Hanna J. Cortner is professor in the School of Renewable Natural Resources at the University of Arizona in Tucson,
Arizona.
Moote, Margaret A. : University of Arizona
Margaret A. Moote is senior research specialist in the environmental conflict resolution program at the Udall Center
for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona.
Sample Chapter
Chapter 2
The Evolution of Ecosystem Management
The United States has historically gone through at least two distinct periods in its attitudes and approaches
to resource management. The first, predomi-nant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was marked by unfettered
exploitation of the nation�s resources. The second, the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, reflected
a significant shift in attitudes and continues to influence resource management today. As we shall see, while challenges
to the management philosophy established during the Progressive Era have periodically been mounted, to date none
has totally replaced the patterns of politics and professional approaches that emerged out of that era. In this
chapter we explore these two major periods, the patterns of politics that emerged during each, and their effects
on the political and ecological land-scape. This chapter also examines the changes in social values, scientific
knowl-edge, and professional practice that may be propelling us toward another sig-nificant shift�a shift toward
ecosystem management.
Wild and Free The American ideal of a free and independent life developed early in United States history. The
United States was a land of plenty, abounding in fertile grasslands, endless forests, and wild game. An eighteenth-century
French naturalist reported that the most striking feature of the new American nation was �an almost universal forest,�
starting at the coast, �thickening and enlarging . . . to the heart of the country.� A seventeenth-century observer
in New England wrote of the limitless flocks of passenger pigeons that blanketed the skies, �that to my thinking
had neither beginning nor ending, length nor breadth, and so thick that I could see no Sun.� Meriwether Lewis observed
much the same thing as he descended the Ohio River in 1803 at the onset of his epic journey across the American
continent. Artist and naturalist George Catlinrecorded grasses so tall riders were �obliged to stand erect in our
stirrups, in order to look over its waving tops.� The federal government�s main concern was to allocate goods and
resources to private parties, making way for indi-viduals to seek their own fortunes and ways of life. A nation
was being built, and the land played an important cultural and economic role in fostering that development. Government
policies in the nineteenth century, such as the Homestead Acts and the Desert Land Act, encouraged western settlers
to take advantage of the country�s resource abundance and promoted an agricultural society. These policies were
largely based on Jeffersonian concepts of democracy and eulogized �yeoman farmers��individual farmers who cultivated
their own small parcels of land. Settlers were beckoned with promises of free land and unrestrained opportunities
for resource development. Converting the nation�s vast expanse of land into small farms would avoid, it was believed,
the European model of wealthy landlords and poor tenants. Instead, yeoman farmers improving their own land would
create economic development. The nation�s future would rest on a propertied class in a propertied nation. The frontier
epitomized individualism, self-reliance, and independence, values that are still ingrained in mythic images of
the American West and American society. As implemented, however, the settlement laws of the nineteenth-century
society were, more often than not, the focus of unscrupulous land grabs, ensuring that speculators and corporations
rather than hardy yeoman farmers reaped the benefits. To encourage western expansion, railroad companies were given
large land grants, totaling some 180 million acres of the public domain. As the nation experienced a period of
tremendous growth and industrializa-tion after the Civil War, railroad owners and other industrialists became extremely
wealthy and ruthlessly powerful by exploiting resources and cor-rupting legislators. The wealth of these �robber
barons,� as they came to be known, concentrated political as well as economic power in the hands of a few. Americans
reveled in the seemingly infinite wealth of nature. As one noted ecological historian concluded: �The people of
plenty were a people of waste.� They fished, hunted, and cleared land with abandon. Thomas Jefferson defended the
often inefficient and wasteful practices of his fellow Virginia planters by declaring that the nation had �such
quantities of land to waste as we please,� plentiful enough to last �to the hundredth and thousandth generation.�
As the nation grew, so did the impacts on the land. The expansion of the railroads linked the hinterlands to markets
in growing urban centers eager for grain, lumber, and livestock, all of which were necessary for an expanding nation
and growing economy; the tall grass prairies of the Mid-west were plowed to make way for cultivated grain; vast
acreages in the North-east and Great Lakes regions were deforested; and the Southwest became over-run with cattle
and California and the Great Basin with sheep. Lands in the South were rapidly depleted by cotton and tobacco farming.
Toward the end of the century, wild game hunting for commercial sale in markets became popular and wildlife populations
were decimated. Buffalo hunters killed thou-sands of bison a day, often taking just tongues or hooves as trophies,
and leav-ing the carcasses to rot. The passenger pigeons that once seemed limitless were killed by the millions.
Early conservation writers did warn of the dangers of resource waste, but they had little political impact at the
time. Nonetheless, many of the themes of conservation that would later become policy in the Progressive Era are
evi-dent in nineteenth-century writings. In novels such as The Pioneers, The Prairie, and The Deerslayer, James
Fenimore Cooper described the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic value of wilderness and deplored its thoughtless
destruction. His frontier hero, Leatherstocking, condemns the exploiters with these words: �They scourge the very
earth with their axes. Such hills and hunting grounds have I seen stripped of the gifts of the Lord, without remorse
or shame!� In 1832 George Catlin wrote of the overgrazing, overcutting, and general land misuse in the United States
and proposed that some lands be removed from the public domain and be reserved as national parks. The writings
of the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau fostered a new appreciation by Americans
of the unique heritage and benefits of forests and wilderness. Perhaps most significantly, in 1864 George Perkins
Marsh published Man and Nature, which claimed humans were subverting the balance of nature to their own detriment.
So significant is the publication of his book, that Marsh, rather than later Progressive leaders, is considered
the management is a politics of expertise, of maximum sustained yield, and of interest.
The Politics of Expertise The Progressive conservationists were concerned about the waste, destruction, and
inefficiency they saw in the use of natural resources. Using the latest scientific research, they sought to eliminate
wasteful use by efficiently managing resources. Conflicts between competing claimants to resources were to be resolved
by experts through the �scientific calculation of material benefits rather than through political struggle.� Rational,
neutral, fact-based science was advanced as the appropriate basis for agency administration, as well as a way to
solve social problems. This coincided with the promotion of positivis-tic thought throughout the sciences, in which
empirical measurements were the mark of �good science.�The Progressives assumed that their commitment to efficiency
in conservation would spill over into other areas of social life, guaranteeing American advantage in the commercial
struggle among nations and ensuring a more democratic society. So central was the Progressive�s belief in the salutary
effects of efficiency that one leading commentator has termed this commitment the �gospel of efficiency.� Conservationists
�envis-aged . . . a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by technicians who could best
determine how to achieve it.� Despite their overall political support for more participatory democracy, the Progressives
advocated a civil service independent of political control or influence, free to determine the most efficient means
to implement policy decisions. �Administration,� wrote Woodrow Wilson, �lies outside the proper sphere of politics.
