Modern Wild Faunal Resource System Management
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The Satisfactory Condition in a Little Detail
In the previous Omega unit we described the current plight of natural resource decision making. It is most clear on public forested and related wildlands but parallels are found throughout the world of the non-industrial private forest land owners. Problem analysis seems far more easily done than problem solving and it to solutions that the unit is devoted.
We have to find an answer to what the public wants. This may be the wrong starting place but it seems reasonable. We are willing to consider alternatives. Past work seems to have started with the physical or ecological system and answered "what can we produce and deliver?"
What do you want?
We believe the answer can be called goals or objectives but to persist with this word usage will carry us no where ... as it has for over 50 years. There are too many connotations, too much dispute, too many vying claims, too many reputations, too many failures at development and implementation to encourage continuation. It is a failed route.
More than a name change from objectives, we believe that the answer to what do people want is a classical answer, namely goods and services but now opportunities and equity..
This is far too general but we believe that the reader knows what these are (and we shall detail them later) and we hasten here to add to important aspects to the words.
The first concept is that within the natural resource world, things are highly substitutable. One species of wood substitutes for another; 2 grouse taken on a hunting trip substitute as a successful day at turkey hunting; one big fish that gets away substitutes for a string of small fish; a forested scene substitutes for a rural scene; one duck substitutes for another; one rare bird make a low-count day of birding a great success. Of course, some things cannot be substituted.
Readily imagined, and often implemented, different areas (though ecologically similar) can provide places for people who abhor hunting. Timing and permits can shift so that people with strong desires for hunting or fishing (or not doing so) can never contact each other. The same land, the same resource can, with careful management in a republic, satisfy the needs of many people with very different preferences and wants.
What do you want? was the question suggested above. The emphasis was not on you. It may have seemed natural that it should have been but if you are in typical natural resource agencies, it should have implied "the general public.". Who is the general public, what are the relevant groups or publics, what is the role of the future public, are individuals to be counted or groups or coalitions? It is likely that this question (sometimes phrased as the political question or issue) is more important than questions of goods, services, metrics of production, and of course, substitutability. While one-person-one-vote may be held as factual, we believe the analysis can be more useful if individuals, groups (or "publics") are tallied and that each be given a relative weight of importance or influence for analyses. Clearly some individuals or groups are "more equal than others" and ignoring these differences has resulted in very costly adverse decisions for the resource agencies. The weights can be investigated using simulation or by observing the actual influence of group expressions on decisions that are made. Individual groups may be studied as well as coalitions (or potential coalitions). Once thought that decisions could be analyzed as summations or cumulative public expressions, we now suggest that there are thresholds of tolerance. A person (or public) is quiet until some threshold is passed. That threshold(s) needs to be described for when a perceived principle is violated, or some concept apparently significantly violated, some financial limit passed, or a perception of the consequence of the decision (if implemented) seems undesirable, the person speaks or acts..
We continue to ponder how to quantify "the greatest good to the most people over the long run" asserted by Pinchot but originating (at least) with economist/philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the early 1800's. We now study the computation of the very small product,"the probability of satisfying all of the people that can be satisfied." Neither formulation, however, is essential for conducting the present analysis and exposition of the satisfaction paradigm.
The key concepts for the satisfaction paradigm (as they are progressively developed) are:
Repeatedly demonstrated, people have a hard time articulating goals or objectives. It can be done and there are a few examples. Editing them is difficult and finding quantifiable measures for them all is difficult. Well-known market commodities are easily quantified; non-market goods and services are notably difficult to quantify (both to find the proper metrics as well as to find the desirable levels of the ones selected.)
People seem "greedy" at times to some people but we believe that within the satisfaction paradigm, it is useful to imagine that people usually have a deficit and typically want "more". They will respond to questions about demand and when told that the demand is met, there many other dimensions of the concept of demand having been met than are typically discussed. They may not know how to harvest the product, prepare it, have the time to get it, have the resources (money, labor, equipment, time) to try to harvest it, have the health, have the right mix of other taxable income, or know where or when to offer the goods or services for sale or use for reasonable gains and satisfaction.
Probably already a well-founded aspect of economical thought, the satisfaction paradigm merely emphasizes that demand for goods and services can be met and the person may not be satisfied.
There as another reason for lack of satisfaction and that is the premise of an intrinsic failure rate for products and services that is a basic assumption in people. To want "more" may not be evil, as suggested by some, but a natural tendency to prepare for shortages and "hard times." Thus when stated demand (the request for goods and/or services) is made, there is probably an additional amount that can be assumed to be desired. Surplus is thus not "bad" but a preparation for the future. The more grim the future, the larger will be the extra that will be requested (or assumed to be needed above the natural request.) At its most simple, if a person needs 100 bushels of apples and from the past they know that 50% will spoil before they are consumed, then the rational person will request 200 bushels to meet the demand.
People buy insurance to offset losses of many types. In many wildland decisions, insurance is not available. "Assurances" have failed enough times to make publics skeptical. There are rare sites, organisms, and situations for which no insurance could be conceived. Insurance is one way to deal with real risks but it is not available within public wildland decision. It is rarely available in the private sector and may pose a fruitful pathway to increase desirable strategies in private wildland use and management.
Feedforward (Figure 1) is not well known. It is the procedure of "seeing" the future and making changes now to prepare for that estimated or envisioned future. Not just futurism, it is action today to respond to the prediction. Since the future cannot be known, only estimated, the concept of demand for goods and services must include for the rational human this procedure. What is wanted or needed now has to include some concept of that the future will be and how we will accommodate that future by today's acts. Planting trees to meet future timber supply needs is a simple but profound example. It requires evaluating concepts of future uses of paper and paper products, energy forests, equipment limits for topography, future restrictions on tree harvesting, and the use of plastics and metals in housing. The demands for forests today and the plantation and harvest strategies are a function of the vision of the uses of forests tomorrow, say 50 or 150 years hence.
