Ecosystem Dynamics and the Management of Landscapes at Different Temporal And
Spatial Scales 1
Steve Light and Kristen Blann
Collaborative Adaptive Management Network
Diagnosis
M a n ’ ’ s a t t t t i i t t u d e t o t h e w o r l d m u s t b e r a d i c a l l l l y c h a n g e d [emphasis added].
We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.
-- Vaclav Havel (1992)
Western Civilization has reached a “watershed” in its history of co-evolution with nature. In three hundred years, since Faust , Goethe’s masterful epic poem was birthed from legend, humans have employed science as a means to subdue and exploit nature. Faust is about man’s mastery of scientific reason and its double-edged role in search of human salvation. Throughout Faust , Goethe centers not on the “Word 2 ,” but on the “Deed” as the final measure of man’s worth. Employing his human reasoning through science to achieve fame and fortune, the aging Faust turns his attention to serving humanity as he contemplates his final fate. Ironically, in his concluding work, he chooses to defy the ocean by reclaiming rich tidal lands from the sea, and in the process has two Greek mythological figures (Baucis and Philemon 3 ) killed whose cabin and chapel were ostensibly in the path of this project. To that end, Faust
’s detached intellectual hubris and self-absorbed character 4 leaves a legacy of unrepentant transgressions – repeated failures to learn from experience – against his fellow humans and nature; finally cursed and blinded by the “Specter Care.” As Western civilization embarks on the 21 st Century, the prophetic curse of the phantom Care on the Faustian
“scientific” character still epitomizes the human predicament – unwillingness to embrace error in the life of our societies and adapt.
From industrial agricultural monocultures that ignore the buffering and stabilizing functions of biodiversity and over-dependence on artificial inputs and chemicals; from epidemics of wildlife disease due to human influence, to overuse of antibiotics in medicine and food supplies; from bioaccumulating toxins to industrial smokestacks to exotic species invasions – the values, actions and structures that drive science and society are eroding our life support systems in inevitably irreversible ways; from the persistence in practices of soil and water degradation, to ignoring the reality of climate change (see Rees 2003; Collier and Webb 2002). The words of Aldo Leopold seem to summarize the situation: “We have the sad spectacle of one obsolete idea chasing another around a closed circle, while opportunity goes begging.”
1 Authors want to acknowledge the generous support of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy and contributions of Kyla Zaro-Moore to helping to develop this paper.
2 That is Faith in Christ, Chapter 1 of the Gospel according to the Apostle John, The New
Testament
3 Symbolically representing “innocence” and “purity.”
4 For this offense analogous to Naboth’s vineyard coveted by King Ahab (I Kings 21).

Enlightenment Age theories of nature and instrumentality have fostered policy and institutions that are now trapped in six powerful and interwoven dogmas which taken together thwart future responsiveness of society to ecological challenges:
 Reductionist Science.
Reductionist science that focuses almost exclusively on generating more narrowly defined problems and technological solutions that are naively intended to solve complex social-ecological ills where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
 Resource Management Myopia. Resource management that is preoccupied with notions of universal equilibrium (myth of nature benign) and practices like maximum sustained yield and single species management;
 Mismatch of Economic Assumptions and Reality . Micro-economic theory that when employed in policy (i.e., cost-benefit analysis) continues to assume rational maximizing behavior based on incremental utility analysis (Stakhiv 2001) in the face of full and symmetric knowledge;
 Top Down Command and Control. Bureaucratic structures that rely on top-down, command and control approaches to management which are more responsive to feedback and direction from special interests than to outcomes of deliberative social democracy embedded in the task environment;
 Market Fundamentalism.
Political structures that are based on the myth that markets are self regulating with the presumption of transparency, objectivity, complete knowledge, and equal access to markets; and
 Engineering-dominated Solutions.
Institutional cultures and scientific practices that have not broken free of their historical roots in engineering for simple physical systems.
Together these tenets are highly resistant to recognizing and adapting to new kinds of feedback and other ways of generating effective shared knowledge about the world. Not only do they suppress recognition of the dynamism and uncertainty inherent in management of complex adaptive systems, but also they carry with them considerable defensive inertia directed toward preserving and extending the life of their values, techniques, and practices.
Reductionist Science. Corporations, governments and financial institutions are using science to perpetuate and advance ideologically based policies (e.g., maximum production, technological quick fixes, nature exploitation) that have delivered shortsighted financial and technological benefits at the cost of future generations. These fixes often do more harm than good, unwittingly accelerating the speed, scale, and complexity of ecological problems to which society must subsequently adapt (Regier and Baskervile 1986). Science, in defining and focusing on problems that readily yield to reductionist analysis, while selectively ignoring those that do not, continues to propagate the myth that complex problems (i.e., feeding the world, solving drought and soil erosion) can be divided into independent constituent components to which there are simple and independent technological solutions (i.e., genetically modified crop species) when in fact the nature of today’s problems and their purported solutions deeply interconnect society and nature (Levins and Lewontin 2002). Yet on the whole, science remains willfully ignorant or completely disinterested in understanding or coping with re-mediating the messy secondary and tertiary order impacts of ecological and social responses.

Resource Management Myopia Conventional problem solving approaches– dominated by positivist science, instrumental and reductionist reasoning that maximized control, screened for
“confounding” variables, feigned objectivity, coveted replicability, were based on views of science and reality that don’t apply to the far-from-equilibrium world managers now find themselves immersed (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, Woodhill and Röling 1998). The success of the prevailing management paradigm, while appearing convincing in the past when experts found themselves in a different social and environmental context, has now been exposed as inept, unresponsive, out of touch with reality.
The ‘know how” that assumed universal stability and an infinitely forgiving, nature that would
“magically” spring back to “life as it was” once the controlling hand of humans was removed, has proved devastating. Simplistic controls have driven natural systems to the point of collapse, and purported “curative measures” have revealed the tenuous state to which fish and wildlife have been pushed (e.g., wild salmon stocks in the Columbia Basin; Cape Sable Seaside sparrow, wood stork and kite in the Everglades, the black-footed ferret in Wyoming, among many threatened or endangered species across the nation’s landscapes and river basins).
Mismatch of Economic Assumptions and Reality.
Conventional wisdom and approaches, while providing short-term economic gain to innumerable forestry, fisheries, and range management systems, have failed ecologically (Ostrom et al. 2001) The abstract assumptions of economicscientific resource management were derived in a relatively “empty world” context in which actions of scientific elites and consequences for ecosystems and ecological economies were isolated in time and space (Daly 1991.) There was little need to acknowledge externalities, as the voices of marginalized indigenous and local people who observed first-hand ecosystem change were ignored, their nature-base livelihoods ruined. But as population growth continued, evidence of ecosystem change and degradation became more and more apparent, and the downstream recipients of scientific management (indigenous and local people) began to develop an empowered political voice, the prevailing economic paradigm of post WWII found itself out-of-sync with social reality and increasingly challenged by new paradigms and theories in physics, ecology, psychology, and mathematics (Light 1999; Gunderson, Holling and Light, 1995).
Kuhn (1962), in his treatise on the nature of fundamental shifts in scientific thinking forever changed our understanding of the influence of how things change. Competing social discourses often seek to define science in a particular way and to exclude other ways of creating knowledge from that definition (Kloppenburg 1991, Scoones and Thompson 1994). In recent decades, discourses in sociology, feminism, cultural studies, and theology have all challenged the notion of a purely objective reality, and to question how information is gathered, made sense of, and knowledge defined and used in decision-making processes. Prevailing models of reality (such as the long held view that terrestrial systems evolve toward a stable climax state from which
“sustained yields” could be predicted) can fend off new countervailing or inconsistencies in facts for only so long. Eventually weight of evidence accumulates (such as that ecosystems have evolved in the face of periodic disturbance, and that they are renewed and altered through creative destruction) and topples previous views of reality. While many economists still hold dearly to the concept of marginal utility analysis of benefits, ecological reality continues to evidence that the whole is greater that the sum of individual parts (Holland 1998).

