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SUSTAINABLE ECOLOGICAL
SYSTEMS-PHILOSOPHICAL,
HISTORICAL, AND CULTURAL
CONTEXT:
Plenary Session Summary
W. Wallace Covington, Chair
The next paper was by Susan Flader. Flader enlarged upon
this theme by pointing out that AIdo Leopold is the only
individual cited in Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson's
directive on ecosystem management. She went. on to describe
Leopold's development of an ecological approach to
management based on his observations while he was a forest
officer with the Southwestern Region of the Forest Service. She
closed by echoing Leopold's concerns regarding potential
administrative stumbling blocks to implementing an ecosystem
management approach on national forest lands.
Mike Soule presented the fmal paper in the plenary session
Soule began with an overview of key concepts of conservation
biology including both functional, or mechanistic postulates, and
nonnative, or ethical, postulates. He then moved on to making
a strong case for taking an ecosystem approach to the
preservation of rare and declining species. He closed his
presentation with an enumeration of some central questions
which must be addressed in ecosystem management.
This plenaty session began with a presentation by Thad Box
entitled, "Sustainable Ecological Systems and Cultural
Changes," in which he discussed the changing demands of
different cultures for natural resources from wildlands. He
cautioned today's constituents from judging too harshly the
resource management and use not only of their contemporaries,
but also of their predecessors. He closed with an admonition
that changes in resource demands will occur at increasing rates
and that continued learning is essential to successful adaptation
to these new circumstances. The next plenaty session speaker
was Baird Callicott who presented a historical perspective on
American conservation philosophy. In his presentation he traced
conservation thinking from the days of Thoreau, Muir, and
Pinchot through AIdo Leopold's attempts at reconciling the
differences among these early conservation thinkers by
advocating humans living in hannony with nature. Callicott
concluded that Leopold's vision of man in symbiosis with nature
can serve as a foundation for contemporary concepts of
ecosystem management.
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