The article begins explainig the relations between economy and environment and exploring the limitations of the clasic economic theory for the sustainable management of environmental goods and services. It stresses the insufficiency and inadequacy of the market mechanisms for this purpose, and the need of the intervention of the state to insure the correct distribution of environmental goods and services considering public interest and sustainability. Then it refers to the conception os natural resources and environment in the 1991 Constitution and to the role that it assignes to the state in their management and administration. It enters then to the subject of valuation of environmental goods and services and in the identification of the tools that the state has in order to administer them in accordance with the basic constitutional principles, in the search of a sustainable society. It ends by stating the need of changing of the dominant paradigm in order to introduce the concept of sustainability , changing the short term market econmy vision.