Top Down; Command and Control.
When performance declines in a constellation of actions
(i.e., technologies, institutions, biophysical systems), the management response is often to make slight adjustments in conventional approaches or institutions that merely increase the control costs
(such as adding fish hatcheries to attempt to compensate for the mortality of fish fray has they go through the turbines in hydro-electric dams) while failing to address the underlying cause of the performance decline. For example, incremental and reductionist approaches to resource management in the Pacific Northwest have combined to precipitate larger and larger cascades of detrimental ecological change in salmon runs (National Research Council 1996). Pacific salmon have disappeared from 40% of the historical range of habitat. Hatcheries, designed to compensate for the negative impacts of hydropower, irrigated agriculture, and commercial fishing—which in and of themselves were considered economic development solutions – have instead generated unexpected results due to competition of less genetically robust hatchery fish with wild salmon, and the introduction of disease. As a result, the salmon take by native people in the Columbia Basin, which despite its spatial and temporal variability was once a predictable annual phenomenon has become filled with chaotic behavior that threatens to extinguish both the salmon and a way of life.
Market Fundamentalism.
Although scientific understanding of ecological systems behavior has evolved markedly over the past 50 years, efforts to pull the fragments of information together to make sense of whole landscapes, river basins and regions lags behind. The inconsistencies and negative social and environmental consequences of political, financial and economic decisions are poorly understood, minimized in the minds of policy makers as regrettable but forgettable externalities of market dynamics – the cost of progress (Stiglitz 2002).
International financial institutions, governments and corporations cling doggedly to the self-perpetuating and self-serving infallibility of the market; contending that markets are objective, policy-neutral and detached from other social values, when in reality, market endeavors themselves originate out of particular constellations of world views, concepts, values, techniques, and practices that are shared with and arise from social communities, and are used by those communities to define legitimate problems and solutions. The preoccupation with market-based solutions is produced and disseminated within powerful social, legal, and political institutions a have tendency toward speculation, monopolistic distortions, and “exultation of markets over legislative criteria, including local democratic priorities” (Phillips 2002).
Engineering-dominated Solutions.
Beginning with the rapid industrialization of the northern countries over the past century, increasing attention has been paid to engineering solutions that place nature in straightjackets of consistency. Instead of developing temporary solutions designed to test various solutions to resource problems associated with flood control, water supply, water quality and environmental mitigation, society invested in optimal, large-scale, highly irreversible solutions that took advantage of the cheap labor, excess engineering capacity and availability of capital. Now at the dawning of a new century, nations like the Netherlands with its newly adopted water resources and sustainable development plan dubbed the “180 degree” plan (van Stokkom and
Smits 2002) reverses many of the solutions of the past several hundred years to deal more effectively with the problems of managing the dynamics of nature and climate change. The
Netherlands pioneered many large-scale engineering solutions are realizing how, inflexible and unreflective past actions are to new conditions and values. Through new understandings of emergence in complex adaptive systems – optimization is often not even meaningful, let alone achievable (Holland 1998)

As population growth, land and water dynamics, ecological needs and climate change continue to place new demands on society, engineering solutions will continue to be called upon. But the challenge of the future will not be to build monuments to increasing obsolescence (or technology treadmills; tiger by the tail; vicious cycles; one step forward, two steps back) but to develop new methods and approaches that restore ecosystems and reconcile new engineering designs with constantly evolving social and economic needs.
Unfortunately, this diagnosis is at little variance from that offered over a half century ago by Aldo
Leopold (Meine 1988), in many respects the father of ecological thinking in resource management:
“Conservation in short, is at direct variance with the moral and esthetic standards of our generation and until those standards change, we can have only such fragments as happen to ‘come easy.’”
Maybe, just maybe, civilization is beginning to awake from the blinding hubris that worried premodern man when Faust began as a legend.
Outline of the Chapter
This chapter outlines emerging theories of ecosystem dynamics and their implications that are essential for fomenting a transition to sustainability. Part I presents current theories of ecosystems behavior with implications for management. Part II delves into how the recognition of nonequilibrium and non-linear dynamics operating at different scales in many ecological settings suggests that some deeply embedded conceptions of naturalness; order and balance are vastly exaggerated. Part III uses case studies to relate the contemporary crises narratives to the institutional dynamics of natural resource management bureaucracies. Part IV brings together some pedagogical, organizational and policy implications of constructing three-fold (social, environmental, economic) sustainable management strategies. This chapter encourages broadening frameworks of research and collaboration in society’s approach to natural resource management as a possible approach to proceeding towards sustaining life on Earth.
Modern Era
Early Civilization
Stone Age
Transition to Global Sustainability?
Part 1: Theories of Ecosystem Dynamics
10 5 10 4 10 3 10 2
Figure 1. Acceleration of time and complexity and stability domains

Part I: Theories of Ecologically-Related Social Change
In the words of Aldo Leopold (Meine 1988) “A species for the first time in history foresees and fears the consequences of its own success. Can it formulate a synthesis between biological momentum and its fear of going too far?” As a new ethos of human’s relationship to nature struggles to take shape in the policies, programs and practices of our nations and international forums, civilization has entered an era of “no easy answers”—a protracted period of fits and starts, deadlocks and break-throughs that are only now beginning to form recognizable patterns. Clearly, the actions and inactions of this era are being shaped by new problems and their implications for society (see also Gunderson, Holling and Light 1995; Chapter 1):
1.
There are no simple cause and effect relationships.
These are systems problems in which aspects of behavior are complex and unpredictable and causes, although at times simple, are always multiple, the logic of the system embedded, hidden from view. Understanding patterns of behavior and deep logic, not “golden numbers and rules” using manifold modes of inquiry and understanding are needed to inform new and reform existing policies.
2.
There are no universal stability regimes.
The new environmental problems are fundamentally nonlinear and chaotic, but not totally intractable. They demonstrate discontinuous behavior, multiple or no stable states in both time and space. The assumption that simply relieving an ecological “stressor” will result in a return to a “stability” domain or “health” is often totally illusory.
3.
There is no easy way out.
Problems are increasingly caused by slow changes reflecting longterm accumulations of human influences on air and water and long-term landscape transformations (e.g., scale of hypoxic zone in Gulf of Mexico). These slow changes cause sudden shifts in environmental variables that quickly and directly affect the health of people, productivity of renewable resources, and vitality of societies.
4.
There can be no neat packaging of problems in time and space.
More frequently, regional and national environmental problems now have their source at both local and global scales.
Examples include the greenhouse gas accumulations, ozone depletion, and deterioration of biodiversity. Management now must assume multiple levels of readiness.
5.
Time is not reversible.
History matters! Both the ecological and social components of these problems have an evolutionary character. They are not amenable to solutions based on knowledge of small parts of the whole, nor on the assumptions of constancy or stability of fundamental relationships, whether ecological, economic, or social. Policies must focus on active adaptive designs and management actions to yield understanding as well as product.
Does the absence of predictability mean that there is no rational basis for making conservation decisions?
Over 30 years ago, social thinkers Dunn (1971) and Michael (1973) predicted the unprecedented nature of “accelerated and escalating series of exogenously and endogenously generated crises” that now overwhelm conventional approaches to problem solving. Dunn and Michael warned of the futility of pursuing defensive strategies directed toward preserving and extending the life of existing constellation of values, technologies, and practices (e.g. US domination of world oil

