The countryside provides a multiplicity of resources: its productive capacity, its landscapes and its wildlife. Few would doubt that the countryside plays a central role in many people's lives, although we may well disagree as to why it seems important or indeed quite what it means. This book is about the physical resources and environmental quality of rural areas. However, it is also about the way in which those qualities are determined, who benefits from them, how they are able to do so, and who misses out.

The dictionary tells us that countryside is a ‘side’ or a part of the country: ‘a tract of country having a kind of natural unity’ (Oxford English Dictionary). However, in practice the idea of the ‘countryside’ is socially constructed. While its definition may indicate assemblages of various plants and animals and topographical features, our appreciation of it embodies particular combinations of these attributes together with its personal, cultural and historical associations. To most of us, the term countryside conjures up ideas of various patterns of agriculture and types of landscape. It also implies something beyond these physical attributes, the human society that lives within it and perhaps is dependent on it, that has moulded the natural resources of an area, its history and its culture. We all have a subjective view of what this entails, perhaps drawing on idealised notions of a rural society or of our heritage. Others may see it in terms of the economic activity located there or in its views or its biodiversity. No single view is correct.

There are several words in this context that would cause us similar problems, such as ‘country’ (Williams, 1973), ‘nature’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998), ‘landscape’ (Cosgrove, 1985), ‘rural’ (Hoggart, 1990), or ‘ecosystem’ (Pickett and Cadenasso, 2002). The understandings of these words differ between people and alter through time.