Pope Gregory I, commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his “Dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where (...) the Christian God is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions. This article outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. Shaped around the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives, and local communities. My aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book and thus prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to become part of the “Dialogues Bioregional Project” and collaborate in its further development. (shrink)

The holism-reductionism debate, one of the classic subjects of study in the philosopy of science, is currently at the heart of epistemological concerns in ecology. Yet the division between holism and reductionism does not always stand out clearly in this field. In particular, almost all work in ecosystem ecology and landscape ecology presents itself as holistic and emergentist. Nonetheless, the operational approaches used rely on conventional reductionist methodology.From an emergentist epistemological perspective, a set of general 'transactional' (...) principles inspired by the work of J. Dewey and J.K. Feibleman are proposed in an effort to develop a coherent ontological and methodological semantics. (shrink)

Connolly draws on the recent changes in the Malaysian state of Penang to open up new perspectives on urban development, governance and the politics of place. Reviewing the role of residents, activists, planners and other experts in socio-natural changes and urban regeneration, it builds an important new framework of landscape political ecology.

Both landscape and aesthetics are all too often considered disengaged categories associated with leisure and contemplation. This book establishes landscape as a key concept in contemporary thought and rethinks aesthetics in political and activist terms. In order to do so, it challenges the dualism of "the environment" as the space inhabited by humans and the province of the natural sciences about which philosophy has little to say. (This separation is evident even in the name of the recent field (...) of environmental humanities.) In a holistic view, landscapes are at the intersection of environment and human, place and people, and nature and culture, and aesthetics provide an immersive and engaged approach to them. Landscapes are ways of being in the world and aesthetics practical means of inhabiting them. Utilizing a pragmatist, antiessentialist lens, Alberto L. Siani characterizes landscapes (as opposed to environments and territories) as concrete, experienced habitats, performative ways of making sense of the world, while aesthetics (following Dewey) identify values and ordering criteria that permeate them. He addresses issues such as temporality, environmentalism, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity within this framework and in conversation with scientific positions. A coda gives three phenomenological accounts of intensely experienced and inhabited landscapes. (shrink)

The image of a ball rolling along a series of hills and valleys is an effective heuristic by which to communicate stability concepts in ecology. However, the dynamics of this landscape model have little to do with ecological systems. Other landscape representations, however, are possible. These include the particle on an energy landscape, the potential landscape, and the Lyapunov function landscape. I discuss the dynamics that these representations admit, and the application of each to (...) ecological modeling and the analysis and representation of stability. (shrink)

On some accounts, Sophocles’ Philoctetes is most notable for what it lacks: alone among the extant Attic tragedies, there are no women in the dramatis personae; alone among the extant plays of Sophocles, no characters die; and the chorus plays a relatively diminished role, adhering most closely to Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that a chorus should take on the role of an actor. But when viewed through the lens of ecocritical feminism and vibrant materialism, notably the work of Donna (...) Haraway, Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, and Anna Tsing, the play’s landscape, the island of Lemnos, comes to life; and it teems with feminine energies as well as compromised and complicated animacies, while the chorus serves as an empathic focalizer and world-builder. This paper argues that in addition to animating the island’s material ecosystem, Sophocles conjures Lemnos’ mythic ecosystem, most notably the tale of the notorious, murderous, and malodorous Lemnian Women. All of these elements cohere to characterize Philoctetes as an abject, sterile menstruator. Furthermore, the chorus’s brief, strange Hymn to Gaia encapsulates the play’s tension between a masculine, heroic, teleological narrative and the feminine, primordial, bestial world of Lemnos. These dynamics are further considered through the lens of fifth-century Athenian colonization, the story of the indigenous Lemnian Pelasgians, and a colonial reading of the Odyssey’s Cyclopeia. Finally, the paper explores the close, mutually constitutive relationship between text, landscape, and body via the popularity, in later antiquity, of pharmacological applications of Lemnian Earth, used to treat, among other ailments, snakebites and menstruation. (shrink)

Restoring Layered Landscapes explores ecological restoration in complex landscapes, where ecosystems intertwine with important sociopolitical meanings.

