Naveh What Is Holistic Landscape Ecology

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 problemsolving 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 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 degradation 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 creat0169-2046/00/$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

ing sustainable, healthy, productive and attractive landscapes for the next millennium, landscape ecology 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 Mission 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 conception of landscape ecology were laid in the densely populated industrial countries in Central and East

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Europe after World War II by the `fathers' of landscape 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 Germany (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 holistic 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 contributions 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 landscape 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 `normal 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 processes with non-linear, cybernetic and chaotic processes 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 transdisciplinarity. This holistic paradigm shift is already changing the science and practice of resource management (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 physicist 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 worldview and disastrous intellectual, professional, academic and institutional fragmentation had also become pervasive among those dealing with environmental 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 discipline-oriented academic education, have been considered to be mutually irrelevant. The acceptance of these innovative scienti®c developments 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-economic issues which encompass landscape ecology.

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The development of a transdisciplinary conception of landscape ecology will require innovative and nonconventional `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 ecology, as well as ecopsychology, and further developments in all realms of human endeavor. These developments have been recently presented by Spretnak (1999) as an important part of `ecological postmodernism'. 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 context of landscapes conservation and restoration (Naveh, 1990, 1995b, 1998a, b), we attempted to provide an overarching framework for a holistic conception of landscape ecology and its theoretical and practical implications. These concepts were formalized in terms of a transdisciplinary systems approach and its recent insights in organized complexity, which are closely related to the self-organizing and selfregulating 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-equilibrium, which seem chaotic, move farther from equilibrium, dissipating energy and entropy, until ®nally new patterns of coherent events, order and information emerge and a new metastable equilibrium is established. 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

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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 Ecosystem that integrates humans and their total environment. 4.1. General systems and hierarchy theory as the conceptual and methodological basis for holistic landscape ecology Under the in¯uence of holistic, organismic biologists, 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 qualitative 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 contemporary concepts of ordered wholeness and complexity, and their fusion into an overarching systems metatheory (a theory above all discipline-oriented theories). 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 relevance 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 especially the holistic branch of ecosystem ecology presented 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,

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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).

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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) formulated this holistic notion of systems in a groundbreaking 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 interpreted 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 additional 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 content 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 collective, 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

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important rigorous formulations of these holistic paradigms 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 mathematician Rene Descartes formalized this approach in the seventeenth century. Thereby complex phenomena are dissected and analyzed through reduction, isolation 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 (Joergensen, 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 unrealistic 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 independent of the human observer. According to Descartes, 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 instrumental relation or quanti®able value which has been

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further developed into a statistical technique (Macauley, 1997). In modern reductionistic scienti®c methodologies (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 knowing, 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 understanding the process of knowing Ð the epistemology Ð must be included in the description of natural phenomena. Thereby, the systems view has been developed 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 interconnected 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 mathematical 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 ecology. These are greatest when we deal with humanin¯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; Steinhardt, 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 transdisciplinary 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. According to Laszlo (1972) its basic paradigm is the view of a hierarchical organization of nature with ordered wholes of multileveled strati®ed open systems, ranging 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 selfcontained 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

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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 our deeply ingrained habit of thought, neither parts nor wholes in this absolute sense exist, and that this is true not only in the domain of living organisms but also in

ecological and social organization. What we ®nd instead are intermediate structures on a series of levels of ascending complexity. The structure and behavior of an organism, as well as of any other hierarchically

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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 complexity and organization by integration of man-andits-total-environment, ``forming one single whole in nature.'' He urged the creation of an innovative interdisciplinary `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 modi®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, unfortunately, 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 present 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 managing the planet. Our activities are causing rapid, novel, and substantial changes of Earth' ecosystems. Maintaining 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 integral 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 landscape ecology to the highest THE level. As the integrative science of the Total Human Ecosystem,

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Fig. 3. The ecological hierarchy and its scienti®c disciplines (Naveh and Lieberman, 1994).

