Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26

What is holistic landscape ecology? A conceptual introduction

Zev Naveh
Faculty of Agricultural Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32 000, Israel

Abstract

To meet the challenges of the emerging information-rich society, landscape ecology must become a holistic problem-
solving oriented science by joining the transdisciplinary scienti®c revolution with a paradigm shift from conventional
reductionistic and mechanistic approaches to holistic and organismic approaches of wholeness, connectedness and ordered
complexity. Its central holistic concept is the Total Human Ecosystem as the highest level of co-evolutionary complexity in the
global ecological hierarchy, with solar energy powered biosphere and fossil energy powered technosphere landscapes as its
concrete systems. Landscape ecology could contribute to their structural and functional integration into a coherent sustainable
ecosphere and thereby to the establishment of a sustainable balance between attractive and productive biosphere landscapes
and healthy and livable technosphere landscapes for this and future generation. By utilizing new insights in self-organization
of autopioetic systems and their cross-catalytic networks in the Total Human Ecosystem for synergistic bene®ts of the people,
their economy and landscapes, such holistic landscape ecology together with other mission-driven transdisciplinary
environmental sciences could serve as a catalyst for the urgently needed post-industrial symbiosis between nature and human
society. This would ensure also their further biological and cultural evolution. # 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved.

Keywords: Landscape ecology: holism; Systems approach; Transdisciplinarity; Information society

1. Introduction ing sustainable, healthy, productive and attractive

Many threatening syndromes indicate that at this
critical transitional stage from the industrial to the
post-industrial global information age, humanity has
reached a crucial turning point in its relationship with
nature. Laszlo (1994), the world-renown systems
planner and philosopher, has corroborated this with
many convincing facts. He concludes that society is
faced with the choice between further biological and
cultural evolution of life on Earth or further degrada-
tion and ultimate extinction. Therefore, the behavior
of human society will determine also the evolutionary
trajectory of the tangible land- and seascapes in which
these crucial processes are taking place.
The aim of this conceptual introduction is to show
that to face the challenges of safeguarding and creat-
landscapes for the next millennium, landscape ecol-
ogy needs a much broader holistic and future-oriented
conception with clearer de®nitions of its theoretical
and practical aims than those presented in the recent
`International Association of Landscape Ecology Mis-
sion Statement' (IALE Mission, 1998), discussed in
the editorial introduction of this volume.
2. The holistic foundations of landscape ecology in
Europe
As we have described in more detail (Naveh and
Lieberman, 1994), the foundations for a holistic con-
ception of landscape ecology were laid in the densely
populated industrial countries in Central and East

0169-2046/00/$20.00 # 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

PII: S 0 1 6 9 - 2 0 4 6 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 7 7 - 3
8 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
Europe after World War II by the `fathers' of land-
scape ecology (Troll, 1939; Neef, 1956). Holistic
methods of landscape planning and management were
developed and widely applied, especially in the former
Czechoslovakia (Ruzika and Miklos, 1982) and the
present Slovakia (Ruzicka, 1998), as well as in Ger-
many (Haber, 1990; Schaller, 1994), Denmark (Brandt
and Agger, 1984) and the Netherlands (Van der
Maarel, 1977). Zonneveld (1982), the ®rst president
of the IALE, stated at its founding congress that in his
opinion, ``landscape ecology should be regarded both
as a formal Bio-Geo- and Human science and as a
holistic approach, attitude, and state of mind.'' This
holistic approach has been adopted in several recent
monographs and textbooks on landscape ecology
(Pedroli, 1989; Leser, 1991; Bastian and Schreiber,
1994; Pignatti, 1994; Zonneveld, 1995; Farina, 1998).
Most recently, Van Mansvelt and van der Lubbe
(1999) provided a comprehensive example of a holis-
tic assessment of sustainable management of rural
landscapes with special reference to organic farming.
The importance of this text for the education of a new
generation of landscape ecologists, who should also
serve as `integrators' in interdisciplinary projects, has
been discussed elsewhere (Naveh, 1995a). The con-
tributions to this special issue bear evidence that
holistic landscape ecology is practiced widely to ®nd
the solutions of a broad range of pressing problems in
landscape research, planning and management.
3. The post-modern scienti®c revolution and its
paradigm shift from parts to wholes
The true meaning of contemporary holistic land-
scape ecology can be fully comprehended only in the
broader context of the recent post-modern `scienti®c
revolution'. According to Kuhn (1970), this revolution
is initiated when new paradigms of conceptual
schemes gradually replace those of conventional
and well-established paradigms of the so-called `nor-
mal science'. Such a scienti®c revolution has occurred
in the last 20±30 years with the emergence of the new
®eld of what could be called `complexity science'. It
has been enabled by the major paradigm shift from
parts to wholes, leading from entirely reductionistic
and mechanistic toward more holistic and organismic
approaches. The result was a rejection of dissection,
fragmentation and analysis of wholes into smaller and
smaller particles, towards integration, connectedness
synthesis, and complementation. It replaced the blind
reliance on exclusively linear and deterministic pro-
cesses with non-linear, cybernetic and chaotic pro-
cesses based on systems thinking of complexity,
networks and hierarchic order. It turned from a belief
in the indisputable objectivity and certainty of the
scienti®c truth towards the recognition of the limits of
scienti®c knowledge, to the recognition of human
wisdom and traditional common sense, to the need
for a contextual view of reality, and the need to deal
