Israel Environment Bulletin Autumn 1997-5758, Vol. 20, No. 4
THE VALUE OF OPEN LANDSCAPES AS LIFE-SUPPORTING SYSTEMS
by Zev Naveh
Professor Emeritus, Lowdermilk Faculty of Agricultural Engineering,
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, 32000 Haifa, Israel
Editor's Note: Prof. Zev Naveh has written extensively on the subject of
ecodiversity conservationthe holistic conservation of biological and
cultural diversity of landscapes. He has continuously warned, in both
papers and scientific presentations, that pressures on open landscapes,
largely driven by population growth and urban, industrial and tourist
development, are threatening the biological, ecological and cultural
diversity, or in short the over-all "landscape ecodiversity" of our
planet. In his numerous studies on the future of Mediterranean forest
landscapes, Prof. Naveh has contended that integrative and
transdisciplinary methods and strategies for holistic landscape
conservation must be developed in order to halt creeping extinction and
ensure continued evolution. Prof. Naveh calls for the development of
semi-natural, human-managed landscapes where the dynamic flow equilibrium
between biodiversity, ecological heterogeneity and land uses at different
scales and intensities will be maintained and restored. To help bridge the
communication gap between researchers, on the one hand, and land managers,
the public and decision makers, on the other hand, more efficient tools
for scientific and technical information transfer should be developed.
These may include "Red Books" or "Green Books" for the conservation of
threatened landscapes. These would help translate the results of
integrated research and management projects into practical information and
make recommendations for implementation.
Prof. Naveh's vision of an environmental revolution whereby the expansion
of technospheric and agro-industrial landscapes will be replaced by their
total integration with the natural and cultural biosphere landscapes is
described in Landscape Ecology - Theory and Applications by Z. Naveh and
A.S. Lieberman (Second edition, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1994).
The following is excerpted from a presentation made by Prof. Naveh within
the framework of a Hadassah Panel on "The Race for Open Space" which was
held in February 1997.
If we look at any older land-use map of Israel, we will realize that all
the open and mostly untillable landscapes which are neither cultivated nor
designated as nature reserves or planted forests, are marked as wasteland.
This reflects the conception of planners that land is wasted if it is not
converted into more profitable purposes. This term has been used in the
evaluation of open spaces, such as sand dunes, wetlands and uplands, for
housing and highway construction by economic and political decision
makers. Decisions are guided almost exclusively by short-sighted economic
cost/benefit considerations. They ignore the fact that we live in the
higher, super system of our total human ecosystem in which humans and all
other living organisms are integrated with their total physical, natural
and socio-economic and cultural environmental.
If this total human ecosystem is taken as a yardstick for land use
decisions, then all open, non-cultivated land covered by a natural
vegetation mantle which has not yet been destroyed completely, or whose
original structure and function cannot be at least partly restored, should
be marked as natural life support systems fulfilling vital multiple
functions for our physical, social and cultural well-being. In addition to
their non-instrumental, intrinsic values (i.e., values for their own sake
as the last remaining refuge of nature and wildlife in our small and
crowded country), their unique value lies in the fact that they provide
free services of nature for human society, without need for further
inputs, because these are part of their natural function. They are
maintained solely by the biological conversion of high grade solar energy
through photosynthesis and assimilation into chemical and kinetic energy,
and by the recycling and bio-regeneration of living and non-living
material. In contrast to our intensive agricultural fields which are
subsidized heavily by fossil energy and chemicals and have detrimental
environmental impacts similar to urban-industrial technosphere landscapes,
these last islands of the biosphere are regulated by complex natural
feedback mechanisms of self-organization and self-recreation.
A detailed list of the multiple functions of natural systems is given by
De Groot (1992) in an important study on the "Functions of Nature" and
their evaluation. Their efficiency depends on the integrity of the living
sponge of soil and vegetation and their supporting physical air, water and
rock systems. These function together as ecosystems, but their actual
tangible sites are the three-dimensional patches of nature, namely the
smallest, mappable landscape cells known as "ecotopes" which together form
closely interlaced puzzles of landscape mosaics. The living sponge of
natural and semi-natural landscapes is irreplaceable, and the loss of
their life-supporting functions is irreversible.
