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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Chapter 16. Managing the Whole Rural Resource: Ecosystem Management?
Dreaming: Wonderful warm fireplaces,
broad porches with rocking chairs and rails to lean over,
dusty roads with flower edges,
fence posts with their kingbirds and shrikes,
ponds with dragon flies and bats,
shaded cows 'neath a lonesome oak, and
big barns,
homes buzzed by swallows…all together…Just dreaming…
| Ecosystem management, a policy or philosophy, perhaps an entire "process" proposed by the US Forest Service and adopted by other US agencies has important dimensions, but must not be used as the basis for improved private land regional economic and natural resource management. |
I discussed "rural" in Chapter 12, a word meaning not only the forests, fields, mountains, lakes and streams around cities but also roads, fences, and structures of many types. It is tempting to discuss "rural" as an "ecosystem" because of some evident parallels and sectors. There is more to rural places and issues than being within an ecosystem. There is more to gaining control over an ecosystem than exposed in current writing about "ecosystem management." In this chapter I try to show some of the relations of Rural System and its processes to ecology, then ecosystems and management of the rural resource.
Ecology
Ecology is a word symbol for a specialized type of study. It's the study of the relations of plants and animals to each other and to their environment. Study, alone, is not adequate to the task ahead. The task is one of total human system management (analysis design, implementation, and maintenance). The forest or pasture or crop field is a complex system but each is only a part of our larger system challenge. Each must be managed splendidly.
There is no clear boundary to "forests" as a subsystem; ecology has taught us to name the relations among subsystems. We don't yet quantify them well. Failure to deal with urban expansion (and relations to wildfires), wetlands (to aquifers), rangelands (to riparian zones), coastal zones (to bottomland hardwoods), or other systems will create problems. Systems are linked, strongly coupled. The ease with which the ill humor of "your end of the boat is sinking" comes to mind is disturbing. Not to deal with total systems is to plan disaster, at least continued waste, inefficiency, and festering crises without end.
Implicit to "the future" in the literature of ecology is the phrase "long-term studies." Within Rural System there is the policy of doing little or no research in the first years of development and devoting efforts to intensive study and using past findings. Afterwards, there is a need to preserve these studies, use them, capitalize on the investment of the recent past society, gain from living students, and implement the results, at least to justify well future studies. Ecosystem studies, clear to all ecologists, tend to be poorly funded and of short duration and disconnected, and usually unplanned (for there are now no clear likely gains from planning them). Sustained studies are badly wanted and as much discussed as sustained environments. Rural System staff has read the pleas and conference proceedings (e.g., 1987 Carey Conference, Millbrook, NY, USA). Participants said:
"Ecological understanding is required to develop environmental policies and to manage resources for the benefit of humankind. Sustained ecological research is one of the essential approaches for developing this understanding, and for predicting the effects of human activities on ecological processes. Sustained research is especially important for understanding ecological processes that vary over long periods of time. However to fulfill its promise, sustained ecological research requires a new commitment on the part of both management agencies and research institutions. This new commitment should include longer funding cycles, new sources of funding, and increased emphasis and support from academic and research institutions…."
That statement is a wish more than a directive. We prefer an emphasis on baseline studies, planned seasonal data gathering that flows through statistical analysis into models that are run "using the best available data." Following this, staff can be busy about clarifying relations, reporting notable differences, and revising statistical range limits. (These are the truly significant variables in ecosystem studies, not central tendencies.) Then models and data collection procedures need to be adjusted for the next season. This work has high costs but high payoffs for the working land manager who is intent on a measurable objective. Without such an objective (the set of them), the quest is the mush of "learn as much as possible about the ecosystem."