with uncertainties. And last, but not least, it led from
mono- and multi-disciplinarity to inter-and transdis-
ciplinarity. This holistic paradigm shift is already
changing the science and practice of resource manage-
ment (Holling et al., 1998). It is therefore high time
that it should also be adopted in landscape ecology
research, practice and education.
Bohm (1980), the world-renowned theoretical phy-
sicist and holistic science philosopher, whom Einstein
recognized as his `intellectual successor', lucidly
analyzed the deeply ingrained roots of our tendency
to fragment and take apart what is whole and one in
reality. Unfortunately, the mechanistic modern world-
view and disastrous intellectual, professional, aca-
demic and institutional fragmentation had also
become pervasive among those dealing with environ-
mental problems. He claimed therefore that it might
not be easy to overcome the rigid conditioning of the
tacit infrastructure of modern scienti®c thought. This
has already led to a fragmentation in science and to a
fundamental breakdown in communication between
areas, which, according to this conventional disci-
pline-oriented academic education, have been consid-
ered to be mutually irrelevant.
The acceptance of these innovative scienti®c devel-
opments may also be hampered in landscape ecology
due to the tendency of many scientists to cling rigidly
to familiar ideas of order Ð in the words of Bohm
(1980), ``to maintain a habitual sense of control and
security, and not to brake their old patterns of thought,
and blocking the mind from engaging in creative free
play.'' This is especially true for those paradigms
grounded in a narrow reductionistic, mechanistic
and positivistic perception of science, while ignoring
the broader cultural, psychological and socio-eco-
nomic issues which encompass landscape ecology.
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
The development of a transdisciplinary conception of
landscape ecology will require innovative and non-
conventional `post-modern' approaches to scienti®c
knowledge, order and creativity, which I will refer to
below.
It is encouraging to realize that we can observe such
signi®cant transdisciplinary scienti®c breakthroughs
in related ®elds, thanks to the emergence of ecological
economics, ecological anthropology and social ecol-
ogy, as well as ecopsychology, and further develop-
ments in all realms of human endeavor. These
developments have been recently presented by Spret-
nak (1999) as an important part of `ecological post-
modernism'.
4. Some major systems premises for a holistic
conception of landscape ecology
In our book on landscape ecology (Naveh and
Lieberman, 1994), and further developed in the con-
text of landscapes conservation and restoration
(Naveh, 1990, 1995b, 1998a, b), we attempted to
provide an overarching framework for a holistic con-
ception of landscape ecology and its theoretical and
practical implications. These concepts were forma-
lized in terms of a transdisciplinary systems approach
and its recent insights in organized complexity, which
are closely related to the self-organizing and self-
regulating capacities and to co-evolutionary processes
in nature and in human societies. They have been
derived chie¯y from the recognition of dynamic and
unstable systems or `dissipative structures' in which
order and disorder arise in intimate relations. As Ilya
Prigogine (1980) has shown, their states of non-equi-
librium, which seem chaotic, move farther from equi-
librium, dissipating energy and entropy, until ®nally
new patterns of coherent events, order and information
emerge and a new metastable equilibrium is estab-
lished. This new `evolutionary literacy' is essential for
a full comprehension of the dynamic changes our
landscapes are undergoing presently as part of the
cultural evolution of society.
It is of special relevance for coping successfully
with the challenges facing landscape ecology at this
crucial turning point from the industrial to the global,
post-modern information-rich society. For a most
recent lucid, non-formal synthesis of these innovative
9
systems paradigms the reader is referred to Capra
(1997). Here I can present only a brief summary of
the most relevant holistic premises for the recognition
of landscapes as concrete, mixed natural and cultural
medium-number systems of our Total Human Eco-
system that integrates humans and their total environ-
ment.
4.1. General systems and hierarchy theory as the
conceptual and methodological basis for holistic
landscape ecology
Under the in¯uence of holistic, organismic biolo-
gists, Gestalt psychologists and theoretical ecologists,
Bertalanffy (1968), the conceiver of general systems
theory (GST), hoped to create a uni®ed scienti®c
theory of integrative systems thinking. GST should
provide a transdisciplinary view of the world that
integrates and links cultural and ideological barriers,
quantitative and normative approaches, and qualita-
tive and descriptive approaches by cutting across
narrowly de®ned borders separated in traditional
scienti®c disciplines (Grinker, 1976). Although this
goal was never reached, GST opened the way for the
above-mentioned further development of contempor-
ary concepts of ordered wholeness and complexity,
and their fusion into an overarching systems meta-
theory (a theory above all discipline-oriented the-
ories). One of its greatest merits lies in helping to
overcome academic and professional barriers not only
between the `cultures' of science and humanities, but
also between these and the techno-economical and
political `cultures' in which decision-making in actual
land uses are carried out. This is also of great rele-
vance for the transdisciplinary direction that landscape
ecology needs to follow.
As shown in Fig. 1, the GST systems approach had
far-reaching implications on diverse scienti®c ®elds.
The system inspired the development of a broad
spectrum of pure and applied sciences, including those
concerned with environmental problems, and espe-
cially the holistic branch of ecosystem ecology pre-
sented by Eugene Odum. Like holistic landscape
ecology, all these new systems sciences have bene®ted
greatly in their recent development from the advances
in computerized systems modeling and simulation.
In a most general sense, systems can be viewed as
a set (or units) of elements in a particular state,
10 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26

