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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 19. The Trevey
Dreaming: A proud company … eyes on the inspired future … stout-hearted rural folks, … a business of serving people … learning from our past and from nature… such ingenuity… such need … so little time… so many people … flooding into cities … flooding back into the rural border… life conditions and lives improved… Just dreaming…
| I have used prior work on TVA's WRAP system and consulting projects and have begun work on The Trevey by developing several hundred informative units and computer aids as part of a dynamic planning system. |
What can we be thinking? We cannot keep on advocating land use planning while seeing that it does not work and cannot work the way we are doing it. There are over 42,000 square miles in Virginia, USA, alone. There are 640 acres in each of those square miles. If we had to plan for 25% of those every 10 years, we'd have to deal actively with over 672,000 acres of land and water every year. We do not have the agencies or the private staff, the time, the access, the energy… or the will … for such a task! We're not talking straight. We're not facing the realities of the magnitude of the action required, the knowledge needed, the insecurities and indefiniteness. The plans that we do have are a joke. Each is that "dusty, expensive books up there on the shelf, out of date before they were delivered." The Trevey was a strong alternative and the only reasonable one available for the near future.
Years ago a graduate student of mine discovered 40 definitions of "planning." There had to be as many "plans," and as many "planners" and so I knew that another definition would not assist in communicating the special (if not new) concept that I had. (See also planning and design, Chapter 3.)
Something new was needed and the needs were so great and the differences between those and things then called "plans" were so great that an alternative name was needed. I labeled it The Trevey (pronounced "tree-vee") to honor my mother and stepfather, Joseph Trevey, a forest landowner and retired wood procurement specialist for Mead - Westvaco Pulp and Paper Company of Lynchburg, Virginia. It started with a need for a unifying unit that could provide personalized, custom-built, dynamic, holistic background and guidance for difficult current and future decisions on rural land. Our first premise: plans should be like good newspapers, great for today, but discarded.
In 1998 I skimmed a collection of 30 forest "plans" of many land owners applying for state funding. I found them perfunctory, brief, uniform, and out of date. They were largely descriptive, not prescriptive. The cost of them all was excessively high for the low usefulness of any of them. Any plan seems better than "no plan at all" (but not by much) and so some consolation, status, and options may be gained and current work is made legitimate by such efforts. Much more planning is needed, but the costs are high and there are many other reasons for not planning. There is in most of us a feeling of needing a look into the general near future. For others, that feeling grows into a real need for protection, for guidance for actions, for markers for the best pathways to our destinations. We need a way to communicate so that we can join or respond to the likely actions of those around us. At least we need a record so that we can easily transfer to our ever-changing bright staff and managers what we wanted and where we were heading. We needed realistic schedules for actions. Plans have rarely been used retrospectively, as a benchmark for comparing in the future how well we have done …or the magnitude of our mistakes.
Quite early, we realized that where fear ruled or where there are no risk takers, then no plan of any type or definition will be used. "Things are about as good as they are going to get" is an attitude that produces daily decisions for which small change is all that can be or will be made. Plans can still be valuable for maintaining the conditions perceived as "best." In the quiet dark, making plans for the distant future seems illogical. Investing for resource improvement after exploiting them seems unreasonable in the face of family breakup, disrespectful children and grandchildren, and the excesses of war and natural catastrophe.
I encountered in developing The Trevey, the expression that "if the concept is good, it would have been developed already," and similar arguments against the project too many times to ignore them. I briefly argued that needs have increased to new magnitude, populations have increased, per capita consumption increases, farmland loss continues, soil deteriorates, rural people have needs for employment, rural communities have lost much of their tax base, and fossil energy supply problems loom along with other global concerns such as warming. Optimization knowledge and support software have increased and GIS and GPS have become available with improved precision, interpretations, and applications. Nevertheless there is evidence that current agencies, methods and procedures, and investments and their associated paradigms and policies are inadequate to meet the needs of rural citizens… or the land.
