Landscapes’ functions and human health: incidence of environmental changes

Landscape functions and antrophical needs. In the multiplicity of landscape functions and from its complexity we can derive functions potentially therapeutic or, anyway, fundamental for human well-being. To do this it is necessary start again from real human needs, which aren’t only the physical or material ones, which can be satisfied by technological world, but which concern to mind and ethic, the only instrument which allow us to take decisions stamped to human species conservation and not human-being conservation in despite of community.The first step is to untie the knot “I do the damage then I repair it” which help only to increase energetic needs which are introduced into the system and determine important changes on the environment till it won’t be suitable for human life on the Earth. Multifunctionality and artificialisation. It is really important to respect the complex landscape features also working on its therapeutic functions, in order not to specialize in a too monofunctional way parts of territory too wide and to respect original features of the places, the limiting factors, their evolutionary potentialities, also during transformation processes. This is what keeps alive a landscape, on the contrary, a plan finalised towards therapy may have two effects: the resulting landscape will lose a big part of its efficacy, in other words we replace a functional autoregenerating unit with a high energetic consume unit which has nothing to do with the place’s potentialities. In this case we do nothing different from the actions which take to artificial environment (Figure 7). This second approach can’t solve the initial paradox, but it exalts it. It is thus necessary think again the cities as complex organisms constituted by different and interactive parts, in which natural functions enter and therapeutic gardens constitute tesseras of an healthy well-constructed mosaic which includes parts expressly finalised to therapeutic functions towards some pathologies.Awareness and Nature. But there is an aspect particularly critical: the detaching of “urban metropolitan animal” by the nature, put him away from its conscience, from processes which are at the base of food production, of the food chain, of the processes which happen without human intervention and problem’s awareness. What we don’t know is generally fear: the tendency is to keep at distance or to escape. Urban generations which form themselves without knowing the nature, without set up an also affective relationship with it and with the land, won’t be able to feel responsible for the environment when will be their turn to make decisions which interact with the environment. A quote which synthetize very well what is written: “What does a condor extinction mean for a children who never saw a wren?” (the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle). Nature is out the cities, but the cities are government places where ideas born and decisions are made about the destinies of far places. How can we decide reasonably about objects and, above all,unknown processes? So, contact with nature doesn’t have the only meaning to contribute to psycho-physical well-being of the human being or some communities. It has a wider meaning of giving base for a sustainable management of Earth system in the following years, so it may guarantee the survival in environments suitable for life of human beings, besides of the other animal and vegetal species which have always constituted the environment which allowed the evolution of human species itself. A change of trend seems unpostponable: care for health, to a deeper and complete health may be the incipit for a new cycle. A new environmental accounting, which insert indicatives of use of the metropolitan areas which count direct, indirect and differed in time costs of the rising infrastructures, savings due to favourable environments, access to services, to places suitability, to human well-being.