Two needs often confront the environmental management: the first is a search for
ways of integrating environmental and socio-economic planning, and the second is to
define and bound areas (e.g. ecosystems) of interest and value to managers and planners.
Sometimes ecosystem boundaries coincide with clear physical features (e.g. an
island or a forest), but often they are less well delineated. Gonzalez (1996) noted the
need to define an ecosystem in 3-D, not just mapping area, but also establishing its ‘top’
and ‘bottom’. The quest is for an eco-socio-economic planning unit, which is stable,
clearly defined and likely to support sustainable development. Some comprehensive or
integrated regional approaches evolved as early as the 1930s and 1940s and used units such as river basins. Interest was renewed in the 1970s with attempts to marry ecological
concern with regional planning and policy making (McHarg, 1969; Isard, 1972;
Nijkamp, 1980). Slocombe (1993) was optimistic that the ecosystem concept might offer
a route to integrating environmental management and development planning that would
lead to sustainable development; Mitchell (1997: 51) was less enthusiastic, and felt that
basic concepts of ecosystem diversity and stability did not adequately describe complex
reality: ecosystems were inherently complex, there were unlikely to be simple answers,
and environmental managers must accept that they could not just manage ecosystems,
but that they were managing human interactions with them.