Résumé: Jusqu’à présent, le développement humain a eu pour corolaire la destruction des paysages culturels. Avec le développement de la civilisation industrielle, les gens ne profitent pas seulement du bonheur qu’elle leur apporte, mais sont également confrontés à divers problèmes liés aux paysages culturels. La philosophie de l’environnement est une philosophie moderne qui considère la relation entre l’homme et la nature comme une question fondamentale, et qui met l’accent sur la protection des paysages culturels. L’analyse de la philosophie environnementale de (...) la Chine ancienne montre que les anciens penseurs se souciaient de tout ce qui se trouve au ciel et sur la terre et qu’ils exploraient en profondeur des questions telles que le développement harmonieux entre l’homme et la nature, offrant ainsi une nouvelle approche de la protection des paysages culturels chinois. Prenant l’exemple de la philosophie environnementale taoïste, cet article propose une analyse préliminaire de la définition des paysages culturels, du développement de la philosophie environnementale et de la philosophie environnementale taoïste. Partant de là, il explore le rôle de la philosophie environnementale telle que “l’unité du ciel et de l’homme” dans la construction de la civilisation écologique, apportant ainsi de nouvelles idées pour la protection des paysages culturels. (shrink)

For most of the twentieth century, nature conservation activities were connected to the protection of agrarian landscapes. During the late 1980s, the introduction of the concept of 'new wilderness' offered new opportunities for ecologists, but at the same time produced conflicts with traditional nature and landscape conservation. At the heart of the conflict were different visions of the relation between nature and society, sometimes resulting in a polarised debate, with opposing Arcadian and wilderness visions. In this paper, the new (...) wilderness will be described from a landscape perspective, envisioning these wildernesses as a phase in the long history of human influences on landscapes and as part of a landscape that is complex and multi-layered. Some examples will show how a sectoral approach to nature leads to projects in which opportunities to integrate the new wilderness into a wider context of landscape and society are missed. In the final part, a prospect will be shown in which (new) wilderness is seen as part of a layered landscape. (shrink)

Agriculture has long struggled to reconcile production with biodiversity conservation. Industrial farming practices that erode structural complexity within crop fields and across entire landscapes, as well as widespread pesticide use, have resulted in declining insect abundance and diversity globally. Recognition of socio-environmental consequences have spurred alternative pest management paradigms such as integrated pest management (IPM) and conservation biological control (CBC), which emphasize ecology as the scientific foundation for a sustainable agriculture. However, adoption of these approaches at scales large enough (...) to impact biodiversity has been slow, particularly in industrialized countries. Landscape-scale management is an integral component of ecological agriculture, making pest control and biodiversity conservation collective problems that require coordination among multiple stakeholders. The extent to which farmers recognize and act upon this perspective is not well studied. Through literature synthesis and a case study of Southern Wisconsin, I analyze factors shaping farmer adoption of insect and landscape management practices through the lens of constrained choice. I argue that multiple overlapping institutions (social networks, market forces, science and technology, and political-legal systems) co-produce farmer behaviors and landscape structure, largely to the detriment of ecological pest control and biodiversity. Wisconsin farmers' entomological concerns largely overlook beneficial insect species and eschew landscape thinking. Ultimately, slowing agricultural drivers of insect biodiversity declines will likely require large-scale coordination and political-economic change. (shrink)

Considering that the development of urbanization cannot be separated from the application of landscape pattern evolution, in order to improve the development level of ecocity, a modeling analysis of ecological urban landscape pattern evolution based on multisource remote sensing data is proposed. Taking ecotype city as the research object, the remote sensing images of ecological urban landscape pattern are screened by using multisource remote sensing data and nonremote sensing data as the basic data. CA-Markov model is constructed (...) and the evolution of ecological urban landscape pattern is analyzed. The experimental results show that, from 2005 to 2020, the development level of urbanization process is higher and higher and the area of building land patches is increasing, which reduces the fragmentation of building land patches. However, the landscape of cultivated land and green space is less and less, and the distribution of the patches also causes uneven phenomenon, which leads to the gradual decline of ecological urban landscape diversity. In the ecological urban landscape pattern, the degree of fragmentation and diversity of urban landscape is reduced due to the high connection and coverage of the construction land. (shrink)

Over the last several decades, scholars and practitioners have progressively acknowledged that we cannot consider cities as the place where nature stops anymore, resulting in urban environments being increasingly appreciated and theorized as hybrids between nature and culture, entities made of socio-ecological processes in constant transformation. Spanning the fields of political ecology, environmental studies, and sociology, this new direction in urban theory emerged in concert with global concern for sustainability and environmental justice. This volume explores the notion that connecting (...) with nature holds the key to a more progressive and liberatory politics. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of a qualitative investigation into the ethical and aesthetic values held by late- and mid-career landscape architects in the UK. It identifies the dominant discourses within three value areas, the aesthetic, the social and the environmental. Within the web of value discourses, some are clearly conflicting, while others are compatible or mutually supporting. The most prevalent values are those associated with 'technocentric accommodation'. A 'trivalent' approach to design is advocated which combines values from the (...) three main areas. (shrink)