In 2006, following years of controversy and high costs of preparing and defending plans for national Forests, that agency announced "Long-term management plans for national forests will no longer go through a formal environmental impact statement." The agency said that "writing the 15-year plans had no effect on the environment, making the impact statements unnecessary." Their conclusion was based on changes to forest planning rules made in 2005 and a past U.S. Supreme Court ruling that says a plan is a statement of intent and does not cause anything to happen! The definition or the logic is so astoundingly muddled that it discourages discussion and further planning. The Forest plan is required by law and the judgment of whether it is an acceptable or not has to entail documenting what its impacts will be once it is approved. The agency just wanted no further planning, at least in the way it was then done. If it truly "had no effect on the environment" then I agreed … lets' stop. But I disagreed that plans, even poor one, among the dozens that I had studied, have no effect. (The effects could have been on the users… or on budgeted support… or aliens.)
I sense a strong collective expression of the need for understanding rural land, thinking about and predicting the future, and trying very hard to achieve personal and community objectives now and for the future.
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It seemed to me, based on the long and universal interest in history, plans, and planning, that I was not alone in having a general yearning and desire for some permanent means for communicating about where we are as a society, have been, might want to go, and how to get there. A litany of agricultural, economic, and environmental need has been presented effectively by Hawken (1993) and Wilson (1998:277-297) with doubts and caveats made prominent by Lomborg (2001). Plans were needed to respond to these needs. Crop and livestock production systems are the basis of the rural economies throughout the world (Munos 2001). However, Eastern US ecosystems (as many others, are suffering the consequences of accelerated deterioration in its ecological capital. Most agriculture production systems of the region show a high degree of environmental degradation as indicated by declines in soil fertility, vegetation cover, biodiversity loss, and increases in soil erosion. One underlying cause of environmental degradation includes poor understanding of agroecosystem dynamics and carrying capacities that lead to developing irregular or failed production systems. There is better "understanding" now within computer models (always with feedback) than in the average or groups of landowners.
There are other reasons for the resource degradation problem, many of which overpower the "lack of technical knowledge" premise. The reasons include inadequate leadership or available capital, scant operational policies as well as inadequate incentives and disincentives, criminal activity, history, etc. The mid-Atlantic region (as other areas of the world) faces stagnant yields, residential and urban expansion into rural lands, and growth in some agricultural products taking place at the expense of the environment, fossil energy supplies, and water supplies. Rural System certainly cannot solve all of these but attempts work at the edges of them all.
Traditional agriculture has emphasized cereals and grain crops that nowadays offer few competitive advantages in national and international trade. Mixed messages are available on bioenergy plantations. Scant attention has been given to integrated production systems of crops such as fruits, vegetables, perennial species, and forests together offering the potential of cumulative gains from added-value efforts in national and international markets. Integrated cropping (rotation intercropping), mixed production systems (crop-livestock), or multi-strata production systems (agro-silvo-pastoral-aquatic) seem ripe for technological development. Similarly, multi-species livestock production systems have received very little attention by producers. Linked farming processes (e.g., animal waste to pasture improvement to improved feeding) have been advocated for many years. The concentration of staff developing The Trevey is on appropriate profits, not just sustained forage and product yields. It is a system that aids Rural System itself to achieve its objectives. Perhaps Rural System seems little more than a shift in scale and precision of conventional agricultural systems. It is that, but it also is a single business that includes many other related enterprises.
Regions such as those of former coal-mining, industrial reductions, and where there is chronic unemployment have critical need to develop sustainable and competitive production systems based on the strategic use of their natural resources, all the while protecting particularly fragile ecosystems. The complexity of the interactions of agriculture systems throughout the world requires a holistic approach to using the results of research and development activities. Additionally, there is an urgent need to integrate small land holders in developing research and technology strategies to improve the social impact of these processes (Munos 2001).