Until they are impaired, we remain unaware of most of the free gifts of
nature, such as flood prevention, soil protection, filtering and breakdown
of pollutants, water collecting, cleaning and draining. But if our
decision makers would have as much ecological wisdom as they have
political and technological power to destroy these landscapes, they would
be willing to consider at least the economic "replacement values" of these
functions before they are lost. For their replacement they would need
costly engineering and technological devices whose production and
maintenance would require the use of polluting fossil energy and
non-biodegradable material and skilled technical supervision which would
be otherwise used for economic production. Thus, for example, Westman
calculated that it would cost $122 million to remove from an area of 4000
hectares the amount of sediments of eroded soil causing the siltation of
water collecting ponds and lakes. This erosion was prevented by the
ponderosa pine tree cover on these slopes before these trees were damaged
by ozone air pollution and by the dense shrub cover before its conversion
into open grassland for pasture and for highway construction.
In Israel, as in California, the protection and regulation function of the
vegetation covered mountainous areas are of vital importance in the
narrow, densely populated coastal strip. It would be worthwhile to
calculate the replacement value of the conversion of this living sponge of
soil and vegetation and their supporting physical air, water and rock
systems into asphalt highways. This includes not only the actual loss of
clean rain water for the coastal aquifer, but also the direct economic
damage caused by the accelerating floodings which affect urbanized coastal
plains almost every winter. These costs should be included in
environmental impact statements and in the cost/benefit calculations of
highway construction, along with the damages caused by air and water
pollution which would have been prevented by these natural vegetation
covered lands. In such calculations, we have to take into consideration
that each patch of land covered by grass increases by 10 times the
physical absorption and infiltration capacity of bare land or asphalt,
each patch of shrubland about 100 times and each patch covered by trees
1000 times. Moreover, these figures have to be raised by several powers in
order to calculate the biological and physico-chemical surface activity of
the canopy of shrubs and trees, functioning as powerful biological filters
and "green lungs." (Petsch, 1972).
According to Bernatzki (1968), an 80-year old huge oak tree in Germany,
covering an area of 160 square meters had a photosynthetic surface of
160,000 square meters. It absorbed during its lifetime 40 million cubic
meters of air-equivalent to the contents of 80,000 two-family houses.
Using only 6 calories of solar radiation each hour, it absorbed 2352 kg of
CO2 and contributed 1712 kg of O. When this tree was to be sacrificed for
the sake of "more comfortable car transportation," it was calculated that
its free services would have to be replaced by planting 2700 young trees
at a cost of 150,000-160,000 DM.
The contribution of trees to the supply of clean oxygen is of special
importance in polluted urban-industrial conurbations such as Haifa and
Haifa Bay because they can replace the oxygen consumed by cars. Thus, a 6
ton truck, driving 10,000 km may consume the oxygen requirement of 8-10
years of a physically active person. A small private car consumes about
400 cubic meters of oxygen-equivalent to 600 people (Berge, 1970).
Of no less importance are the air filtering and dust and pollution
absorption functions on this living sponge. Thus, a single chestnut tree,
30-years old, absorbed 120 kg of dust and 80 kg of microscopic particles
or aerosols and cleaned a polluted area of 100,000 cubic meters. A pine
forest in the Ruhr region absorbed 26 times more aerosols than in the
bordering bare area. A green strip of 2-3 km reduced SO2 concentrations
from the adjacent industrial area from 0.26 to 0.11 mg (Knabe, 1973). In
Russia, a green strip of 500 meters reduced the SO2 concentration by 75%
and NO2 by 67%. An ambient ozone concentration of 150 ppb was reduced by
an 1/8 in one hour and was undetected in the air after 8 hours. Trees were
found to be the only effective removers of CO in polluted areas and along
highways (Dochinger, 1980).
Vester (1985) calculated the economic replacement value of all biological,
ecological, socio-economical and cultural services provided in Germany by
an average single tree as worth 1675 DM. This is 200 times higher than its
value for timber alone. The German economy would have to spend 4230
billion DM every year in order to replace these functions and free
services. In another independent study carried out by a team of foresters
and planners, the multiple benefit values-also known as "social
functions"-of the forest near Baden-Baden were found to be 280 times
higher than the wood and timber products of this forest (Pabst, 1971).