The agro-pastoral ecotone, an ecological transition zone connecting adjacent areas of agricultural planting area and grassland animal husbandry, has three features: a complex natural condition, relatively pronounced population pressure, and a fragile ecological environment. In this study, we conducted an ecosystem risk assessment in the western part of Jilin Province, China, based on multiscale and multitemporal remote sensing images and land-use data. Furthermore, we focused on land-use change from 1995 to 2015 by applying the dynamic change information survey method and (...) carrying out a transfer track analysis. The results revealed three main findings. The ecological risk index at the scale of 3 km × 3 km harbors significant spatial correlation. The ecological risk index of unutilized land, forest land, and grassland is relatively high for each, and their anti-interference ability is weak, while the ecological risk index of construction land and water area is the lowest. Human interference, e.g., construction activities and cultivated land occupation, is the leading factor driving the exacerbation of ecological risk and frequent land-use type conversions. At the study period’s end, a trend of slight contraction in the high-risk areas was found, indicating that land-use regulation and land protection policies have had significantly positive impact upon the lands’ ecological value. The overall study identified a reasonable research scale for eco-environmental risk assessment and discerned relationships between regional land-use changes through geospatial analysis. Moreover, our findings can help provide practical case study information applicable to similar regions with agro-pastoral ecotones. (shrink)

Ecological restoration and native landscaping are increasing, particularly in the American Midwest, where they form part of the area's history and culture of conservation. But practitioners rarely pause to ask philosophical questions related to categories of native and invasive or human control and harmony with nature. This article brings philosophy into conversation with practice, using members of Wild Ones Native Landscaping, a non-profit headquartered in Neenah, WI, as a case study. Philosophers and ethicists who are studying Ecological Restoration and Native (...) Landscaping can learn valuable lessons - in practicality, aesthetics and flexibility - from practitioners such as the Wild Ones. (shrink)

In Europe, an increasing share of public subsidies for food production is being transferred towards the production of goods and environmental services. Today, farmers hesitate between the quest for technical and economic performance, which has been the paradigm of their professional activities since the 1960s, on one hand, and taking account of the environmental concerns that have been imposed since the middle of the 80s, on the other. Is it possible for farmers to continue to work according to the paradigm (...) of the producer of agri-food goods, and how do they react to the ecologization of their activities? In this paper, we will see the difficulties and sources of tension induced by landscape maintenance in the daily professional practice of the farmers. We will see that the professional identity of the farmers is profoundly brought into question by these changes (substitution of strictly “agricultural issues” by more general concerns such as “rural issues,” substitution of the farmer by the “ecologized” peasant...). The topic of landscape reveals social strains between farmers. It also raises the question of the legitimacy of farmers to define the sense of their activities by themselves. Finally we will see that environmental orientations do not systematically open up new prospects for all farmers; they sometimes contribute to increase the inequalities between farmers (financial support proportional to land property, marginalization of farmers who are less socially integrated...). (shrink)

Contributing to the cultural ecosystem services literature, this paper draws on the in-depth place narratives of two coastal case-study sites in Wales (UK) to explore how people experience and understand landscape change in relation to their sense of place, and what this means for their wellbeing. Our place narratives reveal that participants understand coastal/intertidal landscapes as complex socio-ecological systems filled with competing legitimate claims that are difficult to manage. Such insights suggest that a focus on diachronic integrity (Holland and (...) O'Neill 1996) within place narratives might offer a route to more socially and culturally acceptable environmental management strategies. (shrink)

This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental conflicts in India. It explores broadly, landscape-based analyses of political, economic and social issues, which impact environmental changes, challenges and conflicts at local and micro-local levels. The chapters in this volume examine the intervention of different stakeholders in the management of various regional ecological landscapes in India, including forests, rivers, canals, creeks and wetlands. The volume is an interdisciplinary endeavour, weaving together contextual narratives through a combination of approaches (...) from sociology, anthropology, geography, political studies and environmental history. Using such core approaches, the book studies the place-based dynamisms within the regional environmental conflicts in the selected conservation landscapes. It provides empirical reflections on transboundary issues, rural-urban transitions, middle-class environmentalism, identity conflicts, decentralized natural resource management and the role of political institutions. Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Ecology and South Asian Environmental Studies. (shrink)