. . . Administrative questions are not political questions. . . . Politics is thus the special province of the
statesman, administration of the technical official.� Wilson and other Progressives criticized the Constitution
for weakening the executive branch and allowing special interests to prevail in the legislative branch. They sought
to reestablish the Constitution on a more scientific basis, one in which administrators would be neutral con-duits
for executive leadership. It followed then that �since natural resource matters were basically technical in nature
. . . technicians, rather than legisla-tors, should deal with them.� Professionalism became epitomized by the neutral
expert who based decisions solely on empirical measurements and methods and who was in no way tainted by political
ideology. The belief that fundamental allocation decisions regarding resource use should be entrusted to experts
(i.e., to themselves) permeated agencies and professional schools, and still does to this day. The reliance on
expert opinion has come to have profound consequences for the role of the public in political matters. Experts
render judgment, eclipsing the role of the citizen. Under the claim of professionalism and objectivi-ty, experts
convey an image that they are not involved in politics or decisions involving values, all the while making decisions
reflecting their own professional values and definitions of the public interest. The public has become an object
to be studied, managed, and converted to the experts� position. As a result, experts often discount public opinion,
assuming that public opinion is of good quality when it agrees with their own views and of poor quality when it
does not. The logic is this: they, the experts, are well informed; the public is poorly informed. Give the public
more information, and it will agree with them. But what if even after being better informed, the public still does
not agree? Rarely do the experts conclude that the public has a different point of view equally worthy of consideration.
Ironically, the Progressive proponents of greater participatory politics created a governance structure that
discourages public input to decision making.
The Politics of Maximum Sustained Yield The primary goal of resource management�sustained yield�evolved from
the utilitarian values of the Progressive Era. Intuitively, sustained yield is a log-ical and laudable goal: no
more is taken than can be replenished. As it has come to be implemented, however, the concept of sustained yield
has been modified to mean taking the maximum supply a system can withstand (i.e., the furthest point to which production
can be pushed without impairment of the resource�s ability to reproduce).30 One of our colleagues calls this �man-aging
at the edge of harm.� As practiced, sustained yield means providing a continuous supply of market-oriented goods:
in forest management the timber cut; in range management the stocking rate; in water management the acre-foot.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, sustained-yield forestry also came to embrace the goal of community stability,
that is, harvesting timber at a rate that would sustain mill operations and thus provide economic stability for
timber dependent com-munities. The sustained-yield approach became incorporated into the statutes of agencies.
The statutory mandates of both the Forest Service (the Multiple-Use�Sustained-Yield Act and the National Forest
Management Act) and the Bureau of Land Management (the Federal Land Policy and Management Act), for example, specifically
direct these agencies to employ a multiple-use�sustained-yield approach to resource management. More often than
not, however, these agencies adjusted the multiple-use concept to correspond to their primary resource production
objective: timber in the case of the Forest Service and grazing in terms of the Bureau of Land Management. Although
sustained yield is not specifically mentioned in the legislative mandate of agencies such as the National Park
Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for maximum sustained yield of a single
resource: visitor use in the case of the parks, and water supply in the case of water resources. With the advent
of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, resource management agencies and legislation started
to respond to changing social values concerning the environment. In the 1970s, agencies began to give amenity resources
more consideration. Nevertheless, public demands for habitat protection, recreation, and pollution control continued
to be mainly viewed as constraints to output maximization rather than the goal of natural resource management.
While analytical tools became more sophisticated, allowing trade-offs between development and environment to be
more visibly displayed, these tools still reflected a bias toward maximum sustained yield. Linear programming models
developed to balance multiple uses were unable to maximize more than one use at a time, and so maximized a single
use while treating all other uses as constraints to management for that use. They also ignored or �guesstimated�
values for uses that could not be quantified in monetary terms.33 Furthermore, the models could only accommodate
a limited number of �multiple uses.� An eminent forest ecolo-gist recalls that we did not even consider biological
diversity�only game fish and wildlife. . . . Furthermore�and, perhaps, most important�multi-ple use emphasized
outputs of goods and services as the objective of management rather than the stewardship of the ecosystem. It was
output oriented rather than sustainability oriented. Another forestry analyst notes that at best, the agencies
achieved �multiple use by adjacency: in a given forest, timber was harvested in one place, recre-ation services
provided somewhere else, and �multiple use� was claimed over-all.� Almost four decades after the Multiple-Use�Sustained-Yield
Act was passed, the concept of multiple-use�sustained-yield �still awaits becoming a definable system of land management.�
The Politics of Interest Over the years, the resource agencies that formed during and following the Progressive
Era developed close political connections with the beneficiaries of their programs. Scholars and journalists wrote
of agencies �captured� by vest-ed interests. Grazers, for example, dominated the Bureau of Land Management, timber
companies and loggers the Forest Service, and local water users the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers.
The larger public interest was subjugated by a politics of interest that concentrated power in economic beneficiaries
who sought the maximum yield of specific resource outputs and dollars. The environmental laws enacted during the
1970s began to break down the power the traditional interests exerted on resource policy. These law required the
explicit consideration of environmental values during decision making and placed greater emphasis on citizen review
and involvement. The elaborate administrative frameworks and publicly-open planning and environ-mental assessment
processes established by these laws made it more difficult for development interests to influence management. The
preponderance of federal legislative activity tended to centralize decision making in Washington, assuring the
primacy of �national interests� defined by national interest groups. Washington-based agency leadership and Washington-based
interest groups took center stage. Decisions with local impacts often became separated from local interests, history,
and culture. The great majority of environmental groups adjusted to the dominance of expertise and interest group-driven
politics by joining rather than attempting to change the political process. They hired their own scientific experts
and established themselves as legitimate participants in scientific debate at the national level. Although environmental
groups secured a place at the negotiating table and are now powerful organizations, critics note �the interest
group identity for mainstream environmentalism seems more entrenched than ever.� Through lobbying, lawsuits, and
appeals, these groups have strength-ened the role of environmental values in governmental decision making, but
they have done little to build a sense of public responsibility in public affairs. Furthermore, resource agencies
often promote divisiveness and polarization of interests by asserting authority rather than sharing power. Rather
than eliciting public participation from as representative a sample of the public as possible, traditional agency
procedures tend to foster participation by organized interest groups while limiting participation by the general
public. Participation is narrowed into a set of techniques designed to secure adminis-trative compliance with statutory
and regulatory requirements. Citizens are encouraged to use formal means of communicating with the agency, even
though they consistently prefer methods that involve two-way communication and shared decision making. Methods
such as formal hearing periods do not address effectively public concerns because they do not provide an adequate
forum for representing public interests; they exclude the general public in favor of polarized interest groups;
and they do not allow for constructive information exchange between the public and agency professionals. When the
public is viewed only as a set of interest-holding individuals, public participation becomes merely a means to
gather data for an information base. Individuals and interest groups are not encouraged to interact with the agency
or with one another in forums where they can learn about themselves and about one another. Rather than leading
to public learning, current participation techniques often lead to political alienation. This lack of dialogue
increases controversy over resource management decisions, because it forces interested parties to take extreme
stands in order to be heard. Citizens also become more likely to use other forums, such as the courtroom, to affect
agency decisions and policies. In such venues, issues are cast in narrow legal terms and decisions declare winners
and losers, further polarizing the interests. Rather than realizing the harmonious balancing of factional concerns
envisioned by Madison, the emergence of competing groups has created an often dysfunctional system of interest
group acrimony and gridlock.
