Landscape ecology and sustainability

Abstract

One of the major themes of the recent 7th IALE World Congress was ‘‘Landscape Ecology and Sustainability.’’ However, in spite of the many planning, management, conservation, and restoration projects presented at the congress and published in ‘‘Landscape Ecology’’ and other journals, the real impact of landscape ecology (LE) on decision making on sustainable land use is still very limited. With exception of the Netherlands, Slovakia, and UK, the ‘‘landscape’’ as the most suitable, integrative conceptual, and practical tool for sustainable development has not yet reached nationand worldwide recognition. This IALE World Congress took place in the crucial transitional period from the industrial age to the global information age. This ‘‘Macroshift’’ (sensu Laszlo 2001) is marked by a severe ecological, cultural, and socio-economic crisis, in which human society has little time left for the choice of navigating this transformation either to a breakdown or to breakthrough towards a sustainable world. Such a breakthrough is a ‘‘chaos point’’ (Laszlo 2006), during which any input or influence on the system, however small, can replace existing trends by new trends and processes. It can be achieved only by an urgently needed, ecological, socio-economic and cultural and technological ‘‘sustainability revolution’’, leading to the sustainable future of nature and human life on Earth. In this sustainability revolution full use of scientific and technological potentials should be made for a post-industrial symbiosis between human society and nature. This requires above all a shift from the ‘‘fossil age’’ to the ‘‘solar age’’ of a new world economy, based on the limitless power of the sun as the non-polluting and renewable energy source. It requires a shift from depletion of natural resources to their more efficient and wiser sustainable use, by recycling and reducing through-flows of material and energy and their adverse impacts on human and landscape health. It will be driven not only by the widespread adoption of technological innovations of regenerative and recycling methods, but also the efficient utilization of solar, wind, water and other non-polluting and renewable sources of energy. As a cultural evolutionary process it must be coupled with more sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns, caring for nature and even investing in nature. We will only be able to gain a significant influence in the decision process towards sustainability if we will take an active role in steering this Macroshift towards such an all-embracing sustainability revolution as concerned landscape scientists. Our main challenge is to respond together with all those dealing Z. Naveh (&) Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32 000, Israel e-mail: znave@technion.ac.il