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Chapter 2: Getting a Grip on EM: Its Evolution – Three Perspectives/Ethos. Resource Conservation Ethic – Gifford Pinchot Goal of management based on utilitarian ethic – ‘to produce the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time’
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Chapter 2: Getting a Grip on EM: Its Evolution – Three Perspectives/Ethos • Resource Conservation Ethic – Gifford Pinchot • Goal of management based on utilitarian ethic – ‘to produce the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time’ • Romantic transcendental conservation ethic – John Muir • Nature has values/uses other than human economic value independent of human use. • Conservation vs. preservation
Chapter 2: Getting a Grip on EM: Its Evolution – Three Perspectives/Ethos • Evolutionary ecological land ethic – Aldo Leopold • Nature is not simply a collection of parts, some to be used, others to be discarded based on their usefulness • It is a complicated and interconnected ‘functional system’ that is the result of long term evolutionary change. • Ecosystem Management – not a ‘revolution’..it is an ‘evolution’.
Emphasis on commodities and natural resource extraction – Utilitarian Ethic Equilibrium perspective; climax conditions Reductionism; site specificity Emphasis on balance between commoditiesd, amenities, and ecological integrity – Leopoldian Ethic Nonequilibrium perspective; dynamics and resiliency; shifting mosaics Holism; contextual view Contrasts between Traditional and EM
Predictability and control Solutions developed by resource management agencies Confrontation, single issue polarization; public as adversary Uncertainty and flexibility Solutions developed through discussions among all stakeholders Consensus building; multiple issues, partnerships Contrasts between Traditional and EM From command control to adaptive management
The Pathology of Natural Resources Management – Consequences of Command and Control • Human imposed external control – initiated by external of the ecological system by humans • Institutional changes to focus on the control – society expects institutions to be effective • Increased economic dependence on control and overcapitalization
The ‘Golden Rule’ of Natural Resource Management • Natural Resource Management should strive to identify and retain critical types and ranges of natural variation in ecosystems, while satisfying the combined needs of the ecological, socio-economic, and institutional systems. • Maintaining natural variation result in higher levels of resilience • Challenge – determining the types and ranges of natural variation in various ecosystems.
Principles of Resilience and Resistance: High Resistance Low Resilience
Principles of Resilience and Resistance (Low Resistance high Resilience)
Why is the Ecosystem approach important to use in understanding the implications of a management activity or human disturbance in ecosystems (E Book) • The low level of understanding of processes occurring at an ecosystem scale and therefore inadequately developed tools to deal with: • Uncertainty or insufficient data when assessing ecological risk of a system • Poor ability to identify when an ecosystem has traversed from one biological threshold to another • How and what parts of an ecosystem are relevant to study to produce adequate information to test the trajectory that a system is following • The long temporal scales in which a system is responding, resulting in great difficulty in designing experiments to effectively mimic these temporal scales • The inability to effectively address or predict spatial scaling issues in which a biotic or abiotic structure and/or function at one scale can feed back to control processes at another scale
Why is the Ecosystem approach important to use in understanding the implications of a management activity or human disturbance in ecosystems (E Book) • The inability to measure ecosystem resistance and resilience and to be able to identify the system state being studied in relationship to similar ecosystems • The poor ability to identify how past land-use activities or natural disturbances have changed the manner in which present system is responding