The Roots of Ecosystem Management By the late 1980s, the focus of resource management had begun to shift from
sustained yield to sustainability. Whereas sustained yield focuses on outputs and views resource conditions as
constraints on maximum production, sus-tainability makes resource conditions the goal and a precondition for meeting
human needs over time. Outputs, then, are interest on the resource capital. Leading resource management professionals
began to ask whether the multiple-use�sustained-yield concept, as implemented, had outlived its usefulness. Three
increasingly integrated themes began to emerge: a concern for the health of ecosystems; a preference for both landscape-scale
and decentralized management; and a new kind of public participation integrating civic discourse into decision
making. By the early 1990s, these refrains had melded into the philosophy of ecosystem management. Reports by the
National Research Council, the Ecological Society of America, and the Society of American Foresters all called
for applying new ecological approaches to the study and management of resources. By 1994, eighteen federal agencies
had adopted some form of ecosystem management as a guiding policy. State and local resource agencies began implementing
ecosystem management projects and landscape level studies as well. Ecosystem management, however, is not just a
product of the 1990s. Its roots go back to changes in social values, scientific knowledge, and professional and
administrative practice that have occurred in spite of the dominance of Progressive Era ideas, laws, institutions,
and political relationships that are the legacy of the past 100 years. Just as the seeds for the Progressive conservation
movement can be found in ideas advanced by the conservation writers of the nineteenth century, the precursors of
ecosystem management can be traced to ideas and events that developed in an earlier time.
Changing Societal Values In the United States, conservation leaders from George Perkins Marsh to John Muir and
Aldo Leopold were early proponents of many of the themes that characterize ecosystem management today. During the
1930s, for example, Aldo Leopold championed ecological integrity and a changed human rela-tionship to land and
nature, elaborating both a land ethic and a Golden Rule of Ecology. His famous land ethic calls for enlarging the
boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. . . . In
short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen
of it. Leopold�s Golden Rule of Ecology asserts that �a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.�
During the decades that followed Leopold�s writings, several scholars wrote texts and articles that attempted
to bring ecosystem concepts into natural resource management, but it was not until more recently that such concepts
began to take firmer root in national policy, finding fertile ground prepared by the burgeoning environmental movement.
In what one environmental historian has called �the gospel of ecology,� environmentalists utilized the term ecosystem
as an emblem of their earth-connectedness and holism. To a large extent, ecosystem management may rightfully be
viewed as rooted in environ-mentalism and the evolving socio-political values captured by that movement. Some observers
consider Rachel Carson the mother of the environmental movement. Her 1962 book on the dangers of pesticides, Silent
Spring, was the first to raise significantly public consciousness about the damages that indiscriminate use of
human technologies inflicted on natural environments. Heightened public concerns about pesticides and pollution
of air and water were made graphic by images of the burning Cuyahoga River, oil-soaked birds on the beaches of
Santa Barbara, and smog-filled air in Birmingham, Alabama. These and similar catastrophes eroded the American devotion
to technology and growth, which began to be usurped by a belief that there were environ-mental limits to growth.
On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was held, drawing an estimated 20 million Americans to public celebrations
and demonstrations and firmly establishing environmental quality as a national concern. Support for environmental
values would continue to grow. Studies of public attitudes would consistently identify a shift from traditional
values embracing materialism, efficiency, wealth, and hierarchical power to environmental values emphasizing living
in harmony with nature, quality of life, and limits to economic growth. Today, most Americans strongly support
environmental values and consider themselves environmentalists. A flurry of federal environmental and natural resource
management legislation in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s institutionalized the public�s embrace of environmental
values. Public desire to protect the nation�s natural resource heritage was reflected in new laws, including, for
example, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy
Act of 1969, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (Clean Water
Act), and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Much of this federal legislation was enacted in response to complaints
by the general public�and par-ticularly national environmental groups�that agencies were more amenable to commodity
than environmental values and oblivious to the popular �limits to growth� and �balance of nature� concepts. Public
support for environmental programs and values remained high in the 1980s during the conservative administrations
of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. A major goal of both the Reagan and Bush administrations was to reduce
the size and scope of the federal government, and this was reflected in their environmental and natural resource
management policies. Although for the most part the Reagan and Bush policies did not support environmentalist values,
some of the policy initiatives of the 1980s, such as improved accounting procedures to weed out below-cost timber
sales and the inclusion of cost-sharing requirements for financing federal water projects, utilized concerns about
the size of the federal budget to reduce environmental impacts and achieve environmental goals. An emphasis on
market approaches to resource conservation and privatization married environmental protection to the need for financial
economy and political decentralization. It became increasingly recognized that to conserve financial resources,
the nation must manage its land and water resources with extensive cooperation among public agencies and, to the
extent possible, with private individuals and organizations. Reliance on decentralized decision making and collaborative
partnerships began to be woven into the philosophy of resource management.
By the late 1980s, the Reagan�Bush administrations� critique of big Washington government and the need to decentralize
decision making to those communities closest to the resource also began to resonate more broadly: with local economies
and communities hit hard by federal laws and decisions that favored resource protection over extraction; with scientists
who saw the need to better link human wants and needs to an understanding of the dynamics of ecosystem processes;
and with agency visionaries who realized that the problems they experienced in fulfilling their mandated public
involvement requirements could never be corrected unless they dispersed and shared power. The result was a shift
in public sentiment; rather than favoring cen-tralized protection of environmental quality and natural resources,
support grew for decentralized approaches that assumed local communities could in some ways be better equipped
to steward natural resources. Collaborative ven-tures began emerging among industry, environmental interests, agencies,
and local citizens to address natural resource and environmental issues. Increasingly, these efforts focused on
integrated planning and management of ecosystems or watersheds.