General Description
The Trevey became large and required an enterprise within Rural System. The system and its major software were called the same as the group managing it. That system (with its inclusive hardware, information, staff, storage devices, field hardware, etc.) saw its role like that of Rural System being to provide grounds for employment opportunities and incentives for regional and community stability and development. At its most fundamental level, it was the major means for evaluating major decisions about making changes affecting profitability and land use.
For each Rural System Tract the system explores options among the Rural System Groups and then provides text units for specialized uses and feedback from groups such as the Forest Group and Pasture and Rangeland Group. The system provided leaders general decision aids (for classical businesses), then useful means to evaluate the likely consequences of proposed changes in the enterprise, changes that are designed to improve the profit dynamics and a quality of life score for the cooperating landowners. It contains an integrated objectives-setting sub-system, a business-analysis sub-system, and has assembled a complex rural-resource system for pasture and livestock, agro-forestry, fishery, and many other timber and non-timber forest products and services, including tourism and, more inclusive, ranging (Chapter 18).
It has expanded and revised versions of several paradigms currently operative within the realm called agroforestry, agro-silvo-pastoral-aquatic systems, systems agriculture, sustainable agriculture, non-timber-forest product systems, and others. It continually developed a set of computer programs that operate to display simultaneously the optimization results described in Chapter 7).
Trevey documents (Table 1 shows major system parts and current list of draft units) provide historical accounts, inventories of existing conditions (field as well as general governmental data estimates of experts).
The units under continual development and revision are intended to provide land owner information and back ground reasons for the prescriptions offered. They include geographic information maps and data that allow owners to select commodities optimal for available sites and for maximizing the benefits. It used a non-linear numerical analysis procedure (Giles and Snyder 1970 and Chapter 15) to schedule preservation and harvests of land tracts (see Chapter 15). The sum of the estimated results of the efforts of these enterprises is the perceived benefit. Costs over time are estimated for achieving desired conditions and for continued management by the enterprise.
Attention is given to resources such as crops, trees, and livestock but the system characteristics include:
It is based in the dimensions of the 5 E's: ecological, economic, energetic, esthetic, and enforcement. For example, it blends pasture and crop interests at the forest edges and addressed all of the major rural land uses, showing best locations for production, minimum resource user conflicts, and high benefit gains to meet owner demands.
Not the concepts themselves, but the collection of concepts together that formed the basis of The Trevey was:
Objectives for The Trevey
No matter how specific our objectives, we knew that they were approximate and we could readily see how they could be more precise after almost every question asked about them. We had expectations, but we needed estimates of their likely achievement over time and better ways to communicate results of work … to family, investors, or to the courts and regulators -- pro or con -- and we needed a way to lower plan-publication costs. We also needed a way to increase the documents being used, to at least have them read. We converted "the book" which was the classical plan and all that was behind producing and delivering it into a planning system with output being a Word document with images addressed from the Internet.
As one major result of a computer run for a land owner, a table was prepared to suggest the steps to improve the Q index or "score" for an area, showing possible ways to reach the maximum or Q*. (Related computations for objectives, similar for the Trevey and for Rural System itself are discussed in Chapter 9) This analysis goes well beyond simply selecting the optimum from a given set of alternatives. Within the system, overall scores of the managed area are computed under varying conditions, thereby allowing comparisons to be made among the present conditions (described by a performance measure) and the optimum condition, one that might exist with a score of Q*. Such a score expresses the maximum total benefits for people over the long run that includes reasonable subsistence (but not necessarily blue-chip investment returns). A modified benefit-to-cost algorithm is used, allowing study of the costs of increasing Q. Expert system advances are used along with artificial intelligence with non-linear optimization, all well placed on the land using the power of modern geographic information systems.