Fig. 1. General systems theory and its out-branching into different strands of systems scholarship and thinking with some key researchers
(after Ison et al., 1997).
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
connected by relations that are closer than those with
their environment, by being coherently organized
around a common purpose. The set of relations among
these elements and among their states constitutes the
structure of the system. Due to these relations, a
system is always more than the sum of its elements,
thereby becoming an entirely new entity as an ordered
whole or `Gestalt system'. As in an organism, all parts
are internally related to each other by the general state
of the whole. Gestalt systems can be abstract, such as a
melody, a symphony, or a poem, which are more than
their individual notes and words of which they are
composed, or concrete and natural, such as a forest or
lake, or human-made systems, such as a watch, which
becomes more than its wheels and screws that function
together to measure time.
Eminent biologist (Weiss, 1969, pp. 10±11) formu-
lated this holistic notion of systems in a groundbreak-
ing symposium `Beyond Reductionism' as follows:
`When people use the phrase ``The whole is more than
the sum of its parts''' the term `more' is often inter-
preted as an algebraic term referring to numbers.
However, a living cell certainly does not have more
content, mass or volume than is constituted by the
aggregate mass of molecules, which it comprises. . .
The `more' in the above tenet does not at all refer to
any measurable quantity in the observed systems
themselves; it refers solely to the necessity for the
observer to supplement the sum of statements that can
be made about the separate parts by any such addi-
tional statements as will be needed to describe the
collective behavior of the parts, when in an organized
group. In carrying out this upgrading process, he is in
effect doing no more than restoring information con-
tent that has been lost on the way down in the
progressive analysis of the unitary universe into
abstracted elements.
``The information about the whole, about the col-
lective, is larger than the sum of information about its
parts, and therefore the state of the whole must be
known to understand the collective of the parts.''
Weiss (1969) further claimed that ``there is no
phenomena in a living system that is not molecular,
but there is none that is only molecular, either. It is one
thing not to see the forest for the trees, bur then to go
on to deny the reality of the forest is a more serious
matter; for it is not just a case of myopia, but one of
self-in¯icted blindness.'' (For further discussion of the
11
important rigorous formulations of these holistic para-
digms see Naveh and Lieberman, 1994).
This holistic systems view of `ordered wholeness'
differs from the reductionistic and mechanistic view of
nature that still dominates most of the natural sciences
including a large part of ecology. The French math-
ematician Rene Descartes formalized this approach in
the seventeenth century. Thereby complex phenomena
are dissected and analyzed through reduction, isola-
tion and fragmentation into their elementary parts.
According to the mechanistic notion, introduced in the
same century by the English physician Isaac Newton,
these fragments do not grow organically as parts of the
whole, but like parts in a machine. They are basically
external to each other and interact mechanically by
forces that do not deeply affect their inner nature. We
can therefore not expect that by putting them together
again conceptually or experimentally, the whole and
its complex organizationally function and structure
will emerge.
In his important book on ecosystem theories (Joer-
gensen, 1997, p. 14) has expressed forcefully the need
for a new holistic ecology: ``We are facing complex
global problems which cannot be analyzed, explained
or predicted without a new holistic science that is able
to deal with phenomena as complex as multivariate
global changes. . . We are confronted with a need for a
new science, which can deal with irreducible systems
as ecosystems or the entire ecosphere systems that
cannot be reduced to simple relationships as in
mechanical physics.'' This statement is certainly even
applicable for landscape ecology, dealing with these
ecosphere systems in an even more holistic way than
Joergensen with ecosystems in his study, in which the
cultural-human aspects were not considered at all.
The holistic implications of the systems approach
have often been criticized as being a naive and unrea-
listic fantasy. Indeed, like any scienti®c concept, a
system is a construct of our mind. This is contrary to
the above-mentioned Cartesian science paradigm, by
which scienti®c descriptions are believed to be inde-
pendent of the human observer. According to Des-
cartes, the understanding of nature and realization of
certainty are achieved ®rst by separation from the
natural world, then by its precise measurement. This
has lead to a utilitarian criterion of truth, and a
reduction of the `object' of knowledge to an instru-
mental relation or quanti®able value which has been
12 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
further developed into a statistical technique (Macau-
ley, 1997). In modern reductionistic scienti®c meth-
odologies (including those adopted by certain
landscape ecologists), mechanistic models of how
the world works are constructed and then only data
that would ®t the model are perceived. For these only
what can be measured, counted and quanti®ed through
analytical procedures has any scienti®c meaning.
However, according to Frank Egler, one of the ®rst
holistic ecologists to recognize the pitfalls of these
approaches, ``not every thing which can be counted,
counts, but there are many things that cannot be
counted, which count.''
Descartes, devised a method of impersonal know-
ing, which has been adopted by the reductionistic
paradigm of modern science. This was, in the words
of Spretnak (1999) in the above-mentioned book
``impeccably objective because it was untainted by
the dynamic faculties of mind, depending instead on a
machinelike regulation of thought.'' On the other
hand, the systems paradigm implies that understand-
ing the process of knowing Ð the epistemology Ð
must be included in the description of natural phe-
nomena. Thereby, the systems view has been devel-
oped as a perceptional and scienti®c window through
which we are able to look at complex ecological
phenomena in a realistic way within the observed
context. This `contextual window view' is of greatest
relevance for our systems perceptions of landscapes.
This is demonstrated in Fig. 2, which depicts the
confrontation between holistic and reductionistic
landscape perceptions. As long as ®xation on the past
is part of the care and respect for established values of
nature and culture, this deserves careful consideration
in any land use conservation decision. On the other
hand, as pointed out by Van Mansvelt and van der
Lubbe (1999), ruthless exploitation of irreplaceable
values and resources of nature and culture, in favor of
some larger or smaller industrial or ®nancial interest
groups, can be seen as the ego-centered bias for
derailed progress.
The Cartesian paradigm has lead not only to the
belief in the objectivity of scienti®c knowledge, but
also to its certainty. However, realizing that we can
never reach a full understanding and that we will never
be able to explain the myriad of all subtle intercon-
nected natural phenomena, systems scientists have
recognized that these windows can only open vistas
for approximate understanding within the relevant
context. Therefore, we have to learn to deal with
uncertainties and fuzziness. Today powerful mathe-
matical tools, based on `fuzzy logic' and `fuzzy sets'
enable us to deal with approximate knowledge in a
quantitative way. Li (1996) rightly emphasized the
value of fuzzy logic facing the uncertainties of ecol-
ogy. These are greatest when we deal with human-
in¯uenced and modi®ed landscapes. As explained in
more detail (Naveh, 1998a), promising beginnings for
the application of fuzzy sets in landscape-ecological
studies (Burrough et al., 1992; Syrbe, 1966; Stein-
hardt, 1998) have not yet been recognized widely by
landscape ecologists. Kosko (1999), one of the leading
fuzzy systems scientists and the governor of the
International Neural Network Society, has presented
the fascinating story of the recent widening transdis-
ciplinary scope of the applications of `fuzz' (this is the
brief term used now) not only in technology, but in all
®elds of natural and human sciences, politics and
culture.
GST is closely related to hierarchy theory. Accord-
ing to Laszlo (1972) its basic paradigm is the view of a
hierarchical organization of nature with ordered
wholes of multileveled strati®ed open systems, ran-
ging from subatomic quarks as the smallest natural
entities, to galaxy clusters as the largest. In this natural
systems hierarchical organization, each higher level
acquires newly emerging qualities and is therefore
more complex than its lower subsystems. Higher
levels thus organize the levels below and display
`lower frequency behavior'. It is functionally and
spatially more constant over time and thereby also
serves as the context of the lower level. At the same
time, the function of each system is given by its lower
subsystem and the purpose by its supersystem.
An important contribution to hierarchy theory with
great signi®cance for a systems approach to landscape
ecology was made by Koestler (1969) in a symposium
that became a cornerstone for holistic approaches to
biology. He created the term `Holon', as a composition
of the Greek: holosˆwhole‡protonˆpart) for the
recognition of the dichotomic Janus-faced nature of
each hierarchical level being both part and whole. This
means that each system is at the same time both a self-
contained whole to its subordinated subsystems and a
dependent part of its supersystem. Thus, depending on
our point of view, these holons function as either parts
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26 13