Growing Scientific Knowledge Ecosystem science, with its emphasis on holistic understanding of the inter-connections
among all components of nature, is a second root of ecosystem management. The ecosystem concept developed out of
the science of ecolo-gy, but ecosystem science has since broadened to include several other sciences, including
the social sciences. Ecosystem ecology was born in 1935, when British ecologist Arthur Tansley defined an ecosystem
as �the whole system (in the sense of physics) including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex
of physical factors forming what we call the environment of the biome�the habitat factors in the widest sense.�
Tansley�s definition was greatly influenced by the then currently popular systems theory, which looked at any system,
be it sociological, chemical, or physical, as a whole made up of patterns of structure and behavior. Tansley and
other early ecosystem ecologists applied the physical concept of equilibrium to the organization and maintenance
of ecosystems. A major shift in ecosystem ecology was initiated by the Hubbard Brook studies in the 1960s and 1970s,
which set several precedents in ecosystem research. Where previous ecosystem ecologists had focused on energy flow
through the ecosystem, the multidisciplinary Hubbard Brook scientists focused on flow of matter, particularly water
and nutrients. They also offered a means of bounding terrestrial ecosystems in terms of hydrologic watershed boundaries,
which permitted applied research.68 Building on background meteorologic and hydrologic data from the USDA Forest
Service, this team began exploring streamwater chemistry and the details of the input�output relations of a small
watershed within the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. Researchers, looking at the ecosystem as a unit, manipulated
the whole ecosystem to study its construction, function, and responses to disturbance and stress. One of the advantages
of the Hubbard Brook site was that it provided several similar watersheds, which allowed some to be used as controls
for experiments conducted on adjacent watersheds. Over 150 scientists took part in studies of the Hubbard Brook
ecosystem in the 1960s and 1970s, pro-ducing over 450 research articles. The Hubbard Brook studies were the basis
for future ecosystem research design and provided extensive empirical data for use in resource management. In the
1970s, as research into ecological systems expanded, ecosystem ecologists realized they did not have the necessary
expertise in disciplines like chemistry, geology, and hydrology to study fully ecosystem functions. Furthermore,
they realized that population dynamics, genetics, and other sciences previously dismissed as �reductionist� provided
critical information for analysis of ecosystem function. Ecosystem ecologists began collaborating with scientists
from other disciplines in studies they called �ecosystem science.� As social values and law�and therefore political
interests and government funding�placed greater emphasis on ecological impacts, scientific research began to pay
more attention to the impacts of environmental change and to the societal and ecological benefits of noncommodity
and amenity resources. A more diverse cadre of scientific disciplines were integrated into the evolving discipline
of ecosystem science. In 1985, an eminent ecologist wrote: Until recently ecology was generally considered to be
a subdivision of biology dealing with the relationships of organisms with the environment. Then, during the environmental
awareness decade, 1968 to 1981, a school of ecosystem ecology emerged that considers ecology to be not just a subdivision
of biology, but a new discipline that integrates biological, physical and social science aspects of maninnature
interdependence. Other �trans-disciplinary� or �synthesis� disciplines, such as conservation biology and ecological
economics, emerged in the 1980s. Both conservation biology and ecological economics are avowedly normative and
committed to the goal of ecological sustainability. Conservation biologists, for example, clearly believe that
preserving biological diversity should be pursued as a policy. Conservation biology arose because none of the traditional
applied disciplines (e.g., agriculture, forestry, wildlife management, fisheries biology) could comprehensively
address threats to biological diversity. �Conservation biology has two goals: first, to investigate human impacts
on biological diversity and, second, to develop practical approaches to prevent the extinction of species. . .
.� It bridges the biological sciences and the more applied natural resource disciplines, providing a theoretical
approach to the protection of biological diversity while also attempting to provide answers to specific questions
that arise in the field. Conservation biology is more normative than most nat-ural sciences. It also differs from
traditional natural resource management �by having the long-term preservation of the entire biological community
as its primary consideration, with economic factors often being only a secondary consideration.� Ecological economics,
another synthesis discipline, seeks to bridge the dis-ciplines of ecology and economics, based on a belief that
traditional ecology has tended to overlook human dimensions and that traditional economics is built on the ideal
and possibilities of unrestrained economic growth. Conventional ecology is criticized because it rarely studies
humans, often focusing instead on pristine ecosystems. Conventional economics is criticized because it reduces
human motivations to individual self-interest, determines value through exchange and prices, and ignores many items
that cannot be captured through market exchanges (externalities): �Economics too often trivializes the most important
questions in social and political life, including the intrinsic value of healthy ecosystems.� Ecological economists
advocate a better understanding of human�nature interconnections and an expansion of the traditional economic emphasis
on efficiency to include considerations such as intergenerational equity, communalism, and improved tools for incorporating
ecological costs into economic accounting.78 Unrestrained economic growth is rejected as unattainable. Accordingly,
the �limiting factor in development is no longer manmade capital but remaining natural capital.� In the 1990s,
large-scale disturbances, such as those associated with the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the Yellowstone fires,
provided laboratories for study of ecosystem dynamics and pointed to the role that disturbances and biological
legacies play in recovery processes. They also made dramatically clear the inadequacy of legal boundaries for delineating
management dis-tricts. Many ecosystem scientists and resource managers began collaborating in cooperative ventures,
studying and managing resources across a patchwork of jurisdictions and ownership patterns. Science and policy
became linked in places such as the Northern Lands, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Great Lakes Ecosystem.
Resource managers were no longer excluded from the realm of ecosystem science. Although there continues to be debate
over the definitions of ecosystem and ecosystem ecology, ecologists increasingly are embracing the integrated and
comprehensive nature of ecosystem science as critical to ecosystem management at the landscape scale. As an eminent
Hubbard Book ecologist put it, �unless we stop addressing such complex problems in a fragmented way, management
actions will be piecemeal and often ineffectual.� Ecosystem science provides tools for understanding the interconnections
within and between landscapes.
Evolving Resource Management Experience Professional experience and learning based on efforts to implement new
resource management programs is a third root of ecosystem management. To be sure, management perspectives evolve
in response to shifts in societal values and scientific knowledge. But because they are often the ones testing
new technologies and implementing complex and sometimes ambiguous legislation, managers themselves play a central
role developing planning and decision-making models that take a whole systems approach to resource management.
