Encountering Zev Naveh - A force of nature
One answer to the question of where urban ecology came from has to point to Zev Naveh. When I first heard Zev Naveh (1919-2011) a professor at
Israel's Technion, talking about the "total human ecosystem," I
didn't get it. Zev, whom I later hosted
on a sabbatical visit to Rutgers University, was way beyond my thinking about
people and ecology at the time. I had
been working on how communities of annual plants that colonized disturbed,
post-agricultural lands were put together.
I was also developing and generalizing ideas about natural disturbance, and working
to put succession in a connected, dynamic landscape perspective. I was just beginning to seriously think about humans and nature as a big picture. But at the time "landscape ecology"
was just coming together. Zev was one of
the people who was developing that big new field at the time.
One of his main points was that people were parts of real
ecological landscapes. That much I
got. That idea resonated with Richard
Forman's seminal definition of landscape, exemplified by the book written with
Michel Godron in 1986. Richard and I
were colleagues on the faculty of Rutgers University for about seven
years. In fact, Forman had invited Zev
to Rutgers for that sabbatical year, but had been lured away by Harvard before
Zev arrived. So I became Zev's host and colleague for that academic year. Since that visit, I
had often seen Zev at national and international ecological and landscape
meetings. But I must admit, that the
idea of the total human ecosystem had become a little rusty in my memory.
Reminders
A few days ago, I was assembling papers to prepare for writing
a new paper. As is often the case,
digging around in the bibliography of one paper leads to new papers, or reminds
one of things that one had neglected for a while. I came across a citation of a published
lecture of Zev's that I hadn't read. It
was in an obscure publication, but fortunately The Technion had archived some
of Zev's papers on an accessible website.
Here's what I was reminded of.
And the embarrassing admission is how useful Zev's thinking -- summarized in 1992 -- about urban
ecosystems remains. Here are some
nuggets, admittedly filtered through my current lens of urban ecological
thinking.
- It is really useful to think of urban ecosystems as landscapes, and landscapes can exist at any scale. There is no single landscape scale.
- Patches are actually three-dimensional things.
- Urban systems integrate biological, physical, ecological, technological, economic, and cultural components. This is summarized as his" total human ecosystem" idea. Zev uses classical terms like biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere (the global network of ideas), but insisted that they are integrated in landscapes.
- Ecology's origin as a biological science colored its application to cities, where most attention was on what organisms were present and where. Some of us later called this the ecology "in" cities approach (Pickett et al. 1997).
- A hierarchical, systems theory approach is useful for organizing thinking and suggesting both bottom up and top down control in focal components of landscapes in general -- and urban systems. This is the holon perspective long used in systems theory, for which he cites Koestler (1969), for the idea.
- Technology is a part of urban systems, so the contemporary emphasis on social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) has a deep precedent.
- Globalization is part of his thinking: He acknowledges that even then nearly 50% of Earth's people lived in urban areas; furthermore, technology is represented as a global system, not just a local set of tools and constructions.
- Landscape ecology -- and by extension -- urban ecology, must be transdisciplinary.
- He calls for the use not only of ecological knowledge in improving the role of urban-industrial (fossil and nuclear added to biomass powered) systems, but also ecological wisdom and ethics. Alas, anthropologist Joseph Tinker suggests that social systems -- as drivers of environmental degradation -- are hardly ever voluntarily limited. Rather, the collapse with the administrative and social costs of increasing complexity.)
- Ecological knowledge is crucial for urban design, and cities need "green and watered" components, perhaps ideally constituting 10% of urban land, in his opinion.
 |
| The total human ecosystem has a long history. |
·
There are deep literatures in the components he
brings together, going back to plant ecologist and iconoclast Frank Egler (1970)
for the total human environment idea first used in discussing industrial agricultural
impacts. His brief literature cited
contains classics of hierarchy theory, systems theory, and complexity theory. Jantsch (1975) is another key contributor to
Zev's thinking on complexity.
Well, it's a little sobering to find so many ideas that many
of us take as hallmarks of "modern" urban ecology so well articulated
and well foreshadowed so long ago. But
on the other hand, it is comforting to know that one of the inventors of
landscape ecology, and one of the champions of systems theory and understanding
spatial heterogeneity in ecology was pointing to the path urban ecology has
followed.
Literature Cited:
The Paper this Essay is About:
Naveh, Zev. 1992. A landscape ecological approach to urban
systems as part of the total human ecosystem.
Journal of the National History Museum and Institute Chiba. 2:47-62http://tx.technion.ac.il/~znaveh/files/Landscape%20Ecology%20Theory%20and%20Global%20Applications/landscape%20ecological%20approach%20to%20urban.pdf
Supporting:
Egler, F.E. 1970. The Way of Science: A Philosophy of
Ecology for the Layman. Hafner, New York
Forman, R.T.T. and M. Godron. 1986. Landscape Ecology. Wiley
and Sons, New York
Jantsch, E. 1975. esign for Evolution: Self-Organization and
Planning in the Life of Human Systems. George Braziller, New York.
Koestler, A. 1969. Beyond atomism and holism - The concept
of the holon. In Al Koestler, and J.R. Smithies, eds. Beyond Reductionism: New
Perspectives in the Life Sciences. Hutchinson, London.
The Other References:
Pickett, S.T.A., W.R. Burch, Jr., and S.E. Dalton. 1997.
Guest editorial: Integrated urban ecosystem research: Themes, needs, and
applications. Urban Ecosystems
1(4):183-184. (For ecology in/of cities)
McPhearson, Timon, S.T.A. Pickett, N. Grimm, J. Niemelä, M.
Alberti, T. Elmqvist, C. Weber, J. Breuste, D. Haase, and S. Qureshi. "Advancing Urban Ecology Towards a
Science of Cities." BioScience, accepted. (for social-ecological-technical
systems)
Tainter, Joseph A. (1990). The Collapse of Complex Societies (1st paperback ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-38673-X.
An Obituary:
Antrop, M., & Pinto Correia, T. In memoriam Zev Naveh (1919 Amsterdam–2011 Haifa). Landscape Urban Plan.
(2011), doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.06.003
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