Urbanization and associated land-use change is driven by a combination of economic and social factors. The pace and structure of urbanization and land-use change is affected additionally by political considerations. In turn, urbanization and land-use change has numerous direct and indirect impacts on environmental ecology. Closing the loop, ecological considerations (e.g., water quality, changing wildlife populations, availability of green space, timber supply) come back and affect urban dwellers. This necessarily means that tackling problems that are thought to be essentially ecological cannot be divorced from economic/social/political considerations. Moreover, and critically, the extent to which solutions to a whole host of urban/rural interface issues protect or compromise landowners’ private property rights affects landowner incentives, with extraordinarily significant ecological consequences. Raise timber taxes directly or indirectly through removal of current-use provisions in the tax code and you increase a landowner’s incentive to sell out to developers. There are, of course, significant ecological consequences that result from switching land use from growing trees to growing houses.

To move forward productively and as harmoniously as possible between interest groups with different perspectives, there must be informed discussion of issues, concerns, and (too frequently missing from the discussion) opportunities created by land-use change along urban/rural interfaces. Informed discussion requires the ecologists to be talking with people interested in human dimensions. Historically (and now), this simply has not happened in any significant measure. If we have pressing ecological problems, then proposed solutions had better be economically viable/sustainable or they are politically dead on arrival virtually everywhere around the world. By the same token, pressing ecological problems may offer significant economic opportunities that heretofore have not been appreciated, in part because the two sides have not been talking with each other. For example, a recent World Bank/WWF study found very sizable water treatment cost savings to large cities that use forested watersheds as a source of clean water. Are there opportunities for landowners to identify, quantify, and market ecological services that urban dwellers value and that the landowners can provide more cheaply than treatment plants? What other opportunities might exist?

The overarching theme of our conference is linking human dimensions aspects of land-use change along urban/rural interfaces with ecological aspects of such change. We believe that such linkages offer the promise of new, powerful insights for understanding the forces that shape, and are shaped by, urbanization and land-use change and that offer more compelling understanding of the causes and consequences of urbanization-related policies.

We take a broad view of urban/rural interfaces, not just the physical interface between cities and agricultural, timber, or wild land. Land-use policies enacted by urban dwellers touch the lives of rural land owners, as well as those whose economic or private well-being depends, in part, on how that land is used. In turn, how rural land is used affects urban dwellers.