In the 1980s, resource management agencies began managing more explicitly for ecological values. Ecological conditions
prompted discussion about deficiencies in the current system of laws and management that guided resource management
and the viability of multiple-use�sustained-yield as it was currently being implemented. Foresters, for instance,
began to doubt whether they could both manage trees as a crop and adequately meet other social goals, such as maintaining
water quality and endangered species populations. In the 1980s, natural resource management agencies began changing
their management priorities to reflect these ideas. The Forest Service�s New Perspectives program fostered local
projects that attempted to take an ecosystem approach to land management, and promoted new partnerships among managers,
researchers, educators, and citizens to develop and carry out those projects. In the early 1990s, largely on the
basis of its experience with New Perspectives, the agency committed itself to an ecological approach to management
of national forests and grasslands. The Bureau of Land Management made protection and acquisition of riparian areas
and fish and wildlife habitats a priority. The National Park Service reinterpreted its mandate and broadened its
perspective beyond the preservation of individual scenic resources to the management of natural and historic resources
as part of the entire ecosystem and social system in which they are found. The Park Service also began to expand
its system of �partnership parks� or �living landscapes� that included private lands managed by the agency. The
Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation increased spending on environmental restoration, mitigation,
and enhancement, and became more involved in fixing environmental problems created by their own projects. The Environmental
Protection Agency established a Community-Based Environmental Protection program and a new Office of Sustainable
Ecosystems and Communities. Changes in management philosophy and technology began to encourage more adaptive and
collaborative resource management planning. Following the lead of corporate management, resource professionals
began examining their role as �leaders� in modern society. New leadership concepts addressed the chaotic, constantly
changing, and increasingly conflictual environment in which resource managers operate by advising them to develop
strong personal ethics and communication skills, embrace change by being flexible and open to new ideas, and share
responsibility with others. Under the new leadership model, leaders are also �followers� or �servants� of the public
interest, sharing decision making with the public. Thus, responsibility for problem solving belongs to the group
and not to a single leader.89 Embracing these new con-cepts, resource professionals began labeling the traditional
leadership model as �authoritarian� and �hierarchical,� with managers acting like �benevolent monarchs.� Resource
managers began reaching out to other disciplines and to the general populace for ideas on improving management.
Leadership became increasingly linked with the need and passion for a land ethic, the reason of good science, and
a connection to the evolving social values of the larger society. Advances and experience with information technologies,
such as remote sensing and geographic information systems, as well as the explosion of personal computing capabilities
and electronic communication opportunities, made it possible to gather and portray ecological data at a variety
of scales and quickly simulate the results of different management options. Multiple constituencies could now participate
more effectively in analysis and decision making. These information technologies made scientific information more
accessible throughout and between agencies, and to the public. By increasing access to agency planning, these communication
tools allow parties to learn about issues, participate in discussions about them, and collaborate in implementing
and monitoring management prescriptions. Environmental and resource management professionals also began reexamining
their traditional ethics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, in 1989, members of the Society of American
Foresters began to debate whether they should add preservation of ecological integrity to their codes of ethics,
and in 1992 added a land ethic canon. Concern for the environmental consequences of industrial activities also
swayed private sector policies. As a business strategy to attract investors and increase competitiveness, industry
began to embrace �green production,� which uses a total systems concept to minimize emissions, effluent, and use
of virgin materials. One major forest products association, the American Forest and Paper Association, took a bold
new step by approving a set of sustainable forestry principles and implementation guidelines to which members are
expected to adhere. Environmental labeling and third-party certification that production processes adhere to certain
environmental standards emerged in several manufacturing sectors. Specters of the Past History has left its mark
on modern natural resource management policy and practices, often in ways that our predecessors would never have
predicted. Early federal land policy envisioned a nation peopled with yeoman farmers, who would ensure a prosperous
future for the nation, but instead the land dis-posal policies of the nineteenth century facilitated unscrupulous
land grabbing by large wealthy interests. Vestiges of the �wild and free� frontier mentality can still be seen
in laws like the General Mining Act of 1872, which allows mining companies to obtain federal lands at a fraction
of their current value. One scholar refers to the outdated laws, policies and ideas that still guide management
today as the �Lords of Yesterday.� The Progressive Era also left a strong imprint on resource management. Progressive
Era initiatives left an invaluable legacy of resource conservation and political reform, but also created institutions
that now appear to impede rather than further effective natural resource management. The conservation movement
created professional, scientifically-based resource management disciplines dedicated to reversing the previous
century�s practices of resource abuse and waste, but also resulted in aloof and sometimes elitist natural resource
managers and agencies. The laudable conservationist concept of sustained yield became institutionalized as a politics
of maximum sustained yield. Policy and agency budgets came to stress commodity production, even as the environmental
decade demanded more attention to the environmental consequences of such production. Progressive Era concepts of
pluralist governance gave the public more access to government decision making, eventually becoming institutionalized
in laws like the Administrative Procedure Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management
Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. As implemented, however, public involvement policies have
resulted in a politics of interest, creating an adversarial style of public involvement in resource management
dominated by national interest groups. Increasingly, however, Americans have been challenging prevailing natural
resource management policies. Hostile standoffs between the public and agen-cies across the country indicate that
the values some people place on natural resources are in conflict with the institutions that direct resource management.
People are demanding that resource management ensure ecological sustain-ability and that the needs and concerns
of the citizenry be met by involving them directly in the decision-making process. As a society, Americans� vision
of what forest, rangeland, and riparian ecosystems are, and ought to be, as well as how people should use them,
appear to be undergoing a fundamental shift. The convergence of changing social values, growing scientific knowledge,
and evolving professional and managerial experiences around concepts of integration and ecological sustainability
signals a potential revolution in natural resource management. Chapter 3 describes the evolving ecosystem manage-ment
concept�the presumed outcome of that revolution�and the likelihood that revolution will occur.
NOTES 1. Klyza, Who Controls Public Lands? 2. C. Volney, quoted in Perlin, A Forest Journey, p. 324. 3. Cronon,
Changes in the Land, p. 23; and Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, p. 112. 4. George Catlin quoted in Cronon, Nature�s
Metropolis, p. 213. 5. White, It�s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, pp. 57, 138; and Hofstadter, The American
Political Tradition. Also see Ingram and Wallace, �An �empire of liberty.�� 6. White, It�s Your Misfortune and
None of My Own; and Dana and Fairfax, Forest and Range Policy. 7. Cronon, Changes in the Land, p. 170. 8. Jefferson
as cited in Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, p. 33; and Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address as cited in Hofstadter,
The American Political Tradition, p. 31. 9. See Cronon�s Nature�s Metropolis for a discussion of the impact of
railroad expansion on the nation�s urban development as well as on its wildland resources. 10. Cooper, quoted in
Primack, Essentials of Conservation Biology, p. 13. 11. Catlin, �An artist proposes a national park�; and Marsh,
Man and Nature. For a description of the contributions of Thoreau and Emerson and other early nineteenth-century
writers to the development of conservation thought see Payne, Voices in the Wilderness. 12. Hofstadter, The American
Political Tradition, p. 165. 13. Keller, Parties, Congress, and Public Policy. 14. Curbing monopolies, according
to Pinchot in Breaking New Ground, was the third great principle of conservation. On the Progressives� administrative
reform attempts see Knott and Miller, Reforming Bureaucracy. 15. Diggins, �Progressive constitutional thought,�
p. 1482. 16. This philosophy was stated in a letter sent from Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson to Gifford
Pinchot upon the transfer of the forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to Agriculture via the Transfer
Act of 1905. Pinchot actually drafted the letter, but credits his friend and the �scientific brains� of the conservation
movement, WJ McGee, with defining the new policy. See Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, pp. 261, 325�326. 17. Pinchot,
The Fight for Conservation, p. 42; and Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, p. 505. The fledgling Forest Service�s Use
Book, precursor to the modern agency manual, stated that the �prime object of the forest reserves is use.� Cited
in Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, p. 273. 18. Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation, pp. 42�50. 19. John Muir is often
cited as the father of the wilderness movement. The outspoken supporter of preservation founded the Sierra Club
in 1892. For biographies of Muir see Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness; and Fox, The American Conservation Movement.