Well-intended natural resource policies that ignore the complexity of socio-ecological systems too often threaten local values and opportunities for sustainable development. Upland areas throughout Indonesia provide examples of complex socio-ecological systems experiencing rapid socio-economic and environmental transformations in response to interactions between development policies and local agendas. Broad natural resource policies influence socio-ecological systems in different ways. In some cases, there are converging national and local goals, while in others the goals of national policy conflict with local aspirations. This study (...) identifies how broadscale policies could respond to the unique characteristics of upland areas to optimise development outcomes and avoid unintended risks for people and the landscape. The theory of reflexive modernity is utilised to illustrate how two national policies, the Community Forestry initiative and the Irrigation Reservoir program, largely discount the complexity of local values in the uplands of Pagar Alam, Indonesia. We identify local farmer aspirations through an analysis of development narratives and relate how they are impacted upon by the two policies. Our findings indicate that dominant development goals and associated sustainability pathways diverge in a range of ways from local farmer values and aspirations. We suggest that policymakers take more consideration of four interacting elements, namely: local ecological traits; local values and institutions; the multiple development pathways; and exogenous market drivers that affect local development, to promote sustainability and increase the likelihood of achieving all desired policy outcomes. (shrink)

Ecological sciences have informed environmental ethics from its inception as a scholarly pursuit in the 1970s-so much so that we now have ecological ethics, Deep Ecology, and ecofeminism. Throughout the 20th century, however, most ecologists remained enthralled by the myth that science is value-free. Closer study of science by philosophers reveals that metaphors are inescapable and cognitively indispensable to science, but that metaphors are value-laden. As we confront the enormous challenges of the 21st century-the prospect of a 6th mass (...) extinction, acidifying oceans, rising sea level, and global warming-ecologists can no longer remain aloof from public discourse about what actions to take to address these problems. And that means that 21st century ecologists understand that right action is guided by ethics. However, integration of ethical ideas into academic curricula and ecologists' research agendas is still meager. Aldo Leopold, 1947 President of the Ecological Society of America, keenly understood that latent in ecological sciences is an organizing worldview, with implications for reordering societal values and expanding ethics to embrace "soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." Going beyond Leopold's land ethic, contemporary environmental ethics includes eco-social justice and the realization that as important as biodiversity is cultural diversity, inter-cultural, inter-institutional, and international collaboration requiring a novel approach known as biocultural conservation. Right action in confronting the challenges of the 21st century requires science and ethics to be seamlessly integrated. Contemporary science proposes the concept of the inclusive ecosystem that recognizes humans as components. In this book, this "inclusive conviction is endorsed, fortunately, by over forty contributors sharing their accounts, of living well in place, combining nature and culture, residing on landscapes: biocultural ethics" (Holmes Rolston, III). (shrink)

Andean philosophy of nature or pachasophy results from topography and mode of production that, merged together, have produced an integrated and interacting worldview that blurs the line between culture and nature. Respecting Pacha, or the interconnectedness of life and geography, maintaining complementarity and equilibrium through symbolic interactions, and caring for Pachamama, the feminine presence of Pacha manifested mainly as cultivable soil are the basis of Andean environmental and social ethics. Reciprocity or ayni is the glue that holds everything together. This (...) weaving of traditional beliefs, customs, and ecologi­cal knowledge is rooted in the landscape and has sustained Quechua and Aymara societies during many millennia of knowing, using, and transforming the varied environments of the central Andes of South America. Any environmental ethics that influences people’s lives and promotes respectful and sustainable relationships with nature will be framed by already held worldviews. In Bolivia indigenous intellectuals are drawing on the ancient tradition of Pacha to trace an environmental ethics of pacha qamaña or the harmonious and integral well-being of life, the Earth, and the cosmos, and the ethics of suma qamaña as an all em­bracing ethical framework for the “good life” or “living well.” Although pacha qamaña and suma qamaña are rooted in the Andean mythological worldview, they will interest Western philosophers because the values they promote can be correctives for Western cultural traits that see little more than instrumental value in nature. In this sense, pacha qamaña and suma qamaña contribute to the broader discussion of environmental ethics. (shrink)