The Design Premises
While any project or concept can fail due to poor communication, management, and exogenous factors, The Trevey reduced such probability of failure by meeting a specific need, operating within a diverse stable organization, having multiple funding sources, being cost effective, and continually changing. It offered a new assembly of ideas and techniques to meet a new economic and socio-political environment. In the US, the current age structure of land owners suggests that vast areas of forest and farm land will be turned over to people within families that are urbanizing. Such people have slight interests or lasting connections with the land and often live far away from their ownerships. Those lands, that environment with the traditional problems, need computer-aided decisions and careful management to allow rural landowners to move beyond the financial margin for land care, lasting profits, and healthful communities. Rather than move down an "agroforestry" or "agro-silvo-pastoral" path, The Trevey sought to achieve a total system approach to the land and its future for people. Simply, it was a powerful new approach to describing how to overcome the lingering problems of people and their land. Those problems were apparent inadequate research, the complexity of ecological systems, uneconomical controls over the environment, and inadequate applications of principles and knowledge (Lewis 1969:100-101).
As experts have suggested, we pursued an integrated multiscale, transdiciplinary, and pluralistic approach to quantitative ecological and economic modeling, "while acknowledging the large remaining uncertainty inherent in modeling these systems and developing new ways to effectively deal with this uncertainty" (Costanza et al. 1991:13). I've followed over many years the successes and failures of the early workers e.g., Watt (1966,1968, 1973), Van Dyne (1969), Odum (1971,1983, Odum, H. T., and E. C. Odum. 1976), Fabos and Caswell (1977), Holling (1978),Grant (1986), Kitching (1983), Swartzman and Kaluzny (1987) to the emergence of models and program descriptions in many journals and series devoted to rural-related topics and to whole journals on the topic (e.g., Ecological Modeling, Environmental Modeling and Assessment, Community Ecology, and, progressively, Precision Agriculture). Other design elements were closely related to those of over Rural System design (Chapter 3).
Sources of Information and Processors
Effective systems work that addresses large Rural Systems must utilize untold amounts of information from hundreds of knowledge areas, each with its specialists. Even a few of them cannot be cost effectively brought to a farm. Federal agencies have tried to do so but their costs were too high, experts scarce, and the land units too numerous. The problem for progress as well as continuance (for the integrative research effort to pay off later) is that the system reach a useful stage of completion, that the risk of non-completion be low, that neither excessive precision nor grossness be allowed, and that the span of work for the manager be appropriate. While 200 specialists may be legitimately stated to be needed, the probability of getting results from them all is small, and even if there is delivery, integrating work from so many people, even if they have very-well specified contractual requirements, will likely be impossible. The pieces are like those of a jigsaw puzzle. A nearly perfectly cut piece will not fit and it takes effort to confirm this for the skeptic … and then everyone must move to the next area having similar needs.
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| These many factors can be brought together, alpha unit by alpha unit, for county-level as well as ownership level diagnoses and prescriptions. In a Virginia county boundary, lands and roads not within a National Forest are shown. Land uses are depicted in different colors and available at various useable scales. Image provided by Scott Klopfer of the Conservation Management Institute of Virginia Tech. |
We have adopted a cost- and time-effective strategy of having a single design, a single developer, a clear objectives system, demonstrated patterns for output display, a single rural-system production-function algorithm (non linear, reflecting ecological succession and other transitions), a fixed planning horizon (150 years sliding forward annually), a fixed interest rate (entered at the time of the analysis and each time thereafter (a special application allows studies of variations in the rate), a single spatial data base (GIS) with limited specified data that include mapped social data, a single dynamic information system, and programmers affiliated with each enterprise of the collaborative. While whole university departments and agencies address the topics of the small businesses of the collaborative, our work is seen as getting a clear, fundamental system operating, with each part being isomorphic. Management involves working with complex natural and human systems with multiple interacting variables. The Trevey provides a means of addressing these complexities incorporating the best understanding of biological processes and social dimensions of management practices.
Progressively we shall make refinements in The Trevey…based on the analyses of the final system and especially based upon sensitivity analyses that will specify the areas in which adding details will pay off in significantly improved decisions for the amount of the investment in the refinement that might be gained. We hire students, secretaries, data analysts and consultants to provide essential data and find equations from past research.