reserves in the Middle East, rather than investment in alternative technologies.) Dunn and Michael called for nothing less than a “directed self-transformation” that would take responsibility for self and others for today and tomorrow in pursuit of some higher order goal. But defensive strategies that fail to embrace change in nature have prevailed to date (Ludwig, Hilborn and Walters 1993;
Gunderson, Holling and Light 1995).
What is required is fundamental transformation and reorganization of institutions, paradigms, and behaviors. This does not occur in human terms without the pain of giving up the old, then discovering and embracing the new. In the past, society has flexed and responded in the past – new order, radically new ways of viewing the world, is created suddenly from the knowledge accumulated incrementally from useful variations on the past. As in a flood or forest fire, the system undergoes dramatic change and transformation, but eventually is renewed-- the river returns to a new realigned, channel, the forest re-grows from new seeds, and some sense of order and direction to life emerges.
Since the Earth Summit in 1992, the global community has accepted the need for such a massive transformation to deal with the unprecedented ascent of regional and global problems. The Earth
Summit has established a new goal, and ethos – sustainability. Sustainability is a long-term goal that is still in the throes of being defined and worked through. It requires discovering new ideas, tools and infrastructure acceptable to scientific and social communities and sanctioned by those communities to delineate legitimate ways of defining problems and structuring solutions (National
Research Council 1999). Pragmatically, sustainability impels a search for new options, technologies, and ways of structuring natural and social relationships. It requires a new ethos, one that focuses on relationships, mutuality, cooperation, and engages in both a forward and backwardlooking search for symbiotic social and ecological connections.
Unfortunately, making adaptive changes necessary in meeting the sustainability -challenge means coping with persistent periods of social and political disequilibria as Dunn and Michael (above) predicted. It means that some responses will continue attempting to operate out of the current repertoire of problem solving tools due to a lack of “know how”, resources, commitment, etcetera e.g. short-term fixes that lead to greater longer-term instability. For example, while agencies like the Corps of Engineers demonstrate intentions to transform themselves as the Corps begins to restore the Everglades, the same agency defies a federal court injunction on the Missouri River
(Quaid, July 22, 2003. Associated Press) -- notoriously the most endangered river in the United
States (National Research Council 2002)-- and in a blatant contempt for the court, only agrees to change river regulation for two days in response to endangered species’ needs. Meanwhile, the
Bonneville Power Authority has spent over $3 billion over 20 years to mitigate for the collapse of salmon stocks due largely to series of mainstem dams (National Research Council 1996). Five salmon species are on the verge of collapse, but mitigation has failed and policy makers are in denial about the existence of policy deadlock, refusing to seriously consider alternative means of energy generation and use.
As it becomes increasingly apparent that no ready solutions are available, people will increasingly turn to learning in new and different ways. In a fundamentally uncertain world, preserving a diversity of potential futures offers is essential for survival, persistence. The following lessons have emerged:

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There is no universal body of objective knowledge; reality is both constructed and tangible
There is no expert to turn to who has the definitive solutions; a diversity of perspectives, lines of evidence, and modes of inquiry are essential and unavoidable
No one is in complete control, even multinational corporations cannot put nature in a straightjacket of constancy, authority must move beyond authoritative answers to find workable solutions;
Everyone, not just supposed “disciplinary” experts, must assume responsibility for the whole not just their parts; the rebirth of “common sense” depends on the development of shared understanding;
What was politically, economically and socially “impossible” may become practicable as incompetence and arrogance are exposed, values change, and social learning occurs;
There are no established procedures: the “know how” for the future is in learning how to
 structure unstructured decision making processes; and
Asking the right questions may be far more productive than sorting though known solutions.
In an era of no easy answers, there are no simple, technological, ideological solutions. Instead of looking for a rescuer (hero or heroine) to rise above the masses, humanity faces problems that require us to learn new ways (Heifietz 1994). New standards of human behavior are required, and nothing short of that will work. Faced with futures that cannot be forecast, fundamentally new responses and policies are required from science-based agencies. In a world where optimization of one or a set of target variables (i.e., timber, water, fish) is the norm, strategies that keep options open and provide reflection-in-action are now imperative. Incrementalism, with only consideration of known and accepted alternatives is the surest way of eliminating options. Keeping options open actually requires an intentional set of actions that explore and test diverse measures whose paths may diverge from convention. The new rational basis for decision-making is increasingly recognizing, working with, and reducing uncertainty, including:
1.
Uncertainty about the values of system parameters (i.e., recalculation of flood return frequencies in Red River Valley after 1997 flood in context of uncertainty about global and local climate change)
2.
Uncertainty about system structure (dynamics leading to and perpetuating sea grass declines and algal blooms in Florida Bay).
3.
Uncertainty that arises from exogenous disturbance--
“true surprise” (i.e., introduction of zebra mussel into Mississippi River system)
Theories of Ecosystem Dynamics for Resource Management
As discussed above, most science-based resource agency policy and management in the US and elsewhere is still anchored in an equilibrium-centered worldview: the assumption that biophysical systems are deterministic, mechanistic systems that possess some equilibrium state to which they will return after short-lived disturbances – punctuated equilibrium. This equilibrium is assumed to bound a stable set of ecological processes and functions that is viewed as the “preferred” incarnation of the ecosystem. Even in the Everglades Restoration which is planned to take more than 40 years, lead scientists and managers are struggling to reform conventional modes of design, construction and operation, still riveted on compartmentalized, standard procedures that used in the

past while working in isolation of feedback, mid-course corrections and managing for uncertainty.
New “know how” is needed.
Stability and Resilience
One can frame ecological worldviews into three fundamental categories corresponding with the
“myths of nature”:

Equilibrium-centered view

Boundary-centered view

Co-evolutionary view
This plurality of worldviews on the nature of reality, nature, and human nature exists because of multiple cultures as well as because of the dynamics and lag times inherent in the evolution and adoption of new scientific paradigms described by Kuhn (1970) and others. The integrative sciences are gradually embracing a co-evolutionary view, while conventional natural resource management, reductionist sciences and neoclassical economics tend to work from equilibrium or boundary centered views of ecological systems. So while these ideas are not current in the ecological literature, they still dominate scientific management, policy, and disciplinary decisionmaking in different contexts.
The equilibrium-centered view of the world evolved out of the Enlightenment view of Nature. It focuses on stability, predictability, symmetry, reducibility and reversibility of time. Under this worldview, the universe is totally knowable; with time, science will reveal all of nature’s mysteries and general principles. Single cause and effect relationships are assumed. Forest plans, biological opinions, engineering designs, and harvesting recommendations have been largely predicated on notions of maximizing yield (utility and efficiency), stability, and predictability. This worldview tends to support the myth that nature, in the end, is infinitely forgiving. Such a worldview continues, for example, to underlie the “technological optimist” notion that humans will be able to endlessly engineer fixes for ecological problems, as with genetic engineering. Humans will be able to rely on fail-safe technological solutions.
Yet history shows that the equilibrium-centered worldview has generated fundamental contradictions in outcomes. Focus on single management targets and reductionist science creates solutions that might succeed in the short term but eventually backfire in the long haul. When simplistic solutions encounter complex ecological networks of relationships, unanticipated consequences result. For example, in the 1970s, following a series of droughts (between 1971-
1973), the South Florida Water Management District proposed a series of science-based solutions based on analysis of rainfall patterns and population growth that would add more water storage capacity (Light 1983). In the Everglades, when more water was needed, the solution was to simply stack it higher on the landscape; the Everglades was assumed to be able to absorb the consequences. In 1978, puzzled by considerable resistance to water supply options from the public, the District commissioned a community survey on the matter. Surprisingly, the public opinion favored conservation, reclamation and reuse of water to alternatives to increased environmental degradation (Light 1983). Whereas the agency’s response mirrored simple cause and effect relationships, the public acknowledged more complex interrelationships (and just as important, their responsibility in reaching new solutions) and was willing to change behavior instead of

