How landscape became ecosystem

Abstract

The history of the quantitative revolution in geography has received increased attention in recent years by a wide range of authors from a broad spectrum of geographical contexts. After a short introduction to the dominant narrative about the history of the quantitative revolution in German geography, this chapter follows three concepts of nature – landscape, landscape ecology, and ecosystem – and their relation to the understanding of geography as a holistic discipline. The dominant narrative about the quantitative and theoretical revolution in (West) German geography focuses on two events that took in the late 1960s when the quantitative revolution in some countries already started to be challenged by a new generation of radical geographers. The Anglophone debates of the 1950s and 1960s were hardly received at the time and only had a limited impact on German geography.