The Landscape and Humans

The landscape is an entity particularly connected with human beings and it could replace the human habitat concept in this respect. Habitat and landscape conceptually can be considered synonyms, but in reality landscape is related also to a geographical dimension while habitat pertains to the functioning component of a species disregarding its geographical context.

Despite the way in which we will define landscape, how human-related processes interact with a bio-physical landscape remains an open question.

Moving from the wild into urban areas, humanity has completely changed the perception of the environment adding and/or subtracting attributes (Nassauer 1997 Odling-Sme et al. 2003, Hoffmeyer 2009).

For people living in the urban area nature is everything outside the city (mountains, lakes, sea, beach, etc.) and is considered independent from everyday life. For an Australian aborigine the wild is the part unknown outside the territory but has the same characteristics of its home range.

Today a major problem for humanity is to maintain contact with nature, contact that is largely replaced by quasi permanent contact with an artificial symbolic world created by economic processes which offer possibility of meeting secondary needs. The mechanisms that operate in this direction force auto-catalytic processes toward growing unnatural habitats.

A new un-material world is embedding our societies, distorting reality and demanding continuous cognitive novelties in organizational assets. To maintain such a world an enormous quantity of nonsolar energy and related information (technology?) is required, energy that in turn activates entropic processes.

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