approach has been dominant for the study of many processes. This approach takes into account the parts of the process with many details and then assembles the parts into a plan or answers according to a theory or a blueprint. This is the engineer’s method, and most scientists and planners rely on it. It is useful when we are building a house or a bridge. It is not useful when we are dealing with natural systems for which there is no theory, no blueprint, not even a complete list of parts. In this case, we need another approach that takes the problem as a whole. Hence, in recent decades many systems approaches have been developed (Forrester, 1969 Forrester, 1971;Patten, 1972;Holling, 1978;Odum, 1983) to overcome this situation. A systems approach prefers a more holistic, “global,” or top-down view of the phenomena, even at the cost of losing details.

Rural planning is an instrument through which human activities are linked to the rural area. It is a projection in space and time of the social, cultural, environmental, and economic policies of a society. Social and economic development of the population in the rural areas is continually taking place, which leads to changes in use of the soil and development of new activities. These changes create a conflict for the managers of the territory who have to choose between the “natural uses” and the perceived objectives or needs of landowners, farmers, town planners, environmentalists, and so on (Haber, 1990). For it to be useful, all planning must envisage conflicts of use and act as a regulating mechanism of the system, capable of anticipating changes (Margalef, 1974). Therefore, for planning we have to analyse the problems with an integrated approach, coordinating the activities involved in all the sectors: agriculture, forestry, hydrology, conservation, industry, services, and so on (Bertrand, 1978;Grossmann, 1991).