We gain insights for legal and state-related constraints and opportunities as well as local contacts for field-specific questions from advisors. Users give us reactions to draft documents and computer outputs. Staff continually discuss and predict changes and, based on observed results, propose changes in data collection and programming needs.
We had to go beyond providing numerous, lengthy descriptors. We tried to model and produce descriptors of specific elements (e.g., monthly mean temperatures or evapotranspiration, for which there were many such models available), but we concentrated on integrating into The Trevey decision-aid software which simulates the superior decision maker, not just the environment. For example, we use numerical analysis for determining the optimum distribution of age and size of forest tracts (all with non-linear wood yield curves) within an ownership (Giles and Snyder 1970, Waldon 1987). The cumulative expected production of wood profits, for example, is achieved by optimum scheduling of forest harvests in tracts not limited by policy (e.g., steepness and erosion potentials), law (e.g., endangered species), or technology (e.g., soil wetness, locally-available equipment). Many decisions then and now remain simplistic, such as for whether to invest (or not) in an action or project to achieve a specific owner-weighted objective. The decisions are made typically from lists of actions showing expected net financial benefits from each. Maximizing the points gained per dollar per year becomes the dominant decision process. Similarly we developed decision procedures for tradeoffs, cost minimization, net present worth maximization, and several game theoretic strategies ("games against nature") for dealing with risk and uncertainty. Knowing the bounds and staying within them throughout a long planning period can test the best of decision makers. Traditional plans rarely provide such help.
The Trevey offers a long statement, saying to the owner, "If we understand your objectives stated to us, and when we use our best current knowledge, today the following practices should be implemented in the designated times and places to achieve their objectives and maximize your Rural System profits within the stated bounds over a long time.
We have to add quickly that if interest rates, size of the property, objectives, or conditions change such as from wildfires, then the statement may be untrue and another run of the system, with revisions, will be made. These are the same premises that any reasonable decision maker includes (perhaps unspoken or unheard) with his or her decision.quot;
The Trevey employs a classical meaning of optimization, that of "maximizing expected profits within a set of constraints," and so the results of a run of the system is presented as the solution. It lists the actions to be taken (or continued if already underway). The results of a run of The Trevey should be the decision that is made by a rational person … unless the objectives were not clear or complete, data or information errors suspected, predictions not shared, there were major negative effects of combined factors, or that there was private knowledge of poorly-included risk-taking behaviors. That the system does not make decisions may seem escapist or weak, but it is a necessary viewpoint. The real owner decides about actions to be taken.
No one would dare simply call The Trevey "a decision system." That sounds so non-technical. (Everything important now has a marketing dimension.) There have been many other studies of such systems. There are many that have never been seen because of marketing failures, funding failures, and even incompetence. Strangely, and equally sadly for the developers, some have been zoomed-past by systems carried by changing technology and superior algorithms with appeal (partially supplied by the marketers.) The longer a person works in a field, the more of such changes they see. The depression caused is probably just part of the pathology of aging.
We've seen how models, analyses, and especially their visualizations can assist practitioners in incorporating a broad range of considerations into the decision-making process. These tools enable managers, policymakers and stakeholders to evaluate alternative rural resource system management decisions. I did not use the "decision support" phrase (common in the early 2000's) for The Trevey results because it leads a decision maker to an optimum decision (or the region of a very limited set of decisions). It does not make a decision or support one already made. Such decisions require taking risks and agreeing to pay costs, and taking responsibilities and the consequences along with the estimated benefits for a long time. That is the role of the human. The proposed system provides guidance for the decision maker, hardly a play on words meaning for him or her to localize the optimum region within a cloud of options. The owner failing to implement the solution so localized on schedule will not deny the goodness of The Trevey, only changes in risk taking, objectives, or limits … but feedback to the system will be attempted.