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landscape ecology acquires a unique position, bridging these bio-ecology disciplines and human ecology. The Total Human Ecosystem should be regarded also as the highest co-evolutionary ecological entity on earth with landscapes as its concrete three-dimensional `Gestalt' systems, forming the spatial and functional matrix for all organisms Ð including humans Ð and their populations, communities and ecosystems. 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 ecologists 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 infosocio- 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 interpretation 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 evolution through self-re¯ection and human consciousness, 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 landscape ecology. It enables us to view the evolution of THE landscapes in the light of the new holistic and transdisciplinary insights into dynamic selforganization 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 selforganization, the previously-mentioned new insights have advanced the holistic scienti®c revolution to a further stage, called `the second scienti®c transdisciplinary 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 interpretation of the Darwinistic natural selection of species including humans and their immediate environment. This should be understood instead as a single interactive 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

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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 SelfOrganizing Universe.'' In this major transdisciplinary effort, advances in systems sciences, cosmology and biology were combined with the concept of selforganization 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 huntinggathering to the more advanced agricultural and industrial stages, culminating in societies globally integrated in the emerging information age. Each of these bifurcations is driven mainly by the widespread adoption of basic cultural and technological innovation, such as that symbolized presently by the computer. 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 processes 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).

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5. Landscapes as mixed medium-number interaction systems and unique Gestalt systems These major systems premises, derived from new insights in wholeness, organized complexity, selforganization and co-evolution have far-reaching implications for a holistic perception of landscapes. They should be treated as a special class of `Strukturgefuege' 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 physical, 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 conditions 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-organization of the landscape system. Through these selfregulating and self-organizing properties landscapes become more than their components, not in a quantitative±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 component 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 system, which is more than the sum of all its components. These newly emerging structural and functional system 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

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all the components of the forests separately, by counting 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 recreation 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 ecological 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 systems' 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 complexity. 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 himself 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 humanmade 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

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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-organizing 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 mathematical equations, graphical models and maps alone cannot grasp these intrinsic and self-transcendent values. The transdisciplinary notion of landscapes, emerging from this holistic systems view has been further elaborated in more detail in the context of environmental 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 twodimensional 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 multidimensional 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 transdisciplinary three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional

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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 perception of the whole. This has been achieved in the lensfree holograph photography, in which the light from each part of the object falls onto the entire photographic 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 paradigm serves as a powerful analogy for a new metatheory 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 `implicate' or enfolded order, which lies beneath the regular `explicate order' and gives rise to it in the abovementioned universal `holomovement'. The explicate order in which scientists Ð in spite of the radical scienti®c revolution Ð follows the paradigm of classical 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 momentary 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 summarized 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 independent 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.''

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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 unconcerned 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 generative 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 mediumnumbered 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 landscapes are imbedded in a hierarchy of subtle, generative, implicate orders, in which human mind, consciousness and creativity play an important role. Mandelbrot (1982) has formalized such a generative 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 application 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 processes, 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 complex interaction between geomorphologic, biotic, and anthropogenic factors, operating at different space± time scales, and thereby also on the interactions between biodiversity, ecological landscape heterogeneity 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 landscapes. This could be achieved by further development of the holistic Gestalt interpretation of aerial photo-

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graphy combined with holograph photography. Hopefully, new orders will emerge through the collaboration 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 multidimensional and multi-scale spatial, temporal and perceptional 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 biological and geophysical diversity, but also for cultural diversity as measured by the relative richness and distribution of cultural historical and other humanmade 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 conception 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 seminatural, agricultural and urban-industrial landscapes, and thereby became cultural landscapes. However, during this evolutionary process, and since the industrial fossil fuel revolution with accelerating speed, a crucial bifurcation has divided these Total Human Ecosystem landscapes into biosphere and technosphere 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 bioecotopes, such as forests, woodlands, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and lakes, are driven entirely by solar