20. The first primitive area was set aside in 1924 through the efforts of Aldo Leopold. The Wilderness Act of 1964
established the National Wilderness System. On the evolution of wilderness and aesthetic concepts in American culture
and politics see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Allin, The Politics of Wilderness Preservation; and Hays,
Beauty, Health, and Permanence. 21. Klyza, Who Controls Public Lands?; and Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian.
22. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, p. 249. The Progressives embraced the �scientific management�
movement, inspired by the writings of mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who stressed finding the most
efficient method for getting the job done. Taylor�s principal method of discovering the one best way was the time
and motion study. See Knott and Miller, Reforming Bureaucracy. In terms of the Forest Service, Hirt calls the resultant
reliance on expert opinion and technology the �conspiracy of optimism.� Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism. For other
discussions of the main articles of faith in forest management see Duerr and Duerr, �The role of faith in forest
resource management�; and Behan, �The myth of the omnipotent forester.� 23. Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation.
24. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, p. 3. 25. Wilson, �The study of administration,� p. 210; and
Mahoney, �Wilson, Woodrow.� 26. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, p. 3. 27. Henning, �Natural resources
administration and the public interest�; and Behan, �The myth of the omnipotent forester.� 28. Yankelovich, Coming
to Public Judgment, p. 17. 29. Ingram and Wallace, �An �empire of liberty��; and Dewey, The Public and Its Problems.
Rather than render judgment, Dewey believed experts should assist the public as teacher and interpreter. For applications
of Dewey�s philosophy concerning the role of the expert to today�s resource situations see Shannon, �Community
governance�; and Lee, Compass and Gyroscope. But note that Dewey and other Progressives �all also agreed that standing
in the way of federal regulatory policies was a debilitating Jeffersonian heritage that made private rights anterior
to public responsibilities, a destructive individualism that frustrated the ideals of political authority and civic
duty.� Many were �convinced that both the Constitution and Republic could be preserved from the corruptions of
business interests only by augmenting the authority of an efficient and enlightened state.� Diggins, �Progressive
constitutional thought,� p. 1482. 30. Pinchot, in Breaking New Ground, p. 32, wrote that �The purpose of Forestry,
then, is to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep
on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees.� On the evolution of sustained yield see Parry
et al., �Changing conceptions of sustained-yield policy on the national forests�; Hagenstein, �Some history of
multiple use/sustained yield concepts�; Leshy, �Is the multiple use/sustained yield management philosophy still
applicable today?�; and Behan, �The irony of the multiple use/sustained yield concept.� Also see Dove, Multiple
Use, Sustained Yield, and Other Philosophies of Federal Land Management. 31. The thinking and activism of lumberman
David T. Mason were influential in redefining and expanding the sustained-yield concept to embrace the goal of
community stability. See Loehr, Forests for the Future. 32. See Frome, Regreening the National Parks; and Everhart,
The National Park Service, for examples of sustained-yield management in the Park Service. In the case of water
resources see Liebman, The Water Resources Council; Holmes, A History of Federal Water Resources Programs and Policies,
1800�1960; Holmes, A History of Federal Water Resources Programs and Policies, 1961�1970; and Jaffe, �Benefit-cost
analysis and multi-objective evaluations of federal water projects,� p. 70. 33. Kimmins, �Modeling the sustainability
of forest production and yield for a changing and uncertain future�; Kessler et al., �New perspectives for sustainable
natural resources management.� For critiques of quantitative tools see Brewer, �Some costs and consequences of
large-scale social systems modeling�; Cortner and Schweitzer, �Institutional limits and legal implications of quantitative
models in forest planning�; Mitroff, �The myth of objectivity or why science needs a new psychology of science�;
and Parker et al., �Use and misuse of complex models.� 34. Franklin, �Ecosystem management.� 35. Behan, �Multiresource
forest management,� p. 13. 36. Wolf, �The concept of multiple use,� p. 78. 37. See generally Klyza, Who Controls
Public Lands?; Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian; and Clarke and McCool, Staking Out the Terrain. On grazing,
in particular, see Foss, Politics and Grass. On timber see Clary, Timber and the Forest Service, and Hirt, A Conspiracy
of Optimism. On water see Reisner, Cadillac Desert; Gottlieb, A Life of its Own; Miller, �Recent trends in federal
water resources management�; Maass, Muddy Waters; and Ferejohn, Pork Barrel Politics. 38. During the 1980s, for
example, environmental group membership doubled. See Hendee and Pitstick, �The growth of environmental and conservation-related
organiza-tions.� Reapportionment during the 1960s also gave urban areas increasing political power. The environmental
movement was largely urban-based and not reluctant to press Washington to exert its influence over decisions affecting
resource management in distant rural areas. 39. Discussion in this paragraph is adapted from Ingram and Wallace,
�An �empire of liberty,�� p. 103. 40. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, p. 317. See also Sale, �Schism in environmentalism,�
for a discussion of the divisions within the environmental movement. Some segments of the movement argue that mainstream
environmental groups are too �establishment,� too anthropocentric, too willing to compromise, and too coopted by
Washington politics. 41. Sirmon et al., �Communities of interests and open decisionmaking.� 42. Facaros, �Public
involvement in national forest planning�; and Shannon, �Public participation in the RPA process.� 43. Force and
Williams, �A profile of national forest planning participants.� 44. Moote et al., �Theory in practice�; Advisory
Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Citizen Participation in the American Federal System; Blahna and Yonts-Shepard,
�Public involvement in resource planning�; Facaros, �Public involvement in national forest planning�; Feller, �Grazing
management on the public lands�; Fortmann and Lewis, �Public involvement in natural resource management�; Shannon,
�Public par-ticipation in the RPA process�; Shannon, �Building public decisions�; Wondolleck, �The importance of
process in resolving environmental disputes�; and Wondolleck, Public Lands Conflict and Resolution. 45. Cortner
and Shannon, �Embedding public participation in its political context.� 46. Sirmon et al., �Communities of interests
and open decisionmaking�; Moote et al., �Theory in practice�; and Blahna and Yonts-Shepard, �Public involvement
in resource planning.� 47. See Cawley and Freemuth, �A critique of the multiple use framework in public lands decisionmaking.�
Lowi, in The End of Liberalism, critiques the assumption that bar-gaining among competing groups is self-correcting
and discusses the negative consequences of a politics built around interest groups. 48. Alston, �Are sustained
yield and sustainable forests equivalent?�; Brooks and Grant, �New approaches to forest management�; and Bailey,
�Good forest management for the future.� 49. The National Research Council�s (NRC) Forestry Research report called
for a new environmental research paradigm, which would include �an understanding of the fundamental structures,
processes, and relationships within forests� to allow management on the scale of landscapes and regions, p. 12.
