ABSTRACT
It is a banal statement that ecological knowledge is relevant for landscape architecture. The landscape architect designs with organisms (mostly plants), and if he wants to design successfully, he must know something about organisms and their relationships to their abiotic and biotic environments. Hence, the objects he designs are somehow always ecological systems. To focus on entire landscapes as ecological
6.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 113 6.2 Eugene Odum’s Organismic Understanding of Ecosystems ........................ 114 6.3 Why Ecosystems Are Not Organisms .......................................................... 116
6.3.1 Boundaries ........................................................................................ 116 6.3.2 Development ..................................................................................... 116 6.3.3 Self-Organization .............................................................................. 117 6.3.4 Homeostasis ...................................................................................... 117 6.3.5 Functional Units................................................................................ 118
6.4 Howard Odum’s Physicalistic Understanding of Ecosystems ...................... 119 6.5 Limits of Howard Odum’s Understanding of Ecosystems ........................... 121
6.5.1 Biological Systems as Dissipative Structures ................................... 121 6.5.2 The Concept of Information Used by Howard Odum ...................... 122
6.6 Naturalisms of the Odum Brothers ...............................................................124 6.7 Critique of Odumian Naturalism .................................................................. 125 6.8 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 126 Acknowledgments .................................................................................................. 127 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 127 References .............................................................................................................. 131
systems explicitly is not as self-evident. It is accompanied by a shift in the theoretical point of reference from autecology to synecology or from the individual organism to the ecological community. Among the theories of synecological systems, there is especially one that is very popular beyond ecology, e.g., in landscape architecture1the so-called “Odumian” ecosystem theory.
