Total Human Ecosystem

Total Human Ecosystem

Naveh and Lieberman (1994) and Naveh (2000) proposed the holistic, eco-centric concept of the Total Human Ecosystem in order to study the anthropocene ecology and improve land use planning and environmental management, within an integrated and interdisciplinary approach. This concept (or better meta-concept) integrates human systems (the technosphere, but also in the conceptual space of human noosphere) and natural systems (the geophysical eco-space of the Earth biosphere) and their total environment at the highest co-evolutionary complexity level of the global ecological hierarchy. Naveh (2005) defines the concept of Total Human Ecosystem (THE) as:

.

Concepts and epistemology

The interaction and co-evolution of the human and natural ecosystem interactions are the driving forces for the current Earth System. The Total Human Ecosystem meta-conceptional approach have to integrate the bio-and geo-centric approaches, derived from the natural sciences, and the approaches derived from the social sciences and the humanities in order to prevent of further environmental degradation and driving natural and human systems towards a sustainable future.

A natural ecosystem within this concept is solar- energy powered, self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic). A human ecosystem is fossil energy powered by high input and throughput and can be divided in urban-industrial ecosystem or agro-industrial. The ecosystem is realised in space as ecotope and the system of ecotopes is the landscape: natural, semi-natural, urban-industrial are the tangible, three-dimensional physical systems of our Total Human Ecosystem. The THE also consists of the domain of information, perceptions (in landscape ecology this is the ecofield concept, sensu Farina, 2000; Farina and Belgrano, 2004), knowledge, feeling and consciousness, enabling human (but also biological) self-awareness.A special case of landscapes inside of the Total Human Ecosystem are the cultural landscapes (Farina, 2000), in which the relationships between human activity (as an effective, ecology based, land or sea stewardship) and the environment have created ecological, socioeconomic and cultural patterns and feedback mechanisms that preserve biological and cultural diversity and maintain (or better improves) ecosystem resilience and resistance.

References

* Farina, A., 2000. The Cultural Landscape as a Model for the Integration of Ecology and Economics, BioScience, Vol. 50, 4, pp. 313-320.
* Farina, A., and A. Belgrano, 2004. The eco-field: a new paradigm for landscape ecology. Ecol. Res. 19, 107–110.
* Farina, A., 2006. Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology: Towards a Science of the Landscape , Springer, Dordrecht, 412 p.
* Naveh, Z. & A.S. Lieberman, 1994. Landscape Ecology: Theory and Application (2nd ed). Springer-Verlag,New York, 360 p.
* Naveh, Z., 2000. The Total Human Ecosystem: Integrating Ecology and Economics, BioScience, 50, 4, pp. 357-361
* Naveh, Z. 2005. Epilogue: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science of Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration, Restoration Ecology, 13, 1, pp. 228–234.

ee also

*Landscape ecology
*Environmental geography
*Ecosystem
*Sustainability


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