The NRC report also recommended collaboration among forest managers and user groups. The Ecological Society of
America�s 1991 report on its sustainable biosphere initiative, which has been described as a �call-to-arms� for
all ecologists, stressed the critical need to manage for ecosystem sustainability. See Lubchenco et al., �The sustainable
biosphere initiative.� In 1993, a Society of American Foresters� task force released its report, Task Force Report
on Sustaining Long-Term Forest Health and Productivity, which stated that natural resource management should �maintain
the structural and functional integrity of the forest as an ecosystem,� p. xiii. The report concluded that traditional
sustained-yield management as implemented does not ensure that the integrity of the ecosystem is maintained or
that it adequately meets the desires of people for more attention to noncommodity values. The report proved to
be highly controversial within the professional society. 50. Morrissey et al., Ecosystem Management. The twenty-first
annual report of the Council on Environmental Quality, released in 1990 under the Bush administration, advocated
taking an ecosystem approach to planning under the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws.
Council on Environmental Quality, TwentyFirst Annual Report of the Council on Environmental Quality. In 1993, the
Clinton Administration�s National Performance Review released its environmental report, Reinventing Environmental
Management, which recommended cross-agency ecosystem planning and management under all federal programs affecting
ecosystems. This administration also established the President�s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), which
released its Sustainable America report in 1996. In 1995, the Council of State Governments surveyed states about
their ecosystem management activities. See Brown and Marshall, �Ecosystem management in state governments.� Ecosystem
management is not just a western-state phenomenon. 51. The state of Pennsylvania, for example, where over 70 percent
of land is in private ownership, has adopted ecosystem management as policy for managing state-owned forests and
for guiding assistance programs that deal with private forest resources. See Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry, Penn�s
Woods, pp. 8�10. 52. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, p. 204, pp. 224�225. For a biography
of Leopold, see Meine, Aldo Leopold. 53. Salwasser, �Ecosystem management�; Slocombe, �Environmental planning,
ecosystem science, and ecosystem approaches for integrating environment and develop-ment�; and Francis, �Ecosystem
management,� provide historical examples of attempts to develop and apply ecological approaches in the natural
resource management disciplines as well as in a number of social science and humanities disciplines. In 1970, Lynton
Caldwell, who is also known as the principal intellectual architect of NEPA�s environ-mental impact statement requirement,
specifically advocated the use of the ecosystem as a criterion for public land policy. Caldwell, �The ecosystem
as a criterion for public land policy.� 54. Nash, American Environmentalism, pp. 187�189. 55. Golley, A History
of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology, p. 3. 56. Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics;
Cortner and Moote, �Sustainability and ecosystem management.� 57. Carson, Silent Spring. 58. See Meadows et al.,
The Limits to Growth. 59. A summation of American values in the area of the environment and natural resources is
contained in Milbrath�s work, Environmentalists, which examines the shift from the Dominant Social Paradigm to
the New Environmental Paradigm. See also Dunlap and Van Liere, �The �new environmental paradigm��; Dunlap, �Polls,
pollution, and pol-itics revisited�; Dunlap and Mertig, American Environmentalism; and Inglehart, The Silent Revolution.
60. Bosso, �Seizing back the day�; Ladd and Bowman, �Public opinion on the envi-ronment�; and Kempton et al., Environmental
Values in American Culture. Deason points out that public support for environmental values is worldwide. Deason,
�Changing world atti-tudes on environmental values and sustainability.� 61. Dunlap and Mertig, American Environmentalism.
62. Implementation of the sweeping environmental and natural resource legislation of the late 1960s and 1970s was
also beginning to take an economic toll on the federal budget. �In the United States, we spend over $100 billion
per year on pollu-tion abatement and control.� Long and Arnold, The Power of Environmental Partnerships, p. 4.
63. Anderson and Leal, Free Market Environmentalism; Hess, Visions Upon the Land; and O�Toole, Reforming the Forest
Service. 64. For example, an amendment to the Endangered Species Act in 1982 facilitated the development of cooperative
private�public conservation plans that take an ecosystem approach to species conservation. 65. Caldwell, Perspectives
on Ecosystem Management for the Great Lakes; Adams and Atkinson, Watershed Resources; Sample et al., Building Partnerships
for Ecosystem Management on Mixed Ownership Landscapes; and Natural Resources Law Center, The Watershed Source
Book. 66. Tansley as quoted in McIntosh, The Background of Ecology, p. 193. See also Golley, A History of the Ecosystem
Concept in Ecology; and Hagen, An Entangled Bank, for discussion of the history of ecosystem science. 67. Golley,
A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology, pp. 33�34. 68. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology,
p. 145. 69. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology, citing Bormann and Likens, Pattern and Processes in a Forested
Ecosystem; and Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology. 70. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology,
pp. 202�203. 71. The new ecosystem science went well beyond systems analysis. �It is more empirical and experimental
and much less involved in abstract generalization and mathematical formulation� than systems ecology. Systems ecology,
based in the laws of thermodynamics, is heavily dependent on computer simulation models to track complex interrelation-ships
among ecosystem components. See McIntosh, The Background of Ecology, pp. 207, 210�213. 72. Eugene Odum, cited in
McIntosh, The Background of Ecology, p. 202. 73. Meffe and Viederman, �Combining science and policy in conservation
biology�; Soulé, �What is conservation biology?�; and Primack, Essentials of Conservation Biology. See also
Soulé, Conservation Biology; Meffe and Carroll, Principles of Conservation Biology; and Knight and George,
�New approaches, new tools.� 74. Primack, Essentials of Conservation Biology, p. 5. �Conservation biology should
be considered a crisis discipline,� p. 7. 75. Primack, Essentials of Conservation Biology, p. 7. 76. Costanza et
al., �Goals, agenda, and policy recommendations for ecological eco-nomics�; Costanza, Ecological Economics; Folke,
�Ecologists and economists can find common ground.� While ecological economics criticizes traditional economics
because it is too utilitarian, Sagoff contends that ecological economics is also based on utilitarian logic. Sagoff,
�Carrying capacity and ecological economics.� 77. Bradley and Lewis, �Ecological economics,� pp. 31�32. 78. Page,
�Sustainability and the problem of valuation�; Clark, �Rethinking ecological and economic education�; Rylander,
�Accounting for nature�; Norgaard and Howarth, �Sustainability and discounting the future�; Daly, �Sustainable
growth�; and Daily, Nature�s Services. 79. Costanza et al., �Goals, agenda, and policy recommendations for ecological
economics,� p. 8. 80. See Franklin, �Biological legacies�; Maser et al., �Dead and down woody material�; Swanson
and Berg, �The ecological roots of new approaches to forestry�; Perry and Amaranthus, �Disturbance, recovery, and
stability�; and Ehrenfeld, �Ecosystem health and ecological theories,� pp. 137�139 regarding recognition that disturbance
is an integral, perhaps essential, feature of ecological communities. 81. See, for example, Harper et al., The
Northern Forest Lands Study of New England and New York; Clark and Minta, Greater Yellowstone�s Future; Clark et