Aesthetic appreciation of landscape is by no means limited to the sensuous enjoyment of sights and sounds. It very often has a reflective, cognitive element as well. This sometimes incorporates scientific knowledge, e.g.,geological or ecological; but it can also manifest what this article will call 'metaphysical imagination', which sees or seems to see in a landscape some indication, some disclosure of how the world ultimately is. The article explores and critically appraises this concept of metaphysical imagination, and some (...) of the roles it can play in our aesthetic encounters. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to explore common concerns regarding methodological individualism in different fields of the life sciences broadly construed. It will address conceptual problems regarding individuals and their relation and dependence on the collectivities they are part of and consider innovative new viewpoints, grounded in specific scientific projects that question the present descriptions and understanding and raise challenges. A wide variety of recent, influential contributions in the life sciences utilize notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions and emergent (...) phenomena, as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. -/- Examples range from gene expression and regulation, the dynamics of bacterial populations, the ecological developmental biology of symbiosis, levels of selection, to communication, motion and patterns of behavior in diverse life forms, the role of social institutions and cultural dynamics in human evolution, and the psychological basis for social norms. The book is being structured so that fruitful and rewarding disciplinary interactions take place among researchers and scholars who have been concerned with overcoming methodological individualism. -/- The books includes a section of four papers on holobionts and the hologenome theory and a special memorial article on the work of the late Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob authored by Herbert Levine. (shrink)

Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, although the emergentist, multi-level, triadic methodology of J.K. Feibleman and D.T. Campbell has gained acceptance, the importance (...) of emergent properties is still undervalued. In global ecology, the Gaia hypothesis is an expression of an organicist metaphor, while the emergentist terminology used is incongruent with the underlying physicalist cybernetics. More generally, an analytico-additional methodology and the reduction of the properties of ecosystems to the laws of physical chemistry render purely formal any assertion about the emergentist and holistic nature of the ecological systems studied. (shrink)

Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manila's dense urban region with fish and water while operating as a sink for its stormflows and wastes. Transforming the lake to deliver these multiple urban ecological functions, however, has generated resource conflicts and contradictions that unfold unevenly across space. In Urban Ecologies on the Edge, Kristian Karlo Saguin tracks the politics of resource flows and unpacks the narratives of Laguna Lake as Manila's resource frontier. Provisioning the city and keeping it (...) safe from floods are both frontier-making processes that bring together contested socioecological imaginaries, practices, and relations. Combining fieldwork and historical accounts, Saguin demonstrates how people--powerful and marginalized--interact with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the city's edge. (shrink)

Agriculture occupies 38% of the planet’s terrestrial surface, using 70% of freshwater resources. Its modern practice is dominated by an industrial–productivist discourse, which has contributed to the simplification and degradation of human and ecological systems. As such, agricultural transformation is essential for creating more sustainable food systems. This paper focuses on discursive change. A prominent discursive alternative to industrial–productivist agriculture is regenerative agriculture. Regenerative discourses are emergent, radically evolving and diverse. It is unclear whether they have the potential to generate (...) the changes required to shift industrial–productivist agriculture. This paper presents a literature-based discourse analysis to illustrate key thematic characteristics of regenerative agricultural discourses. The analysis finds that such discourses: situate agricultural work within nested, complex living systems; position farms as relational, characterised by co-evolution between humans and other landscape biota; perceive the innate potential of living systems as place-sourced; maintain a transformative openness to alternative thinking and practice; believe that multiple regenerative cultures are necessary for deeply regenerative agriculture; and depart from industrialism to varying degrees. The paper concludes by reviewing three transformative opportunities for regenerative discourses—discourse coalitions, translocal organising and collective learning. (shrink)

Starting with the hypothesis that during this first decade of the 21st century a certain territorial culture has spread that implies greater awareness of landscape on the part of the authorities, the economic and social agents who exercise a degree of leadership in territorial matters and the general public, this article sets out to analyse the possibility that a new ethics of landscape is beginning to take shape. The notion of landscape as proposed by the European Convention (...) in Florence in 2000 looks at the idea of the social construction of landscape. In this new paradigm, landscape is conceived as a social product, the cultural projection of a society in a given space from a material, spiritual and symbolic standpoint. Landscape is understood to be inherently dynamic and changing. When the elements that give a particular landscape its historical and cultural continuity are suddenly removed and its sense of place is lost, we are seeing not evolution in the landscape but its destruction. And the very idea of intervention in these landscapes gives rise to the need for principles and moral values that will provide guidelines that allow landscapes, whether unique or commonplace, to evolve without being destroyed. As I see it, therefore, there is an obvious need for an ethics applicable to regional and landscape planning and management. The new ethics of landscape must be based on the ethics of responsibility, taking into account the dignity of nature, the rights of future generations to enjoy quality landscapes and the rights and duties of today's citizens whose interventions transform landscapes and with them their collective identity, their quality of life, their physical and social welfare and, in short, their happiness. (shrink)

This essay begins with some observations concerning the interaction between nature and art. Relying on these reflections, in the second part experience of landscape will be interpreted as a model for the human stance within the natural as well as the historical world. In the third part some consequences for an ethics and politics of saving the conditions for individual as well as social well-being will be drawn.