A debated principle and slogan within The Trevey staff was that of "model the best decision making of experts, not the actual system." We recognized research needs, recognized the library resources not yet fully exploited, recognized the limitations of our models, but also recognized the integrative power of the experienced expert. We risk using such "rough knowledge" when it is aided and augmented as much with latest findings and computer optimization. We have recognized the costs, delays, and equivocal results produced by classical precise ecosystem simulations. We had to produce a timely alternative to often-ignorant, unaided, factor-limited, short-horizon, and small-group-serving decision aids (or none at all).
Space
The Trevey was developed to provide superior descriptions of ecological, social, economic, energetic and esthetic elements of Rural Systems in which Rural System works. Within each "document" there was to be included about 20 topic-specific, GIS maps and 3-D images as well as descriptive text. Figures Insert 2-3 examples. The area of management was "the farm" (e.g., typically over 100 acres), with contractual arrangements among 50 of them (increasing with profit incentives) managed together within in a region of about 400,000 acres.) The descriptions were for any client but especially for absentee private owners of land, their acres left behind after moves had been made to the cities. It moved into the open the potential benefits of wildlife and other natural land resources in the context of the total ownership and the rational land owner as investor. Using GIS and region specific data, it then augmented site information with field observation with GPS specificity.
One observer said that regions of the state, certainly the nation, were so different that no one system could be devised that could be responsive to such differences. Perhaps. System theorists however, have a special perspective and tend to search for and to see similarities and sameness more frequently than differences. Such a bias can lead to trouble but it is a perspective, not a rule. The more precise the perspective and requirements, the less similar things appear. Given the magnitude of the land, natural resource, and social problems and the perceived needs, the view just has to be one of stressing sameness and accepting approximations, tolerable grossness, reasonable closeness…and that of the general system …always with feedback with action toward developing a more generally useful system as soon as the need is seen and possible.
Time
The Trevey was to be retrospective; current, descriptive of the present Rural System, its structures, functions, and dynamics; prospective and predictive, describing the firmly-believed future conditions surrounding the land unit and the ownership; and prognostic, displaying feedforward, being precisely prescriptive about what to do now, where and when to address likely future changes. It uses annual increments for 5 years before and after the present, then 5-year intervals for 150 years (previously discussed.)
Large Spaces
Interest in "landscape ecology," viewscapes, and how ownerships "fit" into the great rural spaces interests so many people that it needs to be addressed. It seems increasingly clear that what people perceive is not what individuals or populations of animals perceive. A few of the named observations that can be made of large spaces seem correlated with animal population occurrence and abundance and so analyses may be useful.
Major categories for analyzing the rural landscape are:
A Theory behind the System
I have sought an appropriate economic theory for the proposed work and that has been difficult. Any such theory must be consistent with the objectives described in Chapter 7. With regrets, I have attempted with only limited success to approximate minimum estimated financial gains and losses from each alternative, thus selection for gaining profit. There are clearly other criteria for making major decisions (such as smoking, personal health, marriage partners, sport participation, or book buying). Yet monetary grounds are often cited and seem to be a major part of many current natural discussions leading to group decisions. (Individual decision making is less evident.)
We are not trying to prove everything by the numbers or to assign a price to things that are beyond monetary value, like health and life (which nevertheless are valued in military, public health, and insurance enterprises). Avoiding financial analysis can lead to the false assumption that economic arguments favor industry. Making and using such analyses may help people struggling to see "the whole picture" and to become aware of hidden or secondary effects and costs that seem to increase daily and to become less surprising. There are groups of decision makers that seem to listen only to financial arguments. Trevey analyses that put numbers to the cost of harm and the benefits of precaution can give such decision makers a rationale for rejecting arguments that privilege "the present economy" over the quality of the future community in which they may someday live.
Disregarding an appropriate name (Christensen 1991), the theoretical (and I believe fundamental) grounds for the work within The Trevey include:
Objectives
The single most important need for effective integrative Rural System work is having a set of clear objectives, one that can be quantified. The Trevey computes two major outputs ( Q and profits) since citizens (as well as agencies and others) have not had access to more than the most rudimentary analyses of the importance of quantified objectives and how different strategies and tactics produce different success in achieving objectives, even if they are poorly stated.
