Opinion

Abstract

During the present chaotic transformation from an industrial to a global information society, the destabilizing forces driving the ecological crisis have accelerated and the rapidly growing unsustainable, fossil-energy-powered urban-industrial technosphere landscapes have expanded at the expense of solar-energy-powered natural and seminatural landscapes. A sustainability revolution is therefore urgently needed, requiring a shift from the fossil age to the solar age of a new world economy, coupled with more sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns. The sustainable future of viable multifunctional biosphere landscapes and their biological and cultural richness can only be ensured by a post-industrial symbiosis between nature and human society. To conserve and restore the rapidly vanishing and degrading Mediterranean biosphere landscapes, a mindset shift of scientists and professionals from narrow disciplinarity to transdisciplinarity is necessary, dealing with land-use planning and management in close cooperation with land users and stakeholders. Their highest biological, ecological, and cultural landscape ecodiversity can be attained only by maintaining their dynamic homeorhetic flow equilibrium, continuing or simulating all natural and anthropogenic processes. To prevent catastrophic wildfires, highly inflammable pine forests and dense shrub thickets should be converted by active fire and fuel management into floristically enriched open woodlands and multispecies, multilayered recreation forests.