sacrifice more of the Everglades to impoundment. Hence, the District developed in the 1980s one of the most innovative and successful comprehensive water conservation programs in the nation.
The boundary-centered view expands on the notion of equilibrium by recognizing the possibility of multiple stability regimes. Ecosystem function is maintained through fluctuations with emphasis on persistence in the face of disturbance, adversity (a.k.a., resilience). Holling (1986) moves beyond the Clementsian (1916) view of ecology to embrace the creative destruction and renewal functions of ecosystems; that ecosystems do not reach stasis where the conservation of matter and nutrients remain in some culminating conditions but through events like floods, fire, disease and windthrow go through minor or quantum episodes of change, and unpredictability where instabilities can flip a system into another regime of behavior (Holling 1995).
Perturbations can move a system from one to another stability domain. For example, lakes move through nonlinear shifts in stability domains in nutrient inputs move from oligotrophic to eutrophic conditions, which change the structure of plant and animal communities. Such ecosystem behavior is characterized from differing vantage points as being ephemeral, alternating perverse then tolerant, or as naturally occurring stable cycles. A management approach based on resilience would emphasize the need to keep options open, to view events in a larger-than-local rather than local context, and the need to emphasize heterogeneity.
During sustained periods of disequilibria, management typically responds to the need for adaptive change by applying existing tools and approaches. Three outcomes are possible:
(1) If an effective management response is within the existing repertoire of tools, measures and approaches, equilibrium is restored. Example – The recurrence of drought is addressed through existing supply and demand side management measures.
(2) If there is no ready solution, but management uses existing repertoire anyway, short-term constancy is likely followed long-term instability – i.e., the fixes that backfire syndrome.
Example – Existing management measures such as temporarily shutting down water intensive businesses like car washes to address demand are insufficient because population growth has taken up slack water in the system.
(3) When management embraces uncertainty, the path of last resort is to plan to learn new ways. This requires working through the differences that separate people, conflicts, turf, inertia to discover new ways of thinking and acting that involve collective action and sharing of risks. Example – Short-term solutions of supply and demand management fail, and the search begins to review existing uses of water. The inevitable conflicts between urban, agriculture and the environment resurface, and no existing solutions work beyond the next crisis. A non-incremental solution that requires new ways of thinking and acting is required.
The fundamental insight is that while patterns may be discerned within given temporal and spatial scales, future events will be unexpected, not predictable. The resilience framework does not require precise capacity to predict the future, but the qualitative capacity to devise adaptive systems that can absorb and accommodate future shocks in whatever unexpected form they may take.

“The challenge is to understand the new system trajectories and guide them toward the goal of a healthy and self-sustaining ecosystem.”
Embedded in this turn of phrase is a novel way of thinking and acting – ideas still groping toward the light, but full of promise that humans can understand enough about ecological dynamics to channel both nature and human behavior in ways that do not foreclose nature’s evolutionary trajectories. This is clearly a postulate for Everglades’ restoration. Discovering through ingenuity and hard won experience how to guide new ecosystem trajectories for ecological and social benefits is the fundamental challenge of the 21 st century resource scientists and managers. How can we foster combined social and ecological systems that are more flexible and adaptive than their constituent parts? Understanding the phenomena of emergence in complex adaptive systems that exhibit “life and consciousness” is essential (Holland 1998).
Indeed, many ecologists have begun to question the whole notion of stable states. Some contend that ecosystems are entirely historically contingent; they are constellations of independent species interacting and being acted on by forces at multiple scales, but those forces are random, complex, chaotic, in flux. Potential states are nearly infinite and not very stable (Dietz and Stern 1998,
Sagoff 2000). They argue that ecosystem trajectories are as unpredictable and historically contingent as human history, and as socially constructed as our notions of human nature.
Regardless, the very intensity and rapidity of change over the past 100 years, from atmospheric change to alteration of biogeochemical and nutrient cycles to local land use and microclimate transformations, habitat fragmentation, species loss and exotic species invasions, homogenization of habitats and faunal community assemblages, suggests that the notion of ecosystem stability is problematic. Over the 20 th century, ecosystems have experienced such incredible transformations-- habitat fragmentation, species invasions, major and minor alteration of nutrient cycles, atmosphere, alteration species invasions have so drastically altered systems—that even were all human impact to ecosystems to cease immediately, the evolutionary and ecological implications of those changes will be playing out indefinitely. The whole notion of ecosystem stability may increasingly become obsolete.
A more co-evolutionary perspective is now building upon the reactive posture toward system discontinuity of a decade ago. A still emergent set of works (Maturana and Varela 1992, Capra
1996, Kaufmann 2000, Röling and Jiggins 2001) views ecosystems as self-organizing cognitive systems, where cognition is a dialectical process of human perception engaging with the external world in co-evolutionary, dynamic transformation. As with feminist, indigenous, and some eastern spiritual epistemologies, this set of works adopts a more situational, dialectical, and provisional model of knowledge. Knowledge is “effective action in the domain of existence” (Röling 2003).
Living systems respond to environmental influences with structural changes, and these changes in turn alter future behavior of those systems. These structurally coupled living systems are essentially ‘learning’ systems—complex adaptive systems (Röling and Jiggins 2001).
Kaufmann (2000) speaks of the “biosphere as self-constructed by the emergence and persistent coevolution of autonomous agents.” Living organisms and their environment together represent a coupled evolutionary process. The rate at which organisms adapt to their environment is matched

to average incremental evolutionary rates of change in the environment. Viewed from within the human temporal frame, this gives natural systems a semblance of stability, but occasionally environmental or adaptive changes may precipitate large cascades of change. Useful variations accumulate until, perched on the boundary between order and chaos, the tipping point or verge of criticality is reached components recombined in the tumble of ecosystem processes and functions – creative destruction and renewal.
What are the implications for science and society under conditions of uncertainty as foreseen?
Instead of society and culture being brought under the sway of science, reference masters of strategy, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz both stressed “the totally unexpected ways of battle” and the need for intuition and command genius that require “konnen” not “wissen;” know-how, instead of knowthat (Kaufmann 2000). In the Everglades, a team of managers and scientists has been assembled with deep operational experience regarding how water in the Everglades has been operated over past 50 years. Clearly, the trend since the early 1980s has been to look at ways to “optimize the system” though operational changes, “iterative testing” and experiments that have led to design changes without real adoption of an adaptive management culture. The goal of this team is to figure out how adaptive management and collaboration will be integrated into what has been traditionally a “bricks ‘n mortar” based approach to management. Not just a re-conceptualization of the systems is required as was achieved through the Federal Restudy of the Everglades, but a fundamental reorganization of science, management, and policy institutional structures, approaches, and paradigms.
Röling and Jiggins contend with good reason that given the profound implications of the transition from “empty world” to “full world” for what kind of behaviors will ultimately prove adaptive, that there is little effective knowledge displayed by humans in responding to the modern global ecological challenge. They call for ecological rationality – to purposely and collectively redesign human interactions to maintain the ecological services that humans have so far taken for granted.
As in works of pop culture and science fiction, scientists, artists, visionaries, or social critics can sometimes anticipate one potential future and thereby help to exert an influence on the outcome.
They synthesize our understanding of how to do this.
“Humans as a major force of nature are a collective cognitive agency.
Regenerating the biosphere and building opportunity means purposefully and collectively redesigning human interactions. This appreciation – being part of nature not separate from it – could make change and instability seem more
“natural” human condition because humans would not see themselves as insulated from nature, as we do when we act as if we were outside of nature – that is, conquering, or overcoming, or breaking through it. (Röling and Jiggins 2001)
Part II. Horizontal and Vertical integration across natural and societal scales: The
Management Challenge
Additional theories are coming to light in an attempt to better explain observed patterns in natural systems that deviate from the expected. Natural systems consist of sets of nested, complex adaptive systems. Identifying and understanding cross-scale interactions of these systems that frequently