Introduction changing climates of colonialism -- Every Navajo has an anthro -- Extractive legacies: histories of Diné power -- The rise of energy activism -- Solar power in Klagetoh -- Sovereignty's interdependencies -- Contesting expertise: Public hearings on Desert Rock -- Artifacts of energy futures -- Off-grid in the Chuskas -- Conversions -- Vitalities.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 164-188, June 2022.

Ecology is composed of a remarkably diverse set of scientific disciplines. There are many different sub-fields in ecology—physiological, behavioral, evolutionary, population, community, ecosystem, and landscape ecology. Clearly, no summary will do them all justice. However, for the present context, ecology as a science can be divided into three basic areas—population, community, and ecosystem ecology. This entry will introduce some of the fundamental philosophical issues raised by these three disciplines. The first order of business is (...) to ask what is the science of ecology, and more importantly, what is it not (see Brennan 1988). Sometimes the term ‘ecology’ is treated as synonymous or coextensive with three different concepts or sets of concepts: • The science of ecology: the study of organisms and groups of them and their relation to their environment. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume move through time and space--from prehistoric Europe to the Enlightenment, and from industrial Victorian England to Aboriginal Australia--to compare the ways in which the environment is constructed in different ways across cultures.

Environmental landscaping is known to build, plan, and manage landscapes that consider the ecology of a site and produce gardens that benefit both people and the rest of the ecosystem. Landscaping and the environment are combined in landscape design planning to provide holistic answers to complex issues. Seeding native species and eradicating alien species are just a few ways humans influence the region’s ecosystem. Landscape architecture is the design of landscapes, urban areas, or gardens and their modification. (...) It comprises the construction of urban and rural landscapes via coordinating the creation and management of open spaces and economics, finding a job, and working within a confined project budget. There was a lot of discussion about global warming and water shortages. There is a lot of hope to be found even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. AI is becoming more significant in many urban landscape planning and design elements with the advent of web 4.0 and Human-Centred computing. It created a virtual reality-based landscape to create deep neural networks (DNNs) to make deep learning (DL) more user-friendly and efficient. Users may only manipulate physical items in this environment to manually construct neural networks. These setups are automatically converted into a model, and the real-time testing set is reported and aware of the DNN models that users are producing. This research presents a novel strategy for combining DL-DNN with landscape architecture, providing a long-term solution to the problem of environmental pollution. Carbon dioxide levels are constantly checked when green plants are in and around the house. Plants, on either hand, remove toxins from the air, making it easier to maintain a healthy environment. Human-centered Artificial Intelligence-based web 4.0 may be used to assess and evaluate the data model. The study findings can be sent back into the design process for further modification and optimization. (shrink)

introduction to the theme issue of Environmental Values on Rewilding in cultural layered landscapes. Rewilding projects, especially in culturally saturated landscapes, are often being opposed by those who deeply care about the old cultural landscapes (for cultural or ecological reasons). Indeed, some proponents of rewilding today fall back on the language that was developed by the early proponents of wilderness preservation, starting off from an opposition between wild nature and culture, and claiming that nature needs to be protected against human (...) domination, while also claiming the importance of wild nature as an antidote to the historical dominance that humans have had over the natural world. However, seeing cultural landscapes merely as ‘disturbed’ by humans fails to do justice to the way that human history and these landscapes are intimately intertwined. Therefore, other rewilding advocates feel that rewilding in cultural landscapes requires a fundamentally different approach. Rather than seeking to restore a situation of the past, for them, rewilding is fundamentally oriented towards the future and seeks to introduce wildness back into society. Despite these attempts to reconcile rewilding with concerns over landscape history, cultural identity and cultural heritage, clear tensions remain. The papers in this theme issue attempt to find connections between different perspectives on landscape and nature protection and contribute to the ongoing debate about the meaning and value of wildness and history in layered cultural landscapes. (shrink)