Fig. 2. Polarization within society (horizontal) and the relation to a narrow or broad perspective (after Van Mansvelt and van der Lubbe,
1999).

or wholes. Koestler (1969) claimed that, contrary to ecological and social organization. What we ®nd
our deeply ingrained habit of thought, neither parts nor instead are intermediate structures on a series of levels
wholes in this absolute sense exist, and that this is true of ascending complexity. The structure and behavior
not only in the domain of living organisms but also in of an organism, as well as of any other hierarchically
14 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
structured ordered whole, cannot be explained by
reduction and dissection into its elementary parts,
but can be dissected into branches of holons. He
suggested the term `Holarchy' for the Holon hierarchy
of nature. In his opinion, the value of the Holon
concept lies in bridging the missing link between
atomism and holism.
4.2. Total Human Ecosystems as the highest level of
the global ecological hierarchy with landscapes as its
concrete systems
According to conventional ecological conception,
natural ecosystems are considered to be the highest
organization level of ecological hierarchy, above
organisms, populations and communities (O'Neill
et al., 1987). This is indicative for the dominating
perception of a hierarchical order of nature, viewing
humans merely as external factors to ecosystems
(Pomeroy and Alberts, 1988) and disregarding the
close links between natural and social systems, which
create therefore their own social hierarchies. This is, in
fact, part of the modern worldview, ``insisting on a
radical discontinuity between humans and the rest of
the natural world, and apart from the larger unfolding
story of the Earth'' (Spretnak, 1999).
The eminent ecologist, Frank Egler (Egler, 1964,
1970), was one of the ®rst to recognize the need for a
more holistic view of the complementary role of
humans as an integral part of the global ecological
hierarchy. He suggested an additional integration
level, which he called the `Total Human Ecosystem'
(THE), above natural ecosystems. He stressed the
crucial importance for future global survival through
recognition of the newly emerging qualities of com-
plexity and organization by integration of man-and-
its-total-environment, ``forming one single whole in
nature.'' He urged the creation of an innovative inter-
disciplinary `Human Ecosystem Science' to ensure the
highest life quality on earth, and regarded Rachel
Carson's `Silent Spring' (Carson, 1962) as the ®rst
human ecosystem study that alerted humanity to the
danger of pesticides. As a follow-up, Egler (1964)
carried out a pioneer study on the communication of
knowledge on pesticides effects through the social
THE units in the USA. He showed how the `ecological
web of life' (the central metaphor used by Carson) has
been endangered through the improper ¯ow of infor-
mation on pesticides, chie¯y due to `silent scientists'
including ecologists.
According to Pimentel (1992), all humanly mod-
i®ed and used cultural semi-natural and agricultural
landscapes comprise about 95% of the total open
ecosphere landscape area. Even the few remaining
natural and nearly natural landscapes are affected
directly and indirectly by human activity and, unfor-
tunately, are shrinking and vanishing rapidly. Their
fate Ð like that of all other land- and seascapes on
earth Ð depends almost solely on the decisions and
actions of human society.
Therefore, a realistic conceptualization of the pre-
sent global ecological hierarchy has to take into
account that there are almost no natural ecosystems
left on the earth. Vitousek et al. (1997) provide further
proof of human domination of earth ecosystems by
land transformation, global biochemical changes and
biotic additions and losses. In their conclusions
(p. 499) they stated: ``Human dominance of earth
means that we cannot escape responsibility for mana-
ging the planet. Our activities are causing rapid, novel,
and substantial changes of Earth' ecosystems. Main-
taining populations, species, and ecosystems in the
face of those changes, and maintaining the ¯ow of
goods and services will require active management for
the foreseeable future. There is no clearer illustration
of the extend of human dominance that the fact that
maintaining the diversity of `wild' species and the
function of `wild' ecosystems will require increasing
human involvement.''
Consequently, we have to include humans and their
cultural, social, and economic dimensions as an inte-
gral part of this global ecological hierarchy above the
ecosystem level as the highest bio-geo-anthropo-level.
Following Egler we suggested the term Total Human
Ecosystem for this highest ecological hierarchical
level, in which humans are integrated with their total
environment (Naveh, 1982; Naveh and Lieberman,
1994).
This conceptual model of the global ecological
hierarchy is presented in Fig. 3 as a horizontal cross
section across an out-branching tree, ampli®ed as a
Chinese box diagram. On the right are the major
ecological disciplines studying the lower branches.
These are linked by the integrative science of land-
scape ecology to the highest THE level. As the
integrative science of the Total Human Ecosystem,
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26 15