results in unexpected consequences is key to responding to and anticipating future system behaviors.
Ecosystem and societal variables operate on a number of distinct time and spatial scales (Clark
1985), and events at one scale create feedback in other scales (Holling 1978, Clark 1985).
Particularly valuable is Clark’s insight on “clusters of attention,” which allows the system under study to be parsed into discrete, significant scales of time and space (Clark 1985). For example, social and ecological phenomena have characteristic time and space scales, resulting in clusters of phenomena on a log space vs. log time graph. Building on this, Holling highlights how a small number of key variables operating at three distinct speeds can determine essential ecosystem behavior and structure (Holling 1987).
It is the interactions within and among these nested sets of adaptive cycles that feedback into each other and result in unexpected events. “Understanding patterns in terms of the processes that produce them is the essence of science” (Levin 1992). This is why it is important to narrow down ecosystem indicators in order to discover the interactions from which non-linearities arise. By focusing on the structuring variables that control the lumpy geometry and time dynamics of socioecosystems, the importance of the cross-scale interactions resolves into a clear starting point for management decision (Light 1999). Focusing on ecosystems as the product of interactions of a handful of key, linked structuring variables operating at different speeds—fast, moderate and slow
– is useful to understand and usable in action (Holling 1987). For example, these dynamics and assumptions were sufficient to generate a useful spruce budworm model that helped transformed understanding and management of eastern spruce forests (Baskerville et al 1995). However, clearly, the notion of fast, moderate, and slow variables is a cognitive tool, a representative analogy that is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of an objective external world.
Non-linear Dynamics
Cross-scale interactions cause “ecological and economic systems [to be] non-linear and adaptive,
[and exhibit] complex and far-from equilibrium dynamics” (Levin et al. 1998). Positive feedbacks between scales in complex systems are responsible for producing discontinuities that will not be predicted by linear models operating at discrete scales (Munn 1987). Discontinuities result in multiple equilibria, from which once a system arrives, it is difficult to return to the previous state:
“gradually bend a stick and suddenly it breaks. Simply releasing the pressure does not cause the stick to become intact again” (O’Neill 1999). Therefore, it is difficult to develop a general theory about system component interactions using current assumptions about carrying capacity and maximum population size (Pastor et al. 1998).
Unpredictability and Uncertainty
Many ecosystems suffer from short-term management policies that sacrifice long-term sustainability (Ludwig, Hilborn and Walters 1993). Ludwig explains how “magic” theories justify short-term or narrow management strategies. The magic in these theories is that they claim science can manage ecosystems for maximum sustainable yields, ignoring uncertainty and complexity in ecosystems and the feedback from social systems (Ludwig 1993). In extreme cases of the pathology, “the ecological system loses resilience, the industries become dependent and inflexible,

the management agencies become rigid and myopic, and the public loses trust in governance”
(Holling 2000). In accepting and accounting for these factors, researchers can begin to develop theories that work in the complex realm of real life (Ludwig 1993).
In their rush to make things appear tractable for citizens and policy makers, resource managers often side-step reality by ignoring uncertainty and complexity in natural systems, and there is a trade off in reducing complexity with loss of resiliency. A certain amount of complexity is necessary in order to retain resiliency in an ecosystem, yet a certain amount of predictability is desirable in the management of ecosystems. With new tools (such as use of Bayesian statistics in mapping system behavior, dynamic simulations) in understanding complex ecosystems, uncertainty becomes less of a surprise. There is also an issue of cognitive dissonance at work here between the current reality and the desired future. The structural tension between reality and vision is the core challenge to the transition to sustainability (Senge et al. 1994). This requires taking stock of where one is starting from in order to take the necessary steps toward sustainability.
Complexity and Multiple Steady States
Natural resource managers, driven by political, economic and social goals, often fall into the trap of managing systems for a fixed state, which, due to the dynamic nature of ecosystems, is not a longterm possibility (Kay and Schneider 1994). Mismanagement often stems from the assumption that causation is simple or a few causes can be summed together in additive fashion or identification of the wrong cause(s) leading to several predictable mistakes: (1) the significance of the single cause under test can be masked by noise contributed by the unsuspected and uncontrolled factors; (2) the process appears only when two or more causes interact; or (3) the process appears when there are present any number of sufficient causes which are not mutually exclusive (Hilborn and Stearns
1982). Although these problems sound almost trivial, large-scale multi-decadal efforts have been undertaken, like in the Chesapeake Bay where the early assessment suggested that nutrients coming into the bay from upstream were the source of the collapse of the famous bay fisheries. However, nutrient cleanup over 20 years has not rendered the bay healthy (Chesapeake Bay Program 1999.)
Our ideas about the way the world works govern our behaviors, and are therefore critical in determining whether those behaviors are adaptive to the challenge we now face. New ecological knowledge systems need to work with the complexity of ecosystems in a constructivist approach to science so that innovation and learning becomes an emergent property of the soft systems in which management is embedded (Röling and Jiggins 1998). Widening the framework of consideration in natural resource management to include social and economic systems necessarily introduces even more complexity, yet also increases the scope of tools available to approach management issues.
Part III Case studies to relate the contemporary crises narratives to the institutional dynamics of natural resource management bureaucracies .
Missouri River Case Study 5
Meriwether Lewis and Clark during their now epic journey led the first scientific and natural history expedition in conjunction with the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia and
5 Based on National Research Council Report 2002.

funded by the fledgling United States government into the heart of the Louisiana Purchase from
Napoleon in 1804-06 (Ambrose 1996). In the process of exploring the Missouri River, which covers 1/6 th of continental US and the trek to the Pacific Ocean from the headwaters of the
Columbia River, the expedition documented the rich diversity and abundance of wildlife and fish that was beyond numbering at that time 6 . As the US approaches the bicentennial of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, the Missouri River is declared the most endangered river ecologically in the nation (American Rivers 2002). The alteration during the 20 th Century has been ecologically devastating: o
Nearly 3 million acres of natural riverine habitat and floodplain have been lost o
Sediment transport has been reduced by over 90% of natural conditions o
Natural flow regime through damming and channelization has been all but eliminated. o
Reproduction of Cottonwood along the flood plain has ceased. o
Of the 67 native fish species living along the mainstem, 51 are now listed as rare, uncommon and/or decreasing across all or part of their ranges.
Native species of fish such as the pallid sturgeon are on the verge of extinction. The Piping Plover and other species native to its once highly braided and alluvial riverbeds have lost their habitat.
Thundering herds of buffalo were exterminated; the elk, grizzly bear, beaver, river otter and other mammals have long since been hunted out.
In the 1940s two federal plans retaining the names of their authors Pick and Sloan were combined and authorized by Congress (Senate Document 247). The combined Pick-Sloan plan authorized and funded the construction of 7 main stem dams and a navigation system consuming a over 1/3 rd of the river miles on the mainstem. The plan anticipated considerable growth in hydropower, irrigation, and navigation in addition to flood control, water supply, recreation and wildlife benefits.
The operation of the system of mainstem dams was given to the Corps of Engineers, a federal agency notorious for its close association with special interests that support corporate interests. The river was to be managed according to a Master Manual, which was developed by the Corps in consultation with other parties.
Unfortunately many of the original benefits of the Pick-Sloan plan (Flood Control Act of 1944) have never been realized. According to a recent National Academy of Sciences report (2002), irrigation benefits were never realized; the navigation benefits though hotly contested have been declining since the late 1970s and represent anemic $7M/year of economic benefit. Navigation is considered largely unjustifiable in several reaches of the river. Without empty barges sitting upstream, corn and soybean shipments would not be economically viable (Baumel and Van Der
Kamp 2003). Siltation exceeded expectations and has forced whole towns to be relocated due to the loss of storage capacity behind the Gavins Point dam and subsequent flooding of farm, commercial and residential property. The plan never spurred regional economic growth and after
50 years of water disputes and lawsuits, almost no one is satisfied with the current operation of the river (Thorson 1994).
6 July 4 th 1804 journal entry by William Clark “So magnificent a Scenery in the Contry [sic] thus situated far removed from Sivilised [sic] world to by enjoyed by nothing but Buffalo, Elk, Deer & Bear in which it abounds and Savage Indians.”