However, we should not overestimate our ability to transfer the many
intangible "soft" values provided by natural and semi-natural landscapes
into hard money and market goods. Not everything which can be counted
counts, and many things which cannot be counted, count. De Groot, a Dutch
landscape ecologist, states that a change in the attitude of economic and
political decision makers in favor of long-term sustainability is more
important than constructing an artificial yardstick for measuring all
economic benefits of environmental functions. We may never be able to
measure the experience of nature, but at least we should attempt to
consider all the values of the natural environment in the economic
decision making process.
In our book on Landscape Ecology (Naveh and Lieberman, 1994), we
distinguish between "hard" landscape values which provide marketable goods
or can be evaluated in money terms, and "soft" values of economic
non-richness values. We conclude that there is an urgent need for a new,
post-industrial reconciliation, and even symbiosis between human society
and nature. In the terms of the great Jewish cultural philosopher and
teacher Martin Buber, our present estranged I-IT relation with nature
should be transformed into a new reciprocal I-THOU relation. An essential
part of these relations is the spiritual experience gained from these
landscapes and their intrinsic, amenity and aesthetic values. These are
far too rich to be reduced to dollar terms in markets and are more than
complementary to the aesthetic values attached to human art objects.
Therefore, they should not be viewed merely as a source for our
materialistic satisfaction, but also as a source of enlightenment and
enjoyment, as a vital source of mental health.
This can be realized only if the narrow and short-sighted monetary
evaluations in environmental cost/benefit calculations and land-use
decisions would be replaced by much broader ecological and socio-economic
functional evaluations of the soft and hard values provided by these
landscapes. Of great significance, in this respect, is the emergence of a
new synthetic field of ecological economy, aimed at achieving ecologically
and economically sustainable development. It has therefore, like landscape
ecology, a transdisciplinary goal which requires transcending the realm of
natural sciences into that of the humanities for a new, post-industrial
reconciliation between humans and nature.
In order to account for the full value of our natural and semi-natural
landscapes as life-supporting systems we have to include the following
three major domains in all land-use decisions:
1) The bio-ecological domain, related to those physical, chemical and
biological processes which ensure ecosystem function and structure, and
thereby also highest attainable biological and cultural diversity and
integrity.
2) The socio-cultural domain, related to environmental quality,
socio-hygienic, psychological and cultural requirements which ensure the
greatest possible overall benefit for the largest possible human
populations from a national and regional point of view.
3) The socio-economic domain, related to the direct economic benefits to
be derived from these landscapes as pastures, forests and recreation parks
or otherwise, under rational management, which will not endanger the
sustainability of these landscapes and the multiple benefits derived from
the other two domains.
In order to implement sustainable holistic land uses, regional masterplans
should be prepared which will ensure healthy, viable and attractive
natural and agricultural, rural and urban landscapes which provide
combined biological, ecological, cultural and socio-economic services.
This can only be achieved through an optimization of soft, intangible
values with non-economic riches and hard monetary landscape values.
REFERENCES
- Berge, H. 1969. Journal Vitalstoffe-Zivilisationkrankenheite 4/69.
- Bernatzky, A. 1968. Baum-Zitung 2:37-47.
- Buber, M. 1970. I and Thou. Scribner's, New York.
- De Groot. R.S. 1992. "Functions of Nature." Evaluation of Nature in
Environmental Planning, Management and Decision Making. Wolters-Noordhoff,
Amsterdam.
- Dochinger, L.S. 1980. "Interception of airborne particles by tree
planting". J. Environmental Quality 9:265-268.
- Kellert, R.S. 1996. "The Value of Life." Biological Diversity and
Human Society. Island Press/Shearwater Books. Washington, D.C.
- Naveh, Z. and A. Lieberman. 1994. Landscape Ecology, Theory and
Application. Springer-Verlag, New York.
- Pabst, H.R. 1971. Schriftenreihe der Landesforstverwaltung Baden
Wuertenberg, 35.
- Petsch, G. 1972. Schriftenreihe Siedlungsverband Ruhrkohlenbezirk 41,
27-30.
- Roszak, T. 1992. "The Voice of the Earth." An Exploration of
Ecopsychology. A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, New York.
- Vester, F. 1985. Ein Baum is mehr als ein Baun (One tree is more than
just one tree). Koesel Verlag, Munchen.
- Westman, W.E. 1985. Ecology, Impact Assessment and Environmental
Planning. John Wiley and Sons, New York.