Feedforward is a part of the statement of the satisfactory condition.
There may be clear goals or objectives and even an efficient delivery system, but demand may not be able to be met. There are constraints. These are local (no trespassing!), political, topographic, and legal. Of course there are budgetary constraints (as suggested above). The objectives are clear, the demand can be met, but a person or group cannot be satisfied because of constraints. One public may not be satisfied because of the constraint imposed by another group. Management can work to increase or reduce these constraints. They are as real as a shortage if water or nitrogen to a stand of trees. Everything is okay ... except for xxx, some constraint or set of constraints. We believe that constraints are more easily seen that objectives or goals. They are more readily discussed. They are abundant. When applied to a particular system, they typically define a very small space. As long as people understand the space and realize that the manager has limited control over it, then the manager can work to get his or her system to exist within the space. They can move it from a low position within the space to a high position where more goals/objectives are satisfied. In many cases they cannot move it at all (change its position within the space). They may work to relax some constraints, to clarify others which are flexible and often "fuzzy."
The satisfaction paradigm leads to a perceived feeling of satisfaction, the Omega state, by a group involved with the goods and services of a public land. They may have a poor concept of a desired state; they may have a great condition, but perceive it poorly or inaccurately.
They may not be a group but an aggregation of individuals. The more diverse the group and the less time they have together, the less the coalescence of ideas and feelings. There may be individuals that are a part of a group in name only. These may become the anarchists for their personal desired condition does not match well or at all with the actual condition or the desires of the group with which they are nominally affiliated. There is, thus a space, a perceived condition of satisfaction by a group. The group may be tight or disparate; the understanding of the situation may be correct or flawed; the situation may actually meet the desired conditions (or not); the potentials for meeting demands may or may not exist for a reasonable future. The condition is rife with the dimensions a a classical statistical problem: central tendencies, accuracy, confidence level, confidence bounds over time, and power or tests.
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One approach in implementing the above is to use GIS and have an active group generally vote on mapped conditions that they do not want when some land use change is being decided. They may have specified desired conditions (their hidden objectives) and given that, they vote:
System have outputs. Some of these can be seen as things that actually (or may) achieve objectives. We view outputs as goods of interest, usually generally desired goods. They are things that have been of human interest in several places in the past. There may be many thousands of outputs of an ecosystem (e.g., the populations of 1200 insect species) but each is not held to be of functional or operational managerial interest. (Perhaps they ought to be; perhaps some day enough may be known; perhaps someday knowledge, expertise, and resources will be available to actively manage each of the 1200, but now and for the foreseeable future, that is not possible. To continue to discuss the work as if it were now possible is wasteful.
The outputs of managerial interest are as follows:
Along with manipulating the perceptual space, the condition of satisfaction, a fuzzy and changing space, the resource system manager can work with the outputs. Resource systems are well known and most people can name at least a few such outputs of natural systems. These might be game, water, logs, wild fruit, and beautiful scenes. Some, like game and scenes, may be observable conditions not necessarily harvested to be recognized or to be of great value. They are observable, they are "there", and few would argue that they are system outputs. Whether they have value or whether it is of positive or negative dimension is another question but one tied to the definition and concept of the condition of satisfaction.
The manager can concentrate on the outputs and these are the performance measures for the ability to work with the processes of the system, the so called services of the wildlands (see Functions of Nature by R S. deGroot, Wolters-Noordhoff bv 345pp). If the processes of the system, the services, work well, then the outputs are as desired. Efficiencies are desired, well-working services. Effectiveness must be consistently emphasized for it is taken to mean efficiency in achieving the desired condition, not just efficiency per se. (cf there can be very efficient murderers; socially, effectiveness may thus be zero.)
There is need to re-cast outputs as opportunities to be listed along with more conventional "benefits" that go along with the pair: "good and services.".
The production sub-units are:
At the base of the ecosystem is solar energy. Analogously, at the base of the managerial system is money, the budget. There are parallel items but they can eventually with some effort be translated into money (or energy as effectively done by H.T.Odum). These include time, space, equipment, expertise or knowledge, staff, insurance, access, and access to knowledge. Each of these can be studied as a constraint (or as a set for units of money are very substitutable).
A direct progression can now readily be seen from money (or its equivalents) to the condition of satisfaction. Each step is subject to constraints.
We have been perplexed over the years by the realtor's mantra for land for " the highest and best use."
The modeling sub-units, the spatial production systems:
Deep "in the rut" it is difficult to separate land from conventional resources such as nutrients that plants mine for people or from forests and water. What if land were conceived as a platform, an entity from which anything might be produced --- parking space, greenhouse support, a seat for a creative person, an Internet server, a student's chair...trees, animals, sites from which autumn colors are seen by many people, alien craft landing sites,... anything. The alpha unit and units near it take on new potentials for meaning. They need to be studied and cared for very, very well, at least satisfactorily, for us and future people. What we need is to have a desirable rural environment and its region where there exists a single or integrated sustained, profitable, diverse, natural resource-related enterprise. In that enterprise there must be abundant, satisfied employees, residents, visitors, and customers who must find safe, interesting, beautiful, diverse activities and opportunities, some of which are novel, others that change little. Quality living occurs within managed quality spaces. Such spaces need to be restored, created, and managed soundly for sustained profits and other benefits and opportunities cost-effectively. That's all.
Elsewhere:
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Last revision January 17, 2004.