We use taxonomy for objectives described in Chapter 7). We present for each analysis (typically a comprehensive "run" of the computer system, the results from two distinctively different analyses that need to be used for specialized purposes for comparative and confirmative purposes.
The results are reported below I and II for example, as follows:
I. Q* (called "Q-star") - a score or system performance measure reflecting achievement of a complexly-weighted large set of landowner's objectives and constraints
II. Bounded Profits - another such measure, expected present-discounted profits from the collaborative constrained by rules of law, biodiversity and other sustainability issues. This includes, as shown below, three other analyses: (1) the profits under the current system, (2) those under the prescribed system, and (3) those under a major proposed alternative (e.g., a special investment).
| Probability of Success | |||
| Low | Medium | High | |
| I - Q-star - (system performance index) | 30 | 55 | 60 |
| Probable Interest Rate | |||
| Low | Medium | High | |
| II - Bounded Profits | 3.1% | 7.5% | 8.2% |
These analyses are provided for comparisons and confirmative purposes. Suggested steps are provided in a table) to improve the Q index or "score" for an area. Described in Chapter 9), showing possible ways to reach the maximum or Q* goes beyond a simple study of optima from a given set of alternatives. Within the system, overall scores of the managed area are computed under varying conditions, thereby allowing comparisons to be made among the present conditions (described by a performance measure) and the optimum condition, one with a score of Q*. The score expresses maximum total benefits for people over the long-run. It includes reasonable subsistence (but not necessarily blue-chip investment returns). In addition, there are procedures to gain wide citizen or key decision-maker (or public land project) inputs in a practical format.
The system reports the comparative costs and gains under optimum management, current recommendations, and that from current areas without management, or "average" or classical management.
Interest Rate
The interest rates are established by the same family or a designated person using beta estimation procedures, those resulting in a probable median value, then plus three and minus one percent rate differences from that selected value.
Daly (1991:45) claimed that "Renewable resources, in both their source and sink functions, should be exploited on a profit maximizing sustained yield basis and in general not driven to extinction (regardless of the dictates of present value maximization), since they will become ever more important as non-renewables run out."
We use the classical current discount rate, but also report a refined rate (Chapter 7) adjusted the circumstances within which it operates (Page 1991:69). Rates over time cannot be known and they are unlikely to remain constant, so parametric aids are provided the decision maker, the higher value suggesting the influences of increasing rates and the likely increases in value of renewable natural resources over time. The use of much higher rates for the analysis is typically done in forestry to accommodate the likely risks and losses over the timber rotation period which is usually very long (greater than 60 years). The lower rate (minus 1 percent of the current value) suggests a possible stable or declining value (e.g., an extended depression). Recent studies suggest that the lower classical rate is the best one to use unless detailed annual estimates are used within a simulation.
Results
The Trevey has seven subsystems:
Results are delivered by the Internet (or on paper, the land owner's choice). It contains specialized feedback and feedforward elements. It presents a table estimating the consequences of a prescription to the relevant enterprises of Rural System. A result that will be explored is owner reaction to an estimated consequence of hypothetical cooperation with contiguous land owners.
The breadth of knowledge and background of the intended audience within such prescriptive systems is a genuine and recognized problem. Inadequate knowledge is an evident barrier. At an extreme distance from that limitation is the expressed opinion of a singular expert who too-readily suggests to a user a particular weakness in a text or its producing portion of the system. The result of such comments is that the land owner rejects the entire system because of the singular weakness. (Hopefully the weakness will be relayed to staff for correction or improvement…rather than addressing destroying the system.) Staff are continually doing sensitivity analyses, shifting work to gain better information about the factors to which the objective is most sensitive (as well as to ecological factors to which the key crops, forage, and animals are most sensitive.)
