History of the concept

Naveh and Lieberman (1994) and Naveh (2000) proposed the holistic, eco-centric concept of the Total Human Ecosystem in order to study the anthropocene

Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems...

 ecology and improve land use planning and environmental management, within an integrated and interdisciplinary approach. This concept (or better meta-concept) integrates human systems (the technosphere, but also in the conceptual space of human noosphere

Noosphere

Noosphere , according to the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the "sphere of human thought". The word is derived from the Greek νοῦς + σφαῖρα , in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere". Introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 1922 in his Cosmogenesis"...

) and natural systems (the geophysical eco-space of the Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 biosphere

Biosphere

The biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. It can also be called the zone of life on Earth, a closed and self-regulating system...

) and their total environment at the highest co-evolutionary complexity

Complexity

In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. The study of these complex linkages is the main goal of complex systems theory. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are...

 level of the global ecological hierarchy. Naveh (2005) defines the concept of Total Human Ecosystem as:

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Zev Naveh (1919), PhD, is Professor Emeritus in landscape ecology at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. Until 1965 he worked as a range and pasture specialist in Israel and Tanzania. His research at the Technion was devoted to human impacts on Mediterranean landscapes, fire ecology and dynamic conservation management, and the introduction of drought resistant plants for multi-beneficial landscape restoration and beautification.

Almo Farina is Professor of Ecology at the Urbino University, Faculty of Environmental Sciences (Urbino, Italy).

Concepts and epistemology

The interaction and co-evolution of the human and natural ecosystem

Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....

 interactions are the driving forces for the current Earth System. The Total Human Ecosystem meta-conceptional approach have to integrate the bio-and geo-centric approaches, derived from the natural sciences, and the approaches derived from the social sciences

Social sciences

Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...

 and the humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

 in order to prevent further environmental degradation and drive natural and human systems towards a sustainable future.

A natural ecosystem within this concept is solar- energy

Energy

In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...

 powered, self-organizing and self-creating (autopoietic). A human ecosystem is fossil energy powered by high input and throughput and can be divided in urban-industrial ecosystem or agro-industrial. The ecosystem is realised in space as ecotope

Ecotope

Ecotopes are the smallest ecologically-distinct landscape features in a landscape mapping and classification system. As such, they represent relatively homogeneous, spatially-explicit landscape functional units that are useful for stratifying landscapes into ecologically distinct features for the...

 and the system of ecotopes is the landscape

Landscape

Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...

: natural, semi-natural, urban-industrial are the tangible, three-dimensional physical systems of our Total Human Ecosystem. The THE also consists of the domain of information, perceptions (in landscape ecology this is the ecofield concept, sensu Farina, 2000; Farina and Belgrano, 2004), knowledge, feeling and consciousness, enabling human (but also biological) self-awareness.
A special case of landscapes inside of the Total Human Ecosystem are the cultural landscapes (Farina, 2000), in which the relationships between human activity (as an effective, ecology based, land or sea stewardship) and the environment have created ecological, socioeconomic and cultural patterns and feedback

Feedback

Feedback describes the situation when output from an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or occurrences of the same Feedback describes the situation when output from (or information about the result of) an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or...

 mechanisms that preserve biological and cultural diversity and maintain (or better improves) ecosystem resilience

Resilience (ecology)

In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities...

 and resistance

Antibiotic resistance

Antibiotic resistance is a type of drug resistance where a microorganism is able to survive exposure to an antibiotic. While a spontaneous or induced genetic mutation in bacteria may confer resistance to antimicrobial drugs, genes that confer resistance can be transferred between bacteria in a...

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