In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to issues of landscape change and the eco-cultural nature of the environment. Combined with the impacts and effects of cultural severance, the break between local people and their environmental resources, the cultural nature of landscape is now better understood. However, the implicit importance and significance for conservation of biodiversity, of heritage and consequently for activities such as tourism, are only just receiving wider recognition. The implications of widespread landscape abandonment, rural depopulation, urbanisation, and severance, are dramatic and sometimes stark, with wildfires raging, ecology often in free-fall, and local communities and their traditions displaced. 

A first step with all these landscapes is to recognise both the important sites and the critical issues. Then, appropriate protection and conservation must be determined and applied. Finally, there is the potential todevelop new and extended commons as part of a landscape approach to future conservation. However, the cultural past, together now with issues of cultural severance, present enormous challenges for the integration of this knowledge into visions of future sustainable landscapes. Not least of these challenges is the loss of indigenous cultural and traditional knowledge, without which, much future conservation action is jeopardised. This book is intended to raise awareness, to stimulate further discuss, debate and research, and to then turn dialogue into action.