In retrospect, the biological needs of the river were never clearly documented before dam construction began. The operation of the system by the Corps of Engineers has been to the exclusive benefit of hydropower, and navigation. Recreation benefits behind the dams have produced exotic (i.e., salmonids) but profitable sports fisheries, while the river benefits for migratory waterfowl, hunting and gathering by Native American populations, and bottomland hardwoods have declined dramatically.
The lesson from the Missouri River experience is that institutionally the governance of the river is skewed by a federal agency that is tied to the Congressional lobbies who support navigation, the states and the people who actually live and work along the river have practically no voice in river management. Second, despite the fact that myopia of management and policy has been exposed as totally bankrupt, the river basin is in gridlock.
Kissimmee River Case Study
The Kissimmee River flows south from the city of Kissimmee, FL near Disney World approximately 100 miles to where the river empties into Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater lake in Florida (Cummins and Dahm 1995, Toth et al. 1997). Historically the Kissimmee was settled during the mid to late 1800s when Florida was trying to raise money by selling land ceded to them by the Federal Government under the Swamplands Act of 1850. Hamilton Disston, a young millionaire from Philadelphia and the most celebrated developer of this region, was convinced that south central Florida was a veritable breadbasket (or “fruit basket”) of no small consequence to the nation. With the advent of railroads that linked Florida with the coastal cities to the north, Disston proceeded with experiments in drainage and land development to produce a variety of tropical fruits and vegetables.
Establishing the track that agricultural development would pursue, but a half a century ahead of his time, Disston’s experiment was consumed in the bank panic of 1893. Subsequent populists spurred on by the promise of lucrative returns, proceeded to drain the Everglades, dam Lake Okeechobee, and open the Kissimmee River to navigation. After WWII, catastrophic floods hit the south and central Florida, causing massive damage and loss of life. In 1948, Congress launched the most massive flood control and water supply project in the nation. Construction of the Central and
Southern Flood Control Project required several decades. Eventually in the late 1960s, largely at the behest of local farmers who had supported the massive project, work on channelizing the
Kissimmee River began. The project eventually straightened and deepened the river into a trench suitable for the conveyance of water (Loftin et al 1993). Again, the Corps of Engineers was largely responsible for construction, but operations of the facilities were shared with a sub-state regional entity known as the Flood Control District, and later the Water Management District.
But ecological understanding and the environmental movement had progressed to the point that the negative impacts of the construction on fish and wildlife were understood and anticipated. Under the leadership of Archie and Margaret Carr and Art Marshall, the recently retired US Fish and
Wildlife Administrator for Florida, the campaign to reverse the ditching of the river had begun almost as soon as construction began.
Subsequently, two efforts were made to justify dechannelization. Unfortunately, the guidelines that governed Corps of Engineers’ action never contemplated taking something out that they had

installed. The feasibility reports came back negative. No Federal action was justified. Finally,
Governor Graham and the Water Management District took action themselves. Beginning with driving sheet pile weirs into the channel to force water back into the abandoned oxbows, the WMD began a series of experiments and demonstrations that eventually led to the development of a restoration plan. Throughout its history, the restoration plan blazed new territory. Not only was the process of design novel, the method of getting Congressional approval broke all the rules.
Eventually, the restoration plan was authorized and appropriated, and dechannelization of the river commenced in 1992. To date, hundreds of kilometers of river channel have been restored and
>100,000 hectares of wetland and wading bird habitat is recovering. Fears that restoration would cause economic loss of recreational uses and fishing livelihoods that were established following channelization have not materialized; recreational use has actually increased and sport fishing guides are benefiting as fish habitat and production is restored. The lesson from the Kissimmee is that society cannot afford to sacrifice ecological health and integrity for the sake of economic development. By thinking more creatively and holistically about needs such as flood control and navigation, engineering unsustainable economic systems that gradually erode the capacity of natural systems to sustain resource production and ecological services can be avoided. Unlike the
Missouri, Florida had only one state Congressional delegation to convince. The Corps of Engineers had largely ceded its operational authority to the state, which made changes possible, given greater accountability to and from local constituents. Having a sub-state regional entity with the capacity to raise substantial funds to respond to changing needs and interests also aided the Kissimmee
River in its restoration. The critical factor, however, was leadership both within and outside of the
SFWMD that was committed both to communication with constituents and to meeting restoration goals based on quality, state-of-the-art, adaptive experimental science and understanding.
In both cases, the main lesson learned is that the conventional reductionist scientific and economic paradigms that retain their firm grip within scientific and economic institutions, in the service of powerful entrenched interests, have continued to hold sway in justifying patterns and models for decision-making, despite the fact that they are clearly imposing unsustainable costs on the future.
The costs of our failure to learn are being paid in multiple ways: continued ecological decline, social conflict, and loss of environmental and ecological services; the cost of undoing the damage
(restoration) when society ultimately acknowledges the value of healthy functioning ecosystems; and in the foreclosure of future options under conditions of irreversibility.
Effective knowledge: Coherence and correspondence
Implementing the co-evolutionary view of social learning as effective knowledge to cope with the eco-challenge
“To live is to know” according to the Santiago Theory (Maturana and Varela 1992). Structural changes are acts of cognition; development is always associated with learning. Structural change and learning are two sides of the same coin -- expressions of structural coupling (Röling and Jiggins
2001). Communication is not a transmission of information, but rather a coordination of behavior.

Based on the seminal work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela 7 (1992) on cognition and building on Arthur (1994), Arrow (1994), and Capra (1996), Röling and Jiggins (2001) make a very compelling argument for what they term e c o l l o g i i c a l r a t t i i o n a l l i i t t y (in contrast to economic rationality).
“If we do indeed comprise a duality with our environment, if we are inescapably part of the complex web of life…then human survival depends on our ability to maintain the ecological services that we have so far taken for granted. Ecological rationality demands that [we need to] develop the institutions, cognitions, norms, platforms for collective decision making, cosmos-visions and other social elements that allow us to remain structurally coupled to context (Röling and
Jiggins 2001)”
Kauffman (2000) echoes this understanding of duality based on his investigation “into what it means and is to know and make our world together…. Make no mistake, we autonomous agents mutually construct our biosphere, even as we coevolve with it.” Yet the conventional assumption of rational self-interest maximization is so deeply embedded in powerful social institutions that new understandings of cognition, learning, and development of norms are still not being acknowledged.
If we are to generate coherence and correspondence between our knowledge systems and institutions, in order to design adaptive resource management systems that work with change, we have to become open to learning more rapidly about complexity and uncertainty.
Knowledge, power, privilege
“Anything that stands in the way of such resilience [adaptation required in a new context] be it elites, institutions, escapist pathologies, inability to learn, impaired or distorted perceptions of contextual change, or inflexibility of investment is bound to have grave consequences” – Röling 2003, p 31
Power is inextricably linked to who participates in decision-making, whose knowledge counts, and who is excluded. Thus knowledge discourses in decision-making processes and outcomes must be explored in terms of power, entrenched interests, and social relationships (Scoones and Thompson
1994). Power imbalances in society tend to systematically suppress ideas that have actually been present for a long time as “capital”, or novelty, in the system. These ideas do not have the opportunity to move up through nested adaptive cycles to transform thinking until opportunity arises in the social system for novelty to precipitate reorganization.
Many modern environmental predicaments have emerged directly as a consequence of privileging conventional reductionist scientific paradigms and ways of knowing. Not all environmental
“surprises”–the environmental and human health effects of DDT, pesticides, and other biologically and hormonally active agents, climate change, the ozone hole, the recent discovery that genetically modified corn has reached remote corners of Mexico—were entirely unanticipated. Local and cross-scale surprises involve processes or interactions that might have been predictable given additional knowledge or more appropriate observations. Any social processes that suppress the detection and interpretation of feedback—whether dominant paradigms, or power embedded in
7 The Santiago Theory of Cognition

