Transdisciplinary Challenges in Landscape Ecology and Restoration Ecology - An Anthology

Capitalizing on forty years of intensive ecological studies, this anthology presents a collection of widely dispersed major publications on theoretical and practical Mediterranean, global environmental and landscape issues. Each chapter features a comprehensive study of ecological and landscape issues, synthesized in the introduction, and woven with autobiographical experiences. The concluding chapter calls for a transdisciplinary shift in all environmental scientific fields and particularly in landscape and restoration ecology, to cope with the complex, closely interwoven ecological, socio-economical, political and cultural crises facing human society during the present crucial transition from the industrial to the post-industrial, global information age.

Updating and broadening the scope of the groundbreaking Springer book on Landscape Theory and Applications by the author and Lieberman (1994), this is a unique transdisciplinary attempt based on advanced systems complexity theories, which link the natural and human sciences.

FROM THE FOREWORD BY MARC ANTROP, LEADING LANDSCAPE ECOLOGIST AND CO-EDITOR OF "LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY":

Clearly, this anthology is not just a collection of previous work, but a reflection of a scholar on his past work looking at it with greater wisdom and concern for the future development. When he uses the term 'landscape ecology' it has a much broader meaning than just a kind of ecology or a specific discipline. He speaks of a transdisciplinary landscape science; biology-ecology and culture always go hand in hand when it comes to diversity, conservation and restoration. The real significance of ecological research is given by its contribution within the Total Human Ecosystem as part of the Grand Synthesis of Laszlo, who inspired very much Naveh's work.

FROM THE PREFACE BY ERVIN LASZLO, EMINENT, WORLD RENOWN, SYSTEM SCIENTIST, PLANNER AND PHILOSOPHER

It is a genuine pleasure and distinct privilege to write this introductory note to Zev Naveh's comprehensive summary of his life-work, an opus of truly epoch-making dimensions and significance. Writing this Preface is a personal pleasure because it is seldom that a theoretician can discover that his ideas have fallen on fertile grounds not only on the level of theory, but also of practice - or, as a first step, as practice-oriented applied theory. This, however, is what I have found in Naveh's writings. I am delighted that his THE (Total Human Ecosystem) model not only uses the holistic thinking I have long championed as a general framework, but finds use for such specific theoretical concepts as my general-evolution theoretical model of bifurcation-based sequential evolution, and even more remarkably, for the Integral Theory of Everything I have outlined recently, rooted in the concept of a universal information-field, the Akashic or A-field. ....

We should be grateful to courageous and insightful ecologists such as Zev Naveh for pointing to the fallacy of the fragmented reductionistic approach, and insisting that, both in the interest of scientific accuracy and of our life and future, applying the holistic paradigm of complex, interacting and information-imbued systems is of urgent and crucial importance.

If any reader may still entertain any doubt about the scientific validity and practical utility of the holistic approach in landscape ecology, he or she has only to read this volume. It marks a milestone in the vital advance of integrated evolutionary systems thinking in the empirical sciences.

FROM THE EPILOGUE BY EDITH ALLEN, LEADING RESTORATION ECOLOGIST AND FORMER EDITOR OF "RESTORATION ECOLOGY":

A LIFETIME OF LEADERSHIP IN THE FIELDS OF LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY, RESTORATION ECOLOGY, AND ECOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY

The foregoing anthology of Zev Naveh's life work shows not only the progression of his creative thought during his lifetime, but also developments in the fields of landscape and restoration ecology that he helped to shape. In addition, because he is a systems ecologist at heart, he participated in founding the new field of ecological complexity well before it became recognized as a field.

Thus he became one of the earliest restoration ecologists, but recognized that humans are part of nature and not apart from nature. The concepts of restoration and landscape ecology developed in tandem in Zev's writings. People were part of the landscape; they shaped the landscape, including the urban, semi-natural, and even the apparently "wild" components of the landscape.

Zev's writings emphasize that the cultural and natural processes that created the landscape must also be reinstated. He was in fact the first to introduce the term "cultural landscape restoration".

By his remarkable creativity, influential presentations at international meetings, and especially his writings, Zev has become the defining force for three major areas of ecology, and has shown how these areas are interdependent. It has been my great pleasure and honour to be Zev's colleague and co-worker for the last two decades.

From the reviews:

"Landscape ecology is a relatively new discipline which emerged in the 1980s from overlapping interests in ecology, geography, and conservation. … An anthology is always a useful reference work … . This one has been well produced and is a welcome addition to Springer’s ‘Landscape Series’… ." (Antoinette Mannion, Bulletin of the British Ecological Society, Vol. 38 (4), 2007)

"Zev Naveh and Arthur S. Lieberman presented the second edition of their widely appreciated book ‘Landscape Ecology’. …Moreover, the book will be of interest to anyone concerned with or curious to learn about integrated systems thinking."(Rainer Waldhardt, Phytocoenologia, Vol. 38 (4), 2008)