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energy and its biological and chemical conversion through photosynthesis and assimilation into chemical and kinetic energy. They contain spontaneously evolving and reproducing organisms on which the future biological evolution depends. As adaptive self-organizing 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 Lieberman, 1994). Such dissipative structures are systems that are maintained and stabilized only by permanently interchanging energy and entropy with their environment. Driven by positive feedback of environmental and internal ¯uctuations, they move to new regimes that generate conditions of renewal of higher entropy production while undergoing short and longterm cyclic ¯uctuations, far from a homeostatic equilibrium stage. By `pumping out' entropy as disorder in their autopioetic live-creating process, these landscapes 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-organizing 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 functions, 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 information, they still retain much of their self-organizing capacities. In contrast to these `Regenerative Systems', urban-industrial techno-ecotopes are humanmade `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 biosphere landscapes, they result in high outputs of

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entropy, waste and pollution with far-reaching detrimental impacts on the remaining open landscapes and human health. More recently high-input agro-industrial ecotopes have replaced almost all low-input cultivated agroecotopes 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 longterm 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-technological sophistication, like those in Israel, are undergoing a deep economic crisis. Therefore, these landscapes have lost not only their ecological but also their economic sustainability. Although all these bio-agro-and techno-ecotopes are spatially interlaced in larger, regional landscape mosaics, they are related antagonistically, forming a disorganized mosaic of the industrial `Total Landscape' (Sieferle, 1997) which cannot function together in the ecosphere as a coherent, sustainable whole of our Total Human Ecosystem. This is the result of the above-described overwhelming adverse impacts of techno-and agro-industrial landscapes both on the biosphere and geosphere. It is manifested by the biological and cultural landscape impoverishment, accelerated deserti®cation, soil erosion and catastrophic ¯ooding, as well as in threatening global climate changes and in the disruption of the protecting ozone layer in the stratosphere. As illustrated in a simpli®ed cybernetic model of the Total Human Ecosystem ecosphere (Fig. 4), except for the stabilizing negative feedback couplings maintaining dynamic ¯ow equilibrium between the biosphere landscapes and the geosphere, all interactions are ruled by destabilizing positive feedback loops. Because of the rapidly diminishing intact biosphere

Fig. 4. The disorganized Total Landscape of the industrial Total Human Ecosystem Ð Ecosphere, and its destabilization by the Technosphere.

landscapes and the overwhelming de-coupling effects of the technosphere landscapes, the `Gaia hypothesis' (Margulis and Lovelock, 1974), by which the biosphere together with the atmosphere are regarded as a global co-evolutionary self-regulating and self-renewing system, may gradually lose its validity, thereby endangering the future of life on Earth. 8. The need for a cybernetic symbiosis between nature and human society in the post-industrial Total Human Ecosystem, and its achievement through synergistic cross-catalytic cycles between people, economy and landscapes As we have seen, the strength of holistic landscape ecology lies in its capacity to comprehend and deal with landscapes as an integral part of the physical, chemical, biological, ecological and socio-cultural processes determining the fate of our THE and therefore also global survival. It is obvious that for the establishment of a proper balance between productive

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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 technosphere landscapes can be reconciled only through the creation of new symbiotic relations between human society and nature. Such an urgently needed postmodern symbiosis should lead to the structural and functional integration of bio- and technosphere ecotopes 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 collaboration with other mission-driven transdisciplinary environmental sciences, to restore, reclaim, and rehabilitate 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 environmental 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, ecological, 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 innovative methods and tools. Landscape ecologists and planners, economists, geographers and other environmentally-concerned scientists collaborate to ensure lasting mutually reinforcing (synergistic) bene®t for

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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 revolution. This, as envisaged by Laszlo (1994), will guide the bifurcation of cultural evolution on its leap towards a higher organizational level of the emerging sustainable 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 renewable 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 sustainability 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 postmodern landscape ecology in the context of the present 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 selfregulating, irreducible Gestalt system. On global scales humankind together with its total environment forms the highest bio-geo-anthropo ecological hierarchy 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 reductionistic science paradigm, who believe that landscape

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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 spatially 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 properties and cybernetic and chaotic behavior of dissipative 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 interpretation. 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 transdisciplinary way, a change occurs that demands new categories. Transcending these regularities, the application of the generative order of fractals and of contextual 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-organization, 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 bifurcations 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 cooperation 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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