social relations--increase the risk of unintended consequences. “Unanticipated surprises, being unanticipated, become crises” (Holling 1993).
With 20/20 hindsight, we recognize that throughout human history, respected visionaries provided warnings, unheeded advice, and antidotes to the folly of dominant paradigms. Increased vulnerability in the ecosystem has often been noted by small groups of scientists or local citizens.
The knowledge that agricultural pesticides or channelization of streams and rivers would generate adverse environmental outcomes has not always come about in retrospect, a new scientific observation of effects in time, but was present at the time the decisions were being made. Those who carried that knowledge, however—Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson, for example—did not then have the power to influence the discourse or the decisions.
Traditional and indigenous knowledge may have some advantages over local knowledge in developed societies where local knowledge shares with the dominant culture a similar westernscientific world view, educational background, values, training, and acceptable framework for dispute resolution. In such cases, local people may be more willing to share the definition and scope of the problem and solution set, to defer to scientific expertise on questions of uncertainty, to
“privilege” scientific expertise by placing excessive faith in the scientific process’ ability resolve issues of uncertainty or values conflicts. By contrast, traditional or indigenous people often question the very premises upon which a management decision is being based, as in “how much of toxic substance X is permissible in fish tissue?” 8 Or “how can we best protect how much money do you wish to receive in exchange for allowing us to build this dam/market your traditional medicines?” Such perspectives serve to widen debate and to embolden other critics of dominant paradigms, and develop robust responses that avoid catastrophic surprise.
Focusing on the role of power thus reveals that many of what are commonly presented as “new scientific ideas” reflect instead shifts in the power relations of competing discourses. For example, the focus on relationship, function, dynamics, interdependence and process in nature are often discussed as “emerging ideas in ecology” (Botkin 1990). In reality, none of this is really “new” science. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Alfred Whitehead, and Bennett were all advocating for recognition of interdependence and adoption of more integrative and holistic approaches to science and management prior to 1950 (Worster 1977). The critiques of industrial commodity monocultures, technological quick fixes, and expert science coming from feminist, environmental, local, and indigenous perspectives have been with us for over 50 years. Yet the marginal benefits of advances in conventional science and technology have only recently begun to appear less significant, relative to the growing scale and complexity of the problems, and the pattern of their emergence directly out of technological solutions to past problems (Horgan 1996).
The recent focus on integrative science thus reflects the nature of the problems that have begun to attract political attention.
Modern conventional government decision-making processes are slow, largely impenetrable from citizens. Citizens are distanced from the seat of power both figuratively and literally. Social
8 e.g. Indigenous people in Minnesota have articulated zero tolerance for mercury in fish tissue or chemical/herbicide use on restoration lands to control weeds or invasives, based on a fundamentally different value orientation towards ecological and irreversible risk.

learning is limited to those privileged by the process. Power is positioned to maximize its access and maintain its privileged status. The privileging of scientific and technological voices and ways of knowing—often over the objections of the local, public and/or minority voices—has a role in generating inequitable or unsustainable outcomes that must be acknowledged. Finding sustainable solutions in agriculture and natural resource management is dependent on bringing citizens, farmers, indigenous, and rural people back into formal knowledge production (Kloppenburg 1991).
Part IV Pedagogical, organizational and policy implications of constructing three-fold (social, environmental, economic) sustainable management strategies.
Evolving understanding and integration of science, ecosystem dynamics, human nature, social systems and the pathologies and barriers to learning inherent in conventional institutional and organizational cultures has radical implications for the way knowledge, economic functions, social relationships, and power should be organized to address the sustainability challenge of the coming century. Social, ecological and economic sustainability requires new pedagogical and institutional designs and strategies, and a transformation of the role and structures for knowledge and science in society.
Given the shortcomings of conventional models of reality, knowledge, ecosystems, and human nature that still govern natural resource management decision-making, new roles and forms of science in decision-making are needed . Civic science, adaptive management, and sustainability science all advocate expanding the boundaries of science to integrate alternative ways of knowing with conventional reductionism, leading to a radically transformed science whose contours are only now being mapped. (Kloppenburg 1991, Lee 1993, Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, Holling et al.
1995, Irwin 1996).
Science for sustainability differs qualitatively from conventional science (National Research
Council 1999). It acknowledges and embraces uncertainty—about the environment, the future, and in human understanding and social relationships. It requires the creation and enhancement of options, generating ecological resilience and social trust. It requires new tools such as adaptive management, scenario planning, citizen science, collaborative planning and decision-making, and conflict resolution. Acknowledging uncertainty implies a shift from “knowledge-based” management to “ignorance-based” management, predicated on precaution, adaptive management and learning.
Sustainability science requires not just interdisciplinary expertise but transdisciplinary synthesis.
Ecologists and managers are challenged to transform the intellectual and epistemological assumptions that frame their conservation activities (Kloppenburg 1991). Such broadening includes questioning the “objectivity” of science, expanding the umbrella of “officially-sanctioned knowledge”, opening the practice of science to more inclusive methodologies, and the ending the separation between research and management (Irwin 1996; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Holling et al. 1995). Multiple realities do exist and different environmental knowledges must be recognized and valued (Kloppenburg 1997, Turnbull 1997). Valuing traditional, local and indigenous knowledge as sources of understanding and novelty is a vital part of this process. This includes both grassroots, local movements to monitor, research, and repair environmental problems as well as to engage in or influence resource decision-making.

Funtowicz and Ravetz’ “post-normal” science, Irwin’s “citizen science”, and Lee’s “civic science” speak to the transformation of science through a recognition of the place for citizen knowledges and understandings that extend the “peer community.” The goal is not to undermine science as a method of generating and vetting knowledge, to lessen its role or significance in scientific processes decision-making, but to integrate scientific expertise with other assessments, problem definitions and various expertise, and to appreciate interconnectedness. Reductionist, deterministic inquiry must be balanced by open acknowledgement of the limitations, uncertainties, and risks of science and technology.
A reassessment of science’s contribution to environmental questions and wider societal debate will acknowledge emerging forms of peer review, including extension of the peer community to those persons directly affected by an environmental problem or issue (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993).
Opening up science to a wider set of knowledges and sources of inquiry should enhance development of effective knowledge for biodiversity conservation. The diversity of ideas, knowledge spaces, and perspectives facilitates exploration of more innovative, creative and robust solutions, both by broadening the base of knowledges from which ideas emerge and making it easier to “think outside the box”. The existence of a diversity of paradigms, problem definitions, and worldviews means that resolvable flaws in the methods, conclusions, and particularly assumptions of the decision-making processes are more likely to be challenged at some point during the process. This can help to predict certain types of surprises and unintended consequences that would go unchallenged in traditional decision-making contexts, leading to more robust decision-making.
'Top-down' systems of governance must be recast to more collaborative and participative forms of management. Resource management institutions and agencies must also restructure and reorient themselves toward coordination of public/private partnerships, broaden public input, and embrace participatory models of research and decision-making. Conflict resolution, deliberative negotiation of risk and values, and social learning processes must all be fully integrated into decision-making processes; they are required to ensure that democratically and socially desired outcomes are negotiated from within a coherent framework that is consistent with natural limits on and dynamics of ecosystems.
The contradictions and paradoxes that arise through attempts to negotiate multiple, often conflicting values, as well as to operationalize “participation”, “collaboration”, “sustainability,” and
“ecosystem management” create conflicts within the individual and group that must be resolved through learning. This is the epitome of "double loop learning" (Figure 3), in which learning is not just the acquisition of new data or information, but a critical reassessment and re-conceptualization of the assumptions underlying that knowledge, possibly accompanied by a shift in values or goals.
Decision-making becomes more transparent, and even where processes fail and/or political jockeying and special interest prevail, unjust or unfair decisions will be more vulnerable to challenge. This redesign will shift emphasis from reductionist to holistic and integrative forms of scientific inquiry, which are essential to ensuring that natural resource management is treated not just as a commodity production, but also as a provider of environmental services, biodiversity, the natural capital of the economy.

Finally, resource management must embrace monitoring, assessment, and anticipatory adaptive management. Adaptive management (AM) and collaboration are both methodological approaches and processes that have emerged independently as potential solutions to the failures and conflicts generated by traditional natural resource management decision-making. Adaptive management emphasizes the conceptual blind spots of expert driven management, the failure to recognize complexity and dynamism in ecosystems. Adaptive management is predicated on the notion that understanding of ecosystems is always provisional; definitive knowledge of the ways in which ecosystems work is lacking, and uncertainty dominates our interactions within them. The central tenet of adaptive management is that current policy and knowledge is destined to become inadequate, and must remain open to learning and revision. Tools such as adaptive management, collaboration, scenario development, and adaptive environmental assessment and management
(AEA) have been developed to facilitate learning-by-doing (Blumenthal and Jannink 2002), and to develop more anticipatory and flexible solutions to complex problems that do not foreclose future options. Adaptive natural resource management requires explicit articulation of what the goals and conceptual models are of management, selection of indicators, and monitoring and evaluation methods that are modified as learning proceeds (see Holling 1978). Building social capacity for adaptive management in western societies is essential to achieving greater understanding of the value of biodiversity to society, and for developing and diffusing ideas and innovations capable of meeting the challenge of sustainability.
Figure 2. Single-, double-, and triple-loop learning in the context of sense-making and development of ecological and natural resource management knowledge. Modified after Argyris and Schon 1978.
Summary: Transforming the theory and practice of biodiversity research and management
Given the pace, scale, and complexity of modern global change and biodiversity loss, we need to develop and extend the scope and scale of synthetic understanding in order to respond adaptively

(Irwin 1996). Reorganization of scientific, economic, management, and knowledge institutions for more rapid learning and adaptive flexibility is essential; at the same time, emergent solutions may be needed that are more flexible and adaptive than the constituent parts. This paper on biodiversity reviews and critiques conventional notions of ecosystems that, although widely recognized as problematic, still persist in shaping and structuring our economic and natural resource management policies, interventions, and management institutions in ways that seriously impede adaptive response. The paper hopes to make a contribution to the new “praxiology” (Leeuwis, Pyburn and
Boon 2002) that recognizes the indispensable understanding that theory and practice are interdependent. “Theory without action is static, and purely academic, while action without theory can be blind – akin to throwing darts in the dark.”
Theories of ecosystem behavior are in transition. They are moving away from reductionist, positive, and deterministic notions of optimization, stability, and maximum sustained yield and toward managing for resilience and evolutionary adaptive capacity needed to sustain the ability of systems to produce resources and ecological services (Light, in press).
The new theories strive for synthesis, encouraging more holistic analysis of problems to uncover key interrelationships and causal chains. Management must strive to re-couple nature and society in ways that are mutually beneficial. Not only must conservation strategies address human economic needs, but institutions, economic and resource management systems are needed that are able to provide adequate human livelihoods without degrading ecological systems--their structure, function, services, diversity, and resilience. They must support development of integrated socialecological-economic systems, or “working landscapes”, in which human communities, land uses, and livelihoods are compatible with the maintenance of biodiversity and ecological services, processes and functions, and human livelihoods are compatible with social and psychological health.
Formulating a research agenda for sustainability brings us to a focus on participatory social learning. Policy, science and management must all be approached in new ways. This is because in an environment of irreducible uncertainty, policies are hypotheses--questions masquerading as answers. We must therefore foster patterns of collective action that remain open to learning how to discover, accept and reflect on transient solutions that will inevitably be found in need of repair or replacement. We must operate at spatial scales at which the problems of nature and humans define themselves.
Science, policy and management are all components of societal problem solving. They are governed by a vision of reality that becomes the basis for how society organizes itself to define problems, what constitutes a problem, how it will be addressed, and who is empowered to make decisions. These worldviews represent a complex of ways of knowing --“the way the world works” shared by scientifically and socially privileged elites—and “ways of doing business”-- used by those empowered to legitimize ideas, tools and networks for solving problems. Different values screen reality for different information, and put the information together into different pictures.
Making progress toward sustainability will demand a more collaborative mode of operating that integrates accountability across multiple nested social institutions, that generates flexibility. The speed, scale and complexity of economic, social and political changes require a social learning

response based on emergent, self-organized adaptation, learning how to anticipate and cope constructively with rapid change at multiple scales. As problems become increasingly complex and seemingly intractable, collaborative approaches provide potentially highly deliberative and democratic ways of working though the differences that separate people to learn new ways of working together. Social learning is a “fundamentally messy, contingent, and ambiguous intermingling of knowledge, power, interests, and change in the workings of the world” (Parsons and Clark 1995). Decision-making must be decentralized to deal with the accelerating speed, scale and complexity of the institutional environment, but coordinated to integrate sense making across scales. The people most directly affected by the problem or sets of issues are enveloped in a process that creates the conditions for developing shared understanding and can encourage the development of mutual respect and relationships among people of varied backgrounds and interests.
Problems must be solved at levels they define themselves by putting decisions “where they belong”-- matching sense making with feedback.
Part of making the quantum shift toward sustainability is recognizing and putting at risk conventional ways of thinking and acting. It takes time to shake old paradigms, institutions, and habits. The new philosophies and frameworks for biodiversity protection have yet to be fully developed or implemented: citizen sciences, participatory and collaborative learning methodologies, ecosystem and adaptive management, sustainability assessment, and other theories and frameworks are all part of converging and emerging praxiologies that require iterative adaptation. No single framework is appropriate for every geographic, ecological, or cultural setting. Productive interactions between different ways of knowing, between differently situated and partial knowledges, need to be established, not in order to combine or translate knowledges, but to permit mutually beneficial dialogue, synthetic understanding, uncertainty analysis, and emergent solutions. Resource management for biodiversity conservation must view its task as creating the conditions for adaptive social learning and restoration of ecological resilience.
The ultimate test of humanity’s ecosystem “knowledge” is whether it contributes to our survival and quality of life--whether the heuristics, cognitive models, theories, paradigms and praxiologies that undergird decision-making will guide sustainable, “effective” management institutions and economic behavior. Human nature, perception, and social organizations have evolved in very different ecological and social environments than those in which we now find ourselves. Patterns of social, political, and institutional response to global crisis have the potential to send us on trajectories towards very different futures. Does our ecosystem and biodiversity knowledge
“correspond” effectively with our current environmental context, given the scale and pace of ecological changes our behaviors have produced? Does it guide effective action under uncertainty, within the domain of our global ecological predicament? Can we develop effective knowledge in time to avoid ecological or social collapse? These questions remain poignantly open. The challenge is ours.
“And so long as you haven’t experienced this:
To die and so to grow
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Holy Longing”

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