al., �Policy and programs forecosystem management in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem�; Dworsky, �Ecosystem management�;
Francis and Regier, �Barriers and bridges to the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem�; and Johnson et al., Bioregional
Assessments. 82. Some ecologists do not distinguish between ecology and ecosystem science; both are �the study
of the relationships among ecological entities, e.g., individual organisms, populations, and systems, and their
environments.� Likens, The Ecosystem Approach, p. 8. 83. Likens, The Ecosystem Approach, p. 137. 84. Gordon, �From
vision to policy�; and Behan, �The obsolete paradigm of professional forestry.� In the fall of 1989, the forest
supervisors from the northern region of the Forest Service sent Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson a letter that
said, �We are not meeting the quality land management expectations of our public and our employees.� Memorandum
from the Region One Forest Supervisors to Chief Dale Robertson, �An Open Letter to the Chief from the Region One
Forest Supervisors,� November 1989. In the summer of 1990, supervisors of other regions followed suit. The reports
and recom-mendations to the director of the National Park Service from the agency�s 75th anniver-sary meeting in
Vail, Colorado, also expressed concern that the ability of the agency to meet �the most fundamental aspects of
its mission has been compromised.� Steering Committee of the 75th Anniversary Symposium, �National parks for the
21st century,� p. 437. 85. Kessler and Salwasser, in �Natural resource agencies,� note that �For now, it is important
to understand that New Perspectives was an internal, grassroots process for change,� p. 175. For a policy evaluation
of the New Perspectives program, see Shands et al., From New Perspectives to Ecosystem Management. The Forest Service�s
announcement in June 1992 that it would henceforth be taking an ecological approach to management of the national
forests and grasslands was somewhat overshadowed by the announcement in the same memo that it would be reducing
clear-cutting as a standard timber practice. See Robertson, �Ecosystem management of the national forests and grasslands,�
Attachment 2. 86. U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management, Riparian-Wetland Initiative for the
1990s; and U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management, Fish & Wildlife 2000. 87. Commission
on Research and Resource Management Policy in the National Park System, National Parks. The first recommendation
was that the National Park Service develop and use the concept of ecosystem management. The agency�s Vail agenda
also recommended that parks be managed under �ecological principles.� See Steering Committee of the 75th Anniversary
Symposium, �National parks for the 21st century,� p. 440. See also Halvorson and Davis, Science and Ecosystem Management
in the National Parks. 88. See, for example, Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge. 89. Berry and Gordon,
Environmental Leadership; Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge; Block, Stewardship; Sirmon et al., �Communities
of interests and open decision-making�; Heifetz and Sinder, �Political leadership�; and Shannon, �Building trust.�
90. Sirmon et al., �Communities of interests and open decisionmaking.� 91. Cornett, �Birch seeds, leadership, and
a relationship with the land.� 92. Smyth, �Foresters and the land�; Craig et al., �Land ethic canon proposal�;
and Coufal, �The land ethic question.� See also Irland, �Developing ethical reflection�; and Reeves et al., Ethical
Questions for Resource Managers. 93. See Hart, �How green production might sustain the world�; Bhat, The Green
Corporation; and Press and Mazmanian, �The greening of industry.� 94. American Forest and Paper Association, Sustainable
Forestry Principles and Implementation Guidelines; and Wallinger, �A commitment to the future.� 95. Dudley et al.,
�A framework for environmental labeling.� 96. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian.
Preface
Preface
As we enter a new century and a new millennium, it is appropriate to consider how our actions individually and
collectively will be evaluated by our ancestors in another 100 years. Reflecting back, will they see us as leaders
who strived to ensure that they would have a better world? Will they say we chose wisely or selfishly? If it is
to be the former, we believe that society and the professional resource community must own up to the negative as
well as the positive con-sequences of land and water management. We must recognize that despite great strides in
some countries and in some resource areas, on the whole our current policy path and traditional approaches to resource
management are not ecologically sustainable. We both have a long-standing interest in the politics of environmental
and natural resource decision making. Hanna�s particular interest in new ecological
approaches to resource management that embrace the overriding goal of ecological sustainability emerged in the
early 1990s with her involvement with the USDA Forest Service�s New Perspectives program, as a participant in several
agency-sponsored workshops. These workshops brought together members of the natural resource community to define,
monitor, and evaluate that agency�s attempts at integrating ecological sustainability into its management activities.
Hanna�s interest in new perspectives and ecosystem management grew through work initiated in 1991 on the Society
of American Foresters� (SAF) Task Force on Sustaining Long-Term Forest Health and Productivity.
Under the steady, guiding hand of Logan Norris that group took the bold, but highly controversial, step within
the SAF of explicitly recommending that the professional society become an advocate promoting the understanding
and adoption of ecosystem management.
Ann came to her work in community-based process through an interest in indigenous knowledge and new approaches
to environmental and land-use planning that incorporate that knowledge. She began working on ecosystem management
as a graduate student at the University of Arizona, and continued as a research fellow at American Forests, participating
in a project that examined the challenges and opportunities for ecosystem management in mixed-ownership landscapes.
Returning to the University of Arizona as staff in 1995, Ann focused her research on collaborative community-based
approaches to resource management.
We began our collaboration in 1991 with an exploration of the concept of a paradigm shift in resource management.
This collaboration subsequently grew into a larger team project on the institutional barriers and incentives for
ecosystem management centered at the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, where Hanna
then served as director. Also central to the team were Mary Wallace and Sabrina Burke. At the time, Mary was a
senior research specialist at the Water Center, and Sabrina a graduate student in the School of Renewable Natural
Resources. The team�s work laid the basis for this book as it probed the principal themes of ecosystem management,
contrasted the political theories guiding resource management under traditional and ecological approaches, explored
the challenges of moving toward more collaborative forms of public deliberation and intergovernmental coordination,
and identified potential areas for research on the political�institutional aspects of ecosystem management. We
both have thus been involved in a number of efforts�jointly, separately, and with others�to define, analyze, and
advance the principles embraced by the concept of ecosystem management. On the public record, we are advocates
for more ecological approaches to resource management, for policy changes that foster more open and collaborative
decision-making processes, and for innovative ways to manage resources across mixed ownerships. In this regard,
our arguments are prescriptive and normative. We believe it is not only the duty of scholars of public policy to
describe and empirically explain
relationships, but also to promote the ideals of democratic governance and citizenship. