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Failing with a guild strategy, some people with a sincere desire for improvements began preaching an ecosystem strategy. The definition being difficult to agree upon, the policies and practices envisioned were similarly difficult to discuss and agree upon. "Manage the ecosystem and things within it will be ok" seemed to be the assumption or underlying premise.

In modern wildlife management work it now seems that species is not the right unit of measurement or of attention. The unit is the life group and it seems to be a reversion to the particulars of the species and even more precise work than was required with it. Efforts have been away from the species to groups and the life-group approach seems to be a reversion to the particular.

Life-group work was impossible without the computer. With it it is possible to deal with the details of 50 to 500 such groups for an area, to compute optimum strategies, and to allocate resources that will achieve the needs of species but especially the objectives of the manager (for some groups need to increase and others decrease.) Ecosystem work has implicit within it that nature knows best, natural is the best that can be gotten, all systems will return to a particular state, and they ignore distant forces such as things effecting birds on their migration and destinations.

As desirable as "ecosystems" may seem, they are mindless retreats from the knowledge we now have about each life group, they dodge the needs for new knowledge that we have, they do not isolate the work needed or assess the sensitivity of objective to work that we might do. We need to study the effects of changes in any group on other groups (at least in a pair-wise analysis (a triangular matrix)), then make the efforts and adjust after the effects are observed.

This Web site is maintained by R. H. Giles, Jr.
Last revision January 17, 2000.