Payoffs from conventional (but few) long-term studies to scientists are low, publications must be infrequent and funding for them difficult to secure, and field workers are variously motivated and usually feel improperly credited. There are few answers from student researchers for the question, "What will you do with the results after you have reached the end of the term?" Claiming "basis research" will not suffice when funds are sparse and from multiple sources, said to be diverse for sustainability. Funding cycles are political and unsustainable. Academic and research agencies are seeking funds for rapid-payoff and high profile projects. Rural System studies have similar self-serving purposes but with results directed at profits for the right reasons.
Rural System remains involved in finding and improving the processes that have produced the current condition. It is especially interested in observed differences in current production from areas with characteristics now better known than ever. Clarifying the probable transitions of populations and communities (Chapter 15) to the future resource base of the enterprise is a continual effort. Predicting citizen attitude and thus value changes likely over the next few years is as important to the manager as predicting the likely growth over five years of a planted pasture. The gains in knowledge about the future forest and agricultural and fisheries systems and their users will be from the private enterprise, where knowledge of the outdoors is power and wealth-building and is expected to provide a competitive advantage.
Ecosystem
"Ecosystem" is a word that has come into almost daily use. This has surprised many people, and older people can almost remember the time when it became popular in the early 1970's. Over the past several decades it has grown in use and interest like the world "environment" and "ecology." It has not been very precisely used but there has been little harm from that. There are other scientific words that once had very precise meaning to scientists and technicians but that have become generally and grossly used. For example, calories still has a scientific meaning but it is used very loosely. I do not intend to give a scientific definition of ecosystem for that just provokes questions and alternatives. We can point at them as entities and we all know what we mean generally: that spring, that pond, that pine forest there. Within Rural System, staff is not "for" ecosystems, or preservation of natural entities, or specific ecological concepts like biodiversity. We point at a pond and know very well that it a special ecosystem. We point at grape arbors and, fully aware of their requirements and complexities, easily call them an ecosystem, but rarely do so. It just doesn't seem right to do so. It is too small, too unnatural, too simplified. I only suggest that there is a very large and complicated idea that sails under the flag of "ecosystem." The phrase "ecosystem management" now labels a policy of the US Forest Service (and increasing numbers of other federal and state agencies) but muddies a concept of "ecosystem" and adds unexpected policy issues to an already difficult task.
There is no rural "ecosystem." What people seem to be thinking when they quickly and thoughtlessly use that phrase is all of the vegetated and prepared land, the air above it, and the soil, geology, and minerals below the surface in areas not mapped as towns and cities. They need to think of a volume, a multi-dimensional space, much more than plants and animals and the image of what the space used to be or the wilderness it might become. The rural resource volume is where people took a big buck, went courting, and got stuck in the mud. It is where they saw an incredible sunset, where the morning tree shadows were so pretty they almost made old people cry they. It is more than an area on a map, more than a piece of ground. It is more than plants and animals and their relations, more than forests, ponds, and fallow fields. What we must work with is a large volume with emotional and esthetic dimensions and it even has a time dimension for it has been and is very likely to continue. Not just history and esthetics are united within that big volume, but also economics and risks. To call all of that an ecosystem is so atypical and so different from the classical definitions of the term than an alternative is needed. The work needed is for benefits at all levels within the manageable named Groups of Rural System and to continue to work at two levels of spatial analysis simultaneously …at the regional or landscape level and at the map pixel level (the unique alpha unit described in Chapter 12).
Temperature is one of the abiotic factors included within some definitions of ecology and presumed to be included within concepts of ecosystems. In places where trees grow, they are affected by temperatures which themselves are affected by factors far removed from Rural System Tracts. Trees on Tracts now get more ultraviolet than they once did because of the ozone hole. We've all participated in creating this awful thing along with global warming. Our trees will be affected, and so will we, and eventually we'll have to counterattack. We may be too slow. In the Eastern US, precipitation is affected by ocean winds as well as air masses from the West and those winds now bring rain and snow, flakes that are different than those tasted by our grandfathers and grandmothers when they let them fall on their faces.