In work with past systems, land owners have been impressed and amazed by the delivered documents. However, experts and consultants, having seen the documents many times before, have become bored in discussing each new Trevey document and related questions with land owners and their managers. Their passion for the documents and their effects on the land are dulled. The Trevey is different because it is continually changing with age, success, and family size and with local and agency changes. "What will it recommend on this run, given the data and value changes just made?" is an exciting question for the consultant as well as land owner. Excitement arises when owners change their objectives faster than would be expected based on built-in theories of transition in such values (a change more predictable than ecological succession) based on age, success, financial status, and family size. Local and broad agency changes can negatively affect the conclusions and thus the usefulness of the documents. In one case, an owner changed numerical values of his objectives to get the results of the program to match the practices he was currently using. Outguessing the system becomes a new sport.
In the future there may be two versions, one general and non- technical and the other a technical and abstracted version. Internet links throughout the system and links to related information will continue to open reading and knowledge-building opportunities for land owners as well as their advisors. Reading, interest, or knowledge levels of owners may one day become inputs and these may shape the reports.
| Says who? A reasonable question about the writer's experience
The Trevey emerged during my experience a Virginia state wildlife biologist and from gaining Western experience while at the University of Idaho, then during lectures in a class in systems ecology, experience as a member and chairman of the Blacksburg, Virginia, Planning Commission; chairman of the Citizens' Committee on the Jefferson National Forest (participating in National Forest plan development); non-game planning for the state wildlife agency as well as their wildlife information system, and work with graduate students in GIS, modeling, and related topics over 35 years. I've encountered enormous hardware and software changes (some personally very wasteful and delaying) and new combinations of software, GPS, satellite imagery, field computers, and the Internet itself. Key planning projects had addressed topics for airports, powerlines, and wildlife areas in Virginia. My graduate students used geographic information systems (GIS) in 1969 before it was called that. Like "decision support," it was a poor name for a field that is far more about resources and people than about geography. No one would now dare use simply "a decision system" for that sounds so non-technical. (Everything important now has social and marketing dimensions.) There have been other studies of many such systems. There are many that have never been seen because of marketing failures, funding failures, and even incompetence. Strangely, and equally sadly for the developers, some have been zoomed-past by systems carried by changing technology and superior algorithms with appeal (partially supplied by the marketers.) The longer a person works in a field, the more of such changes they see. The depression caused is probably just part of the pathology of aging. "Maturity" has to be an alternative that gaines from time with experienced landowners and operatives who are currently active in logging, ranching, and the business affairs of Rural System. I had made major gains in understanding with Dr. Charles Lobdell(1972) in developing a budget and planning system for the Branch of Federal Aid, US Fish and Wildlife Service and with Dr. Charles Buffington (1972) who examined information needs of the National Wildlife Refuge System. Several years were spent in designing and assisting in implementing the TVA's Department of Forestry's Woodland Resource Planning System (WRAP©) used annually by 300 private landowners in the Valley. I had been a consultant for the award-winning Williamsburg, Virginia, environmental plan and for Wintergreen, Virginia, development. I had advised the US Wildlife Refuge System about planning and had suggested a desirable environmental plan format to the Department of Defense, Indianhead Naval Surface Warfare Center. I advised in a small way the NEDS decision-support system project and the hardwood encyclopedia project of the US Forest Service, Southern Research Station. I taught a distance-learning graduate course with the Northern Virginia Graduate Center. I've also changed personal concepts of risk, costs, government loyalties, and values as a private forest land owner. History gives me a unique opportunity at this time, place, and local and national socio-economic condition to display the Trevey design and to continue developing an important system for improving land management seen in the products and services from such land for the well being of citizens, many who are not-yet aware that they are dependent upon it. Time has been given new dimensions for me since retirement in 1998. Loaded with ideas, mistakes, and alternatives, I continue work on The Trevey as an enterprise within Rural System. When the results are made operational, investments in it will allow self-adaptive processes to improve it. |
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