Why take a holistic approach to land management?

People usually have an idea of holistic medicine, but what do you think holistic means when we are talking about land management?

The traditional view of wildlife ecologists, as reflected in standard ecology, is that the processes that affect populations and communities operate at local spatial scales so, a lot of past research has been reductionist in approach and has focused on small areas.

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It has also meant that although the landscape consists of many elements - eg landforms, vegetation, soils, roads, fields/paddocks, houses, and water, usually these elements are studied independently of each other.

It is important in environmental/ecological studies to consider the wider scale. Rather than just looking at what is happening within habitat patches, we need to look at the spatial and temporal associations between habitat patches, and to investigate these in the context of the broader landscape.

The consensus in landscape studies today is that the parts making up the landscape need to be considered as subsystems of larger units (Zonneveld, 1990). Landscapes should be regarded as a 'whole' where the 'whole' is greater than the sum of the parts (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984).

This means that for environmental management to be effective, environmental managers need to take a holistic approach to land management and consider all factors that influence the appearance and functioning of landscapes.

This sort of holistic approach to science breaks away from the reductionist ideology of traditional science.