Fig. 3. The ecological hierarchy and its scienti®c disciplines (Naveh and Lieberman, 1994).
16 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
landscape ecology acquires a unique position, brid-
ging these bio-ecology disciplines and human ecol-
ogy.
The Total Human Ecosystem should be regarded
also as the highest co-evolutionary ecological entity
on earth with landscapes as its concrete three-dimen-
sional `Gestalt' systems, forming the spatial and func-
tional matrix for all organisms Ð including humans
Ð and their populations, communities and ecosys-
tems. Landscapes are therefore more than repeated
ecosystems on km-wide stretches. As the concrete
systems of our THE they have to be studied and
managed in their own right on different functional
and spatial scales and dimensions. These range from
the ecotope as the smallest mappable landscape unit to
the ecosphere, the largest global THE landscape. The
ecotope is used chie¯y by European landscape ecol-
ogists as the term for the basic unit for landscape
studies (Leser, 1991; Zonneveld, 1995). It can be
treated also as the actual `site' of an ecosystem (Haber,
1990). The ecotope is much more rigorously de®ned
than the vague `patch', as generally used by American
and many other landscape ecologists.
As thinking human creatures we live not only in this
physical, ecological and geographical landscape
space, which we share with other organisms. We live
also in the conceptual space of the human mind Ð the
noosphere (from the Greek noos Ð mind). This is an
additional natural envelope of life in its totality that
Homo sapiens acquired throughout the evolution of
the human cortex as the domains of our perceptions,
knowledge, feeling, and consciousness. It enabled the
development of additional noospheric realms of info-
socio- and psycho-sphere that have emerged during
our cultural evolution. The geochemist, Vernadsky
(1945), who coined the noosphere term, predicted that
the noosphere or `world dominated by mind' of man
will gradually replace the biosphere. This was based
on the erroneous technological cornucopianism,
unfortunately still shared by many scientists and by
most technocrats of the post-World War II industrial
society, that humankind can put itself above natural
laws and live in such a completely arti®cial world.
Therefore, all problems can be solved in time through
`technological ®xes' or other aspects of `modern
progress' that we cannot even imagine now. Such
over-optimistic and even dangerous con®dence or
`hubris' in our scienti®c knowledge and technological
skill has overpowered our ecological wisdom and
ethics. It has become one of the major cultural roots
for our present ecological crisis, threatening not only
the biosphere, but our THE as a whole and also global
survival.
However, an entirely different holistic interpreta-
tion has been given to the noosphere by Jantsch (1980)
to whom I refer below. He believed in the active role of
humans in designing and furthering constructive evo-
lution through self-re¯ection and human conscious-
ness, although he refuted the technocentric
interpretation of the noosphere and introduced the
above-described interpretation, which also seems to
be relevant for the THE concept of holistic landscape
ecology.
To conclude, the Total Human Ecosystem can be
regarded as the overarching conceptual supersystem
for both the physical Ð geospheric Ð and mental
and spiritual noospheric space spheres. This should
be considered the major holistic paradigm of land-
scape ecology. It enables us to view the evolution
of THE landscapes in the light of the new holistic
and transdisciplinary insights into dynamic self-
organization and co-evolution in nature and in human
societies.
4.3. New holistic and transdisciplinary insights into
dynamic self-organization and co-evolution in nature
Marked by the expansion of the hierarchical view of
GST into a synthetic concept of evolution and self-
organization, the previously-mentioned new insights
have advanced the holistic scienti®c revolution to a
further stage, called `the second scienti®c transdisci-
plinary revolution'. This stage opposes the Newtonian
paradigm of an atomistic world that operates by
mechanistic laws of a clockwork-like universe and
its more modern view as bio-chemical and physical
machine. It rejects the mechanistic and reductionistic
sense of the one-way cause-effect causality interpre-
tation of the Darwinistic natural selection of species
including humans and their immediate environment.
This should be understood instead as a single inter-
active system in which each species adapts to and
affects others in a constant process of community
co-evolution. It leads also to a major paradigm shift
from the neo-Darwinian conception of evolution to
an all-embracing conception of co-evolution that
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
emphasizes cooperation as the creative play of an
entire evolving universe. This is a far more nonlinear
process than the mechanistic worldview has led us to
believe. As is elaborated further below, this is of
fundamental importance to realize the important
potential role of landscapes and therefore also of
landscape ecology in the cultural evolution towards
the post-industrial global information society (Naveh,
1998a, b).
An outstanding example of this new evolutionary
paradigm was the last seminal study by the farsighted
systems thinker and planner, Jantsch (1980), who
presented one of the ®rst comprehensive syntheses
of what he described as ``The Evolution of the Self-
Organizing Universe.'' In this major transdisciplinary
effort, advances in systems sciences, cosmology and
biology were combined with the concept of self-
organization and non-equilibrium thermodynamics
along with neurophysiology, landscape and urban
planning and other disciplines. Enriched by further
more recent scienti®c ®ndings, reviewed by (Laszlo,
1987, 1994), he described this evolutionary process as
a discontinuous development of sudden leaps by
`bifurcations' (from the Greek furca Ð fork) to a
higher organizational level. In the case of cultural
evolution these were leaps from the primitive hunting-
gathering to the more advanced agricultural and indus-
trial stages, culminating in societies globally inte-
grated in the emerging information age. Each of
these bifurcations is driven mainly by the widespread
adoption of basic cultural and technological innova-
tion, such as that symbolized presently by the com-
puter. These leaps have been made possible by
mutually amplifying cross-catalytic positive feedback
loops of whole chains of catalytic `hypercycles', ®rst
described by Eigen and Schuster (1979) in chemical
and biological processes that underlie the emergence
of life. Systems on a relatively high organization level
that can renew, repair and replicate themselves as
networks of interrelated component±producing pro-
cesses in which the network is created and recreated in
a ¯ow of matter and energy are called autopioetic
systems (from the Greek autopioesis Ð self-creation).
To these belong not only living systems, ecosystems
and social systems (Jantsch, 1980; Laszlo, 1987;
Bromley, 1992), but also solar-powered biosphere
landscapes (Naveh, 1998a, b; Naveh and Lieberman,
1994).
17
5. Landscapes as mixed medium-number
interaction systems and unique Gestalt systems
These major systems premises, derived from new
insights in wholeness, organized complexity, self-
organization and co-evolution have far-reaching
implications for a holistic perception of landscapes.
They should be treated as a special class of `Struk-
turgefuege' or `ecological interacting systems' whose
elements are coupled with each other by mutual,
mostly non-linear cybernetic and sometimes even
chaotic relations. If one element is affected, all others
will be affected directly or indirectly to greater or
lesser degrees, irrespective of the nature of the phy-
sical, chemical, biological, or cultural (human-caused)
or other forces that affect their feedback couplings and
network relations. Thus, negative that means mutually
restraining and deviation-counteracting feedback
loops enable the landscape system Ð to a degree
Ð to compensate for changing environmental condi-
tions by adaptive self-stabilization. Thereby, it retains
its resilience in a changing world. On the other hand,
positive feedback loops Ð mutually reinforcing and
deviation±amplifying loops Ð enable self-organiza-
tion of the landscape system. Through these self-
regulating and self-organizing properties landscapes
become more than their components, not in a quanti-
tative±summative way, but in a qualitative±structural
way. The dynamic interacting network relations in the
landscape create newly emerging, non-summative
systems properties that cannot be comprehended by
taking them apart and analyzing each landscape com-
ponent separately.
Thus, for instance, if we look at the forest through a
narrow reductionistic window, we will be able to
observe and study nothing more than the sum of its
trees plus many other organisms and other elements,
such as soil, water, and air, existing together as
unstructured aggregates. However, if on the other
hand, our view of this forest is guided by a holistic
systems approach, we perceive the forested landscape
as an adaptive ecological Gestalt, an interaction sys-
tem, which is more than the sum of all its components.
These newly emerging structural and functional sys-
tem properties and cybernetic processes and controls
allow its function and adaptation in an ever-changing
environment. They were not present at the level of the
single tree and cannot be predicted merely by studying
18 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
all the components of the forests separately, by count-
ing and measuring each one, isolated or de-coupled
from the whole system. This is even more the case if
human in¯uences, such as cutting, grazing and recrea-
tion modify its structure and functions. Thereby
humans, like any other foraging species, become an
integral part of these interaction systems. We can
therefore not expect that a realistic and comprehensive
picture of the whole THE forest landscape will emerge
if these components are studied separately and then
put together arti®cially, published as separate chapters
in so-called `multidisciplinary' scienti®c reports and
publications. Unfortunately, this is also very often the
way in which environmental impact statements are
carried out.
In the above-mentioned contribution to such a
holistic view of nature, Bohm (1980) has drawn
attention to the subtle dif®culties involved in our
understanding the difference between the fragmentary
approaches that have so long dominated science and
an approach that assumes wholeness. Thus, for
instance, he stated that regarding a tree as a thing
or part of nature composed of roots, trunk, limbs, and
leaves interchanging with the environment is useful if
we want to fell or plant trees. However, in a larger
ecological context, this idea may be detrimental. The
tree is not only a part. It is impossible to say at just
what point a molecule of carbon dioxide crossing the
cell membrane into a leaf stops being air and becomes
the tree. Moreover, the expansive root systems of all
the trees in the forest are interconnected into a dense
network, in which there are no precise boundaries
between individual trees. In the words of Bohm
(1980): ``the tree threads out into the whole landscape,
the whole environment of the earth and eventually the
whole universe. If this fact is ignored and forests are
cut down, consequences will arise which may have
far-reaching impacts. Human misapprehension about
parts and whole can therefore be not only confusing
but even dangerous.'' We are learning this lesson now
in the context of global climate change. This human
misapprehension about parts and whole can therefore
be not only confusing, but also even dangerous. With
the help of the holon concept, the problem of forest
trees being both parts and wholes can be resolved, if
we view and study it as holons within the framework
of a hierarchical structured organization of the THE
holarchy.
However, in the quantitative study of these ecolo-
gical interaction systems with conventional statistical
methods, a major problem arises from the fact these
are characterized by intermediate numbers of diverse
biotic and abiotic components with greatly varying
dimensions and structural relationships among their
components. Thus, they differ both from small number
systems with few components and simple cause-effect
interactions, as well as from large number systems,
such as gases or the unorganized heap of sand. These
are ruled mostly by chance and by the physical laws of
gravitation and friction, and not by any inherent
biological and ecological laws. Therefore, for the
`organized complexity' of such `medium-number sys-
tems' neither mechanical nor statistical approaches
are satisfactory and innovative holistic approaches and
methods are required (Weinberg, 1975).
As shown in the case of ecosystems by O'Neill et al.
(1987), the hierarchical approach is a very useful tool
for the study of complex medium-numbered systems,
because it takes advantage of their organized complex-
ity. More recently Joergensen (1997) has treated the
problems of organized systems complexity formally,
their analysis and synthesis with the help of energy,
material and information ¯ow, network models and
other holistic tools. Unfortunately, he restricted him-
self to bio-ecological and physical aspects of natural
ecosystems. However, in THE landscapes, these
human-ecological dimensions are no less important
and cannot be neglected. For this reason, landscapes
should be treated as a special case of `mixed natural
and cultural medium-number interaction systems'.
This is especially true for our highly fragmented
and heterogeneous human-modi®ed, managed and
used cultural terrestrial and aquatic landscapes.
Throughout their evolution, natural elements, such
as soil, rocks, water, microbes, plants and animals
of the geosphere and biosphere interact with human-
made artifacts of the noosphere, such as terraces,
roads, bridges and other human constructions. They
have created closely interwoven, natural and cultural
patterns and processes. Cultural landscapes thus
create a tangible bridge between human minds
and nature (Naveh, 1995a, 1998a). Because of this
co-evolutionary process of mutual modi®cation and
adaptation of humans and their natural environment
in cultural THE landscapes, the delineation between
social and natural systems in socio-economic models
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
of landscape processes is completely arbitrary and
arti®cial.
As described in detail by Naveh and Lieberman
(1994) each THE landscape is a unique self-organiz-
ing Gestalt system with intrinsic self-transcendent
openness, which cannot be fully described by the
formal openness of ecosystems or landscapes to the
¯ow of energy/matter. Therefore, it contains more than
the measurable parameters of the Newtonian space±
time dimensions and the Cartesian mechanistic and
deterministic causality. Formal descriptions by math-
ematical equations, graphical models and maps alone
cannot grasp these intrinsic and self-transcendent
values.
The transdisciplinary notion of landscapes, emer-
ging from this holistic systems view has been further
elaborated in more detail in the context of environ-
mental education (Naveh, 1995a). It can be illustrated
by adopting the dimensional approach, developed by
the late, eminent psychotherapist and founder of
logotherapy, Frankl (1969), who used the metaphor
of projecting three-dimensional bodies into two
dimensionals in order to demonstrate that the unique
multidimensional wholeness of human nature and its
intrinsic and self-transcendent openness are reduced to
`nothing but' biological or psychological reactions.
Thus, if we project a drinking cup as an open cylinder
out of its three-dimensional space into the closed two-
dimensional plane of the outline of its layout or the
side view of its pro®le, we receive only a circle or a
rectangle. The same happens if we project landscapes
out of their unique multidimensional THE Gestalt
wholeness into their lower `nothing but' geological,
or biophysical, or esthetic, or socio-economical
dimensions. This happens also, if we deal in landscape
research and/or education either exclusively within the
realms of biology or geography and the natural
sciences in general, or within the arts and humanities.
In each case we would lose their unique multidimen-
sional nature as self-organizing Gestalt systems with
intrinsic self-transcendent openness.
6. Bohm's hologram paradigm, implicate order
and implications for landscape ecology
The problem of the reduction of the transdisciplin-
ary three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional
19
models can be overcome with the help of the hologram
systems perception. By this approach we do attempt to
present not the details of the landscape elements,
rather the interrelated patterns relevant for the percep-
tion of the whole. This has been achieved in the lens-
free holograph photography, in which the light from
each part of the object falls onto the entire photo-
graphic plate. Thus, in a holograph each part of the
plate contains information about the whole scene. It
re¯ects the whole and in a sense becomes enfolded
across the holograph (Naveh and Lieberman, 1994).
For a fuller comprehension of the true meaning of
this view in the context of landscape ecology it is
essential to become familiar with the groundbreaking
and exciting new holistic ideas of Bohm (1980), to
which I have referred above. Bohm originally
intended to create holistic physics, but he became
one of the most important and in¯uential holistic
science philosophers. For Bohm the hologram para-
digm serves as a powerful analogy for a new meta-
theory of a holistic whole and undivided order of the
universe. He proposed a `new notion of order' to
describe the deeper reality, which he named `impli-
cate' or enfolded order, which lies beneath the regular
`explicate order' and gives rise to it in the above-
mentioned universal `holomovement'. The explicate
order in which scientists Ð in spite of the radical
scienti®c revolution Ð follows the paradigm of clas-
sical physics while looking for the ultimate particles.
It is the order in which fundamental equations are
written using coordinates of space and time. For
Bohm, what happens on the plate is simply a momen-
tary frozen version of what is occurring on in®nitely
vaster scales in each landscape on earth and in each
space of the universe. In this `everything is enfolded
into everything'.
In a recent bibliography, Bohm's close friend and
collaborator, Peat (Peat, 1997, p. 263), lucidly sum-
marized these ideas: ``In this sense the implicate order
is a new way of seeing and talking about the world. It
directs our attention away from boundaries and inde-
pendent existences into holism, interconnectedness,
and transformation. It argues that explicate order
descriptions can never exhaust physical reality. The
implicate order is a door into new ways of thinking and
the eventually discovery of new and more appropriate
mathematical orders. It is both a philosophical attitude
and a method of inquiry.''
20 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
Bohm and Peat (1987) have carried this holistic
paradigm even further. They rightly claim that order is
neither subjective nor objective, for when a new
context is revealed, a different notion of order appears.
No single order fully covers human experience and as
contexts change, orders must constantly be created
and modi®ed. This is true also for the Cartesian grid of
coordinates that has dominated the basic order of
physical and geographical reality for the last 300
years, and more recently also landscape ecology. Its
general appropriateness is therefore questioned by
Bohm and Peat (1987). They arrive at notions of
different degrees of order. A ¯owing river gives a
good image of how a simple order of low degree can
gradually change to a chaotic order of high degree, and
eventually to random order, but Bohm and Peat show
that there is a rich new ®eld of creativity between the
two extremes, as a state of high energy makes possible
a fresh perception through the mind. Full creativity
also requires free communication in science.
Bohm and Peat recognized implicate order as a
special case of generative order. This order is uncon-
cerned with the outward side of development and
evolution in a sequence of successions, but with a
deeper and more inward order, out of which the
manifest form of things can emerge creatively. This
order is fundamentally relevant in nature, as well as in
consciousness and in the creative perception and
understanding of nature, and therefore also of all
THE landscapes. They viewed implicate orders as
organized by super-implicate order, opening the
way for an inde®nite extension into even higher levels
of implicate orders, as a very rich and subtle gen-
erative order. Therefore, they reached an entirely new
view of consciousness as a generative and implicate
order that throws light on nature, mind and society,
and opens the door to a kind of dialogue. This, in their
own words: ``may meet the breakdown of order that
humanity is experiencing in its relationships to all
these ®elds.'' Such an overall common generative
order will bring together science, nature, society
and consciousness (Bohm and Peat, 1987). It may
help also holistic landscape ecology to bridge the gaps
between `the two cultures' of science and humanities
(Naveh, 1990) and even become a true synthesis
between science and art, as envisaged by Caldwell
(1990) This could have also far-reaching implications
for its transdisciplinary paradigms.
For landscape ecology this means that further and
deeper insights into the holistic nature of landscapes
can be gained only if we are ready to free our minds of
rigid commitments to familiar notions of order. Only
then, we may be able to perceive new hidden orders
behind the simple regularity and randomness. ``It is
possible for categories to become so ®xed a part of the
intellect that the mind ®nally becomes engaged in
playing false to support them. Clearly, as context
changes so do categories'' (Bohm and Peat, 1987,
p. 115). Such a change in context occurs when we
perceive landscapes as self-transcendent medium-
numbered mixed natural and cultural Gestalt systems,
and not as `nothing but' formal, spatial geometric
structures and mosaics, describable by Archimedian
geometry, and by the Cartesian grid of coordinates
(Forman and Godron, 1986). All these THE land-
scapes are imbedded in a hierarchy of subtle, gen-
erative, implicate orders, in which human mind,
consciousness and creativity play an important role.
Mandelbrot (1982) has formalized such a genera-
tive order with fractals as a generation of forms, which
proceed by repeated applications of similar shape on
decreasing scale. The recognition of such subtle orders
has been initiated in landscape ecology by the appli-
cation of fractal dimension as the generative order that
underlies the geometric regularity of self-similarity.
As an innovative method for the study of organized
landscape complexity and multi-scale dynamic pro-
cesses, it allows the quanti®cation of the shape and
texture of landscape features and the prediction of
multi-scale dynamic landscape processes. Fractal
dimensions enhance our comprehension of the com-
plex interaction between geomorphologic, biotic, and
anthropogenic factors, operating at different space±
time scales, and thereby also on the interactions
between biodiversity, ecological landscape heteroge-
neity and cultural diversity (see also Burrough, 1981;
Loehle, 1990; Milne, 1991; Allen and Hoekstra, 1992;
Farina, 1998, and many others). However, it should be
realized that the order of fractals is related to a local
order of space, but in the implicate and generative
order, the process of enfoldment is related to the whole
Ð to the THE.
A major challenge in landscape research is to
capture the implicate and generative orders of land-
scapes. This could be achieved by further development
of the holistic Gestalt interpretation of aerial photo-
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
graphy combined with holograph photography. Hope-
fully, new orders will emerge through the collabora-
tion of landscape ecologists with other relevant ®elds
for the development of practical tools and methods to
include the appreciation of aesthetic, ethical and
intrinsic nature values in the decision making process.
However, for tangible expression of the multidi-
mensional and multi-scale spatial, temporal and per-
ceptional landscape richness and heterogeneity, we
need an additional transdisciplinary parameter,
broader than `biodiversity', which I have proposed
to name `total landscape ecodiversity' (Naveh, 1994,
1998c). This parameter accounts not only for biolo-
gical and geophysical diversity, but also for cultural
diversity as measured by the relative richness and
distribution of cultural historical and other human-
made artifacts within the speci®c landscape unit.
7. Biosphere and technosphere landscapes and the
disorganized `Total Landscape' of the industrial
society
As mentioned, the holistic THE landscape concep-
tion opens the way for a more comprehensive view of
landscape dynamics as part of biological and cultural
evolution, and therefore also of the future of life on
earth. For this purpose, we have to make a clear
distinction between the major functional landscape
classes and their role in future evolution. Throughout
human history the Total Human Ecosystem expanded
according to the rate of growth of human populations,
their consumption and technological power. This
growth also caused the expansion of their ecological
footprints and colonization processes by which natural
landscapes were converted into human modi®ed semi-
natural, agricultural and urban-industrial landscapes,
and thereby became cultural landscapes. However,
during this evolutionary process, and since the indus-
trial fossil fuel revolution with accelerating speed, a
crucial bifurcation has divided these Total Human
Ecosystem landscapes into biosphere and techno-
sphere landscapes and their ecotopes (or in short
bio-and techno-ecotopes), and most recently also into
intermediate agro-industrial ecotopes.
Natural bio-ecotopes, as well as semi-natural bio-
ecotopes, such as forests, woodlands, grasslands, wet-
lands, rivers and lakes, are driven entirely by solar
21
energy and its biological and chemical conversion
through photosynthesis and assimilation into chemical
and kinetic energy. They contain spontaneously evol-
ving and reproducing organisms on which the future
biological evolution depends. As adaptive self-orga-
nizing systems they are internally regulated by natural
(biological and physical-chemical) information and
have the capacity to organize themselves in a coherent
way by maintaining their structural integrity in a
process of continuous self-renewal of autopioesis.
At the same time, all human-in¯uenced, modi®ed
and converted open biosphere landscapes can be
considered also as dissipative structures that are far
from equilibrium (Naveh, 1998a; Naveh and Lieber-
man, 1994). Such dissipative structures are systems
that are maintained and stabilized only by perma-
nently interchanging energy and entropy with their
environment. Driven by positive feedback of environ-
mental and internal ¯uctuations, they move to new
regimes that generate conditions of renewal of higher
entropy production while undergoing short and long-
term cyclic ¯uctuations, far from a homeostatic equi-
librium stage. By `pumping out' entropy as disorder in
their autopioetic live-creating process, these land-
scapes increase their internal negentropy, ensuring
more effective information and energy ef®ciency
within the system. In the words of Prigogine and
Stengers (1984), they create `order out of ¯uctuation
and chaos' and play an active role in the evolutionary
process. Their function as open, dynamic, self-orga-
nizing systems enables the spontaneous emergence of
new order, creating new structures and new forms of
behavior. At the same time, they ful®ll vital food
production, regulation, protection and carrier func-
tions, as important life-support systems, together with
their intrinsic and `soft' non-instrumental spiritual,
aesthetic, scienti®c and other cultural values.
Traditionally and organic agro-ecotopes are also
solar-energy powered biosphere landscapes. Although
regulated and controlled by human cultural informa-
tion, they still retain much of their self-organizing
capacities. In contrast to these `Regenerative Sys-
tems', urban-industrial techno-ecotopes are human-
made `Throughput Systems' (Lyle, 1994) driven by
fossil and nuclear energy and their technological
conversion into low-grade energy. Lacking entirely
the self-organizing and regenerative capacities of bio-
sphere landscapes, they result in high outputs of
22 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26

entropy, waste and pollution with far-reaching detri-

mental impacts on the remaining open landscapes and
human health.
More recently high-input agro-industrial ecotopes
have replaced almost all low-input cultivated agro-
ecotopes in industrial countries and are spreading now
also in many developing countries. These are much
closer to technosphere landscapes than to biosphere
landscapes. Although their productivity still depends
on photosynthetic conversion of high grade solar
energy, this energy is subsidized to a great extent
by low-grade fossil energy, and their natural control
mechanisms are replaced almost entirely by heavy
chemical inputs and throughputs. We are still far from
being able to realize fully their far-reaching and long-
term detrimental environmental impacts on the open
landscape, its wildlife and biodiversity, and the quality
of its natural resources of soil and water, as well as on
human health. In this respect, they come very close to
technosphere landscapes. Without heavy ®nancial
subsidies, even the most `successful' agro-industrial
systems, as measured by high yields and agro-tech-
nological sophistication, like those in Israel, are Fig. 4. The disorganized Total Landscape of the industrial Total
undergoing a deep economic crisis. Therefore, these Human Ecosystem Ð Ecosphere, and its destabilization by the
Technosphere.
landscapes have lost not only their ecological but also
their economic sustainability.
Although all these bio-agro-and techno-ecotopes landscapes and the overwhelming de-coupling effects
are spatially interlaced in larger, regional landscape of the technosphere landscapes, the `Gaia hypothesis'
mosaics, they are related antagonistically, forming a (Margulis and Lovelock, 1974), by which the bio-
disorganized mosaic of the industrial `Total Land- sphere together with the atmosphere are regarded as a
scape' (Sieferle, 1997) which cannot function together global co-evolutionary self-regulating and self-renew-
in the ecosphere as a coherent, sustainable whole of ing system, may gradually lose its validity, thereby
our Total Human Ecosystem. This is the result of the endangering the future of life on Earth.
above-described overwhelming adverse impacts of
techno-and agro-industrial landscapes both on the
biosphere and geosphere. It is manifested by the 8. The need for a cybernetic symbiosis between
biological and cultural landscape impoverishment, nature and human society in the post-industrial
accelerated deserti®cation, soil erosion and cata- Total Human Ecosystem, and its achievement
strophic ¯ooding, as well as in threatening global through synergistic cross-catalytic cycles between
climate changes and in the disruption of the protecting people, economy and landscapes
ozone layer in the stratosphere.
As illustrated in a simpli®ed cybernetic model of As we have seen, the strength of holistic landscape
the Total Human Ecosystem ecosphere (Fig. 4), except ecology lies in its capacity to comprehend and deal
for the stabilizing negative feedback couplings main- with landscapes as an integral part of the physical,
taining dynamic ¯ow equilibrium between the bio- chemical, biological, ecological and socio-cultural
sphere landscapes and the geosphere, all interactions processes determining the fate of our THE and there-
are ruled by destabilizing positive feedback loops. fore also global survival. It is obvious that for the
Because of the rapidly diminishing intact biosphere establishment of a proper balance between productive
 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
and attractive biosphere landscapes and healthy and
livable technosphere landscapes, the above-described
destabilizing feedback loops must be counteracted by
culturally regulative, controlling and stabilizing loops
in all natural and human dimensions. At the same time
it has to be realized that our environmental crisis is
basically a cultural crisis in our relations with nature.
Therefore, the basic con¯icts between bio-and techno-
sphere landscapes can be reconciled only through the
creation of new symbiotic relations between human
society and nature. Such an urgently needed post-
modern symbiosis should lead to the structural and
functional integration of bio- and technosphere eco-
topes into a coherent sustainable ecosphere, in which
both the biological evolution of natural systems and
the cultural evolution of human systems can be
ensured.
The scienti®c input of landscape ecology, in colla-
boration with other mission-driven transdisciplinary
environmental sciences, to restore, reclaim, and reha-
bilitate damaged landscapes, to revitalize wetlands,
rivers, lakes and their embankments, to create living
corridors and viable urban biosphere islands, could
ful®ll an important role in this integration. It should be
part of comprehensive landscape planning and envir-
onmental management for sustainable development
towards the information society, and become a driving
force in this symbiotic process (Naveh, 1999).
Thanks to the above-described recent insights in
self-organization of autopioetic systems and their
cross-catalytic networks, we are now able to express
these new symbiotic relations between nature and
society in much more robust and realistic terms and
translate them into sustainable development. It would
be illusionary to assume that we can restore the
original symbiotic natural feedback loops of the
pre-industrial society, but we are now in a position
to create new cultural, information-rich cross-catalytic
and synergistic feedback loops, linking natural, eco-
logical, socio-cultural and economic processes of our
THE. As shown by Grossmann et al. (1997) and
Grossmann (1999), this can be achieved in regional
sustainable development projects with the help of
dynamic systems simulation models and other inno-
vative methods and tools. Landscape ecologists and
planners, economists, geographers and other environ-
mentally-concerned scientists collaborate to ensure
lasting mutually reinforcing (synergistic) bene®t for
23
the people and their physical, mental, spiritual and
economic welfare together with the creation of
healthy, productive and attractive landscapes for the
emerging information society.
On global scales this can be realized only as part of
an all-embracing environmental sustainability revolu-
tion. This, as envisaged by Laszlo (1994), will guide
the bifurcation of cultural evolution on its leap towards
a higher organizational level of the emerging sustain-
able information society. It will be driven by the
widespread adoption of technological innovations of
regenerative and recycling methods and the ef®cient
utilization of solar and other non-polluting and renew-
able sources of energy, coupled by less wasteful and
more sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns.
That this is not a utopian dream can be learned from
the encouraging examples provided in the recent 1999
State of the World report (Brown et al., 1999) Ð in
addition to many others Ð indicating that we are at the
threshold of a post-modern environmental sustainabil-
ity revolution.
9. Recapitulation
In view of the great opportunities and dangers
facing human society during the transition from the
industrial to the post-industrial global information
age, we have to capture the true meaning of post-
modern landscape ecology in the context of the pre-
sent scienti®c revolution and its paradigm shifts from
reductionistic analysis and fragmentation to holistic
synthesis and integration. Holistic landscape ecology
should be based on a transdisciplinary systems view of
the world as an autopioetic, self-organizing and self-
regulating, irreducible Gestalt system. On global
scales humankind together with its total environment
forms the highest bio-geo-anthropo ecological hier-
archy level we have, the Total Human Ecosystem.
Serving as the tangible spatial and functional matrix
for all biotic and abiotic Total Human Ecosystem
components, biosphere and technosphere landscapes
are becoming the concrete medium-numbered mixed
natural and cultural Gestalt system of the Total Human
Ecosystem.
There is still a considerable number of landscape
ecologists clinging to the mechanistic and reductio-
nistic science paradigm, who believe that landscape
24 Z. Naveh / Landscape and Urban Planning 50 (2000) 7±26
ecology will achieve `scienti®c maturity' only if it will
be able to make exact predictions in a mechanistic
sense, like in physics. This may be possible, as long as
landscapes are regarded as `nothing more' than spa-
tially heterogeneous areas of repeated patterns of
natural ecosystems. However, as explained above,
we have to treat landscapes as complex hierarchical
ordered holons with unique natural and cultural prop-
erties and cybernetic and chaotic behavior of dissipa-
tive structures and their bifurcations, embedded in the
evolution of human society. Consequently, we must be
aware of the dangers of misleading deterministic
extrapolations from present situations, and must
satisfy ourselves with fuzziness and uncertainties.
We cannot predict precisely the fate of our Total
Human Ecosystem landscapes, but we are able to
offer different scenarios of their future dynamics
under different land-use strategies and conservation
policies.
Present methods for the categorization of organized
landscape complexity are based chie¯y on simple
regularities of Euclidean geometry for the description
of formal structures and their mechanistic interpreta-
tion. In order to perceive new hidden orders behind
these regularities, we have to free ourselves from rigid
commitments to these familiar notions. By changing
context we also have to change these categories.
Perceiving landscapes in this holistic and transdisci-
plinary way, a change occurs that demands new
categories. Transcending these regularities, the appli-
cation of the generative order of fractals and of con-
textual scaling in hierarchical levels, as described by
Naveh and Lieberman (1994), are important steps in
this direction. However in their present use, they
remain almost exclusively within the realm of natural
sciences. Therefore, one of the greatest challenges for
landscape ecology as a holistic and transdisciplinary
science, is the inclusion of further enfolding orders
with the new categories such as intrinsic natural
values, landscape integrity, health and self-organiza-
tion, as interlaced with human mind, consciousness
and creativity of our THE.
With the help of dynamic systems modeling,
including cross-catalytic networks, and holistic future
scenarios and other integrative methods, we are now
able to deal holistically with complex natural and
cultural patterns. This can be achieved by synthesizing
and quantifying in more robust ways the interaction of
the dynamic natural and socio-cultural and economic
landscape processes. Utilizing these insights and
methods for holistic landscape research and education,
landscape ecologists can play a signi®cant role in the
diversion of the trajectory of post-industrial bifurca-
tions from decline and extinction to future, sustainable
evolution of life on earth, as part of a post-modern
synthesis between human society and nature. By
accepting these challenges, holistic, problem-solving
oriented landscape ecology, landscape ecologists will
be in the forefront of these efforts, reaching out to a
higher stage of transdisciplinary integration and coop-
eration with relevant ®elds of the social sciences and
the humanities. Their joint overarching goal should be
to ensure healthy, attractive and productive landscapes
for this and future generations. In this way, holistic
landscape ecology could become a catalyst to the
urgently needed geo-and bio-cybernetic symbiosis
between the post-modern information-rich human
society and nature.
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Zev Naveh Prof. emer. Zev Naveh (1919) of the Lowdermilk
Faculty of Agricultural Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of
Technology, has been a visiting professor and guest lecturer in
several universities in the USA, Europe, Japan and Australia,
invited lecturer and keynote speaker at many conferences,
symposia and workshops on ecology, landscape ecology, and on
sustainable development. He is a member of editorial boards of
several journals, including Landscape Ecology, Restoration Ecol-
ogy and Mediterranean Ecology. His major research interests
include effects of human impacts on Mediterranean landscapes;
introduction of drought resistant plants for multi-beneficial land-
scape restoration, dynamic conservation management of Mediter-
ranean uplands. Presently involved chiefly in studying theoretical
aspects of holistic landscape ecology and sustainable development
towards the information society.