Risk is rarely included as part of an ecosystem. It is part of people who are part of such systems. Some of the trees of the forest were planted at great cost, and reasonable people want their investments to pay off. The big red oak is pretty, but its standing there is as good as a stack of dollars. There is more to the tree than just dollars because there is a game going on as if people were involved in a financial deal. The deal with the tree can pay off, but disease, fire, or insect might "steal it away." A lightning strike may destroy its value. Risk in the woods is as real as the odor of a skunk, unseen, but surely there, and worth avoiding.
In the Eastern US there are no longer (since at least 16,000 bp) any systems that have not been influenced by people. People need to be part of the concept of ecosystem … or an alternative term or phrase used. Old growth and wilderness areas are also influenced. All ecosystems have been influenced by design or by accident by people for the future, are thus unnatural, and thus we have no genuine baseline for comparisons, only approximations, thus a condition at least as ambiguous as "ecosystem management."
Because the ecosystem concept deals with "all outdoors," all of nature, and usually connotes biological or natural communities, then it is too narrow for the definitions proposed. It will not "carry the baggage" of esthetics, economics, and energetics, and enforcement. To deal with the practical affairs of managing a particular forest or pasture with a particular ownership, we must deal with more than the ecosystem, more than just trees and things, energy and abiotics and their relations. Agricultural systems always include interaction between social and ecological subsystems and thus are much more complex than either natural ecosystems with inputs and outputs managed by man, or social systems using biological systems. Crop production is as much a function of price support, land set-aside, and grain export policies as it is a function of soil fertility and rainfall.
To sustain profits, to sustain goods and services from outdoor subsystems, we must do more than study the relations. We have to work with those relations within and between systems. Once growing trees was the emphasis within forestry; now we have a larger view, perhaps that of the ecosystem, and are trying to learn all that it might mean. What we want to do is to understand sets of relationships so that we can avoid problems later. More wood crowded on an acre once seemed to be a good idea, but now we know that the promised returns over the long run do not always materialize. They often did, but we do not need, we can no longer stand, the failures. The failures hurt too many people -- too many, too badly …and "hurt" equates with the "costs" part of the profit equation.
Something has happened; something has gone wrong in the environment, to the places that someone called "ecosystems." There has emerged, like methane from the pond edge, an awareness of environmental problem and it is big and diverse and so we easily express our concern and call for "ecosystem management." Forests have become simplified and species are present in unseen proportions, exotic species are invading, prey and predator balances are unclear, species existence is threatened, and assured production from fairly natural communities no longer exists. "Health" we know well and so we easily conclude that things in the great outdoors are not well, clearly unhealthy (though we cannot define that). People grasp for answers, for management and control.
Management like ecosystem also has several meanings and connotations. Management, at least within Rural System, means taking control over a situation, making decisions and controlling systems to achieve desired ends cost effectively. Management is expensive. You do not "will" management; you do it. In Rural System work, there are intended financial gains accompanying costs of actions taken. Every cost is not direct, a payment. There are externalities or hidden costs. There is an inexplicable de-emphasis of full-scale cost accounting and cost minimization in ecosystem management as now practiced within agencies. (There may be no quantified objectives for standards, thus no means for comparison.) In Rural System work we bring the profit objective to full prominence. We sit on the knife-edge of the daily payroll, nearly consumed by our thoughts about risks and costs. In public agency management, the source-field of the ecosystem management concept, the pattern is that of maximizing an agency and its budget and spending it all, not in achieving system effectiveness at lowest cost. At least some low cost or break-even results seem desired by taxpayers.
Managers of businesses work to achieve profits. That's not all they do, because they also want safety, to be legal, to avoid labor conflict , i.e., Type 4 objectives; Chapter 7) objectives. They even paint their building, knowing of the high cost of doing so, but also knowing that doing so will help maintain reasonable profit over the long run. Painting may not be "necessary," or a payoff easily estimated, but the wise manager does it anyway because he or she understands that maintenance pays off.
When two problematic words are combined as "ecosystem management," at best there is created a positive political foil. It has been said in one government publication that it is an alternative approach to managing natural and cultural resources and that it seeks to secure and support present and likely future objectives, preserve ecosystem integrity and health, operate at a scale compatible with most natural processes of a site, recognize and use natural time frames, recognize potentials of social and economic viability within functioning ecosystems, and will be adaptable to complex changing requirements. As if not enough, some add that it is implemented or "realized" through effective partnerships among private, local, state, tribal, and Federal interests. It is a process that includes considering the environment as a complex system functioning as a whole, not as a collection of parts, and recognizing that people and their social and economic needs are part of the whole. It is hard to know what that means, impossible to consistently state what will be recognized as "success" or where to apply a force to make an improvement.
Leadership has not yet been significant enough to centralize a definition or to clarify the concept. The concept as policy is debated at a trivial level, also ignored as a gross irrelevant agency ploy. Debating the words has supressed debating and clarifying the objectives. It is a phrase with potential meaning about as precise as "manage that ecosystem." It may mean or imply the fullness of modern total human system management, something much more, but displayed in one federal agency primarily involved in managing areas with trees.
A challenge in gaining well-formulated ecosystem management is to allocate properly resources to achieve intergenerational fairness or equity. Objectives need to be quantified and achievement eventually graphed over time. People need to know when ecosystem management is being done. There must be substantial evidence. Results must be concrete; there must more than a gross probability statement. There must be desired end-states significantly different than those that would be "provided by nature" if investments are to be made. Nature does not exist. Things that occur "naturally" follow only a few rules - start, collect energy, store it, reproduce, and tend wastes -- and if they do not, they disappear…with or without human intervention. There are no pre-ordained states, only aggregates of plants and animals in a place, typically influenced by invasion or arrival sequence and then flourishing or not as a function of the factors present within places during a stated period
Discussing the complex dynamic outdoor system as Nature may continue to be helpful for communicating. Nature's results may not match well with human needs. (See fluctuations in Figure 1. To deny this is to suggest the belief that there are no known vertebrate pests or that, if they are, they are only the result of human intervention. To deny is to suggest returning the mid-US to the buffalo and wolves or New York to muskrats and cougars.
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| Figure 1. The desired end state Q* (pointer A) can be stated and graphed (here the straight line) and then progress in managing a system over the years (time, t) seems reasonable, causing the difference between Q and Q* to be as small as possible. Excessive deviations of Q (as at E) are always possible (such as caused by storms, illegal activities, or budgetary failures). In some cases objectives may be improperly stated and they too can be revised.
In Rural System management, the managers work for the long run, usually 150 years or longer. That's merely two average lifetimes and people have lived here in these forests and their gaps since the glacier drizzled water in their direction 141 life-times ago. |
Rural System management means taking control and doing all of the following things simultaneously:
The above items can be recast as the objectives essential in a systems approach (as suggested in Chapter 7). These are the criteria by which performance can be measured Chapter 5). The general processes that are needed as part of a system to achieve the above list of 34 desired ends are:
What of the future of ecosystem management? As flaws are reduced or ignored or new contenders are advanced, what will be the next policy flag that natural resource managers will salute? There is an evolution of concepts underway:
What might be next? Must it be a simple, linear step? Where is the leadership? If ecosystem management is the answer, what is the question? The question is leading, more complex than apparent, but if it must be answered, then … What is the question?
The question is, "What is the paradigm and its essential set of tactics and strategies for how those people responsible for a Rural System should gain substantial control over owned and surrounding lands and the users of that land so that they continually produce a large set of benefits within acceptable limits cost effectively into perpetuity? "
Perhaps the answer may be called ecosystem management but it has flawed denotations and connotations. There may be a larger concept such as delta management with its own precise definition and description. That phrase, unlike ecosystem management and its sister, an as-easily-criticized phrase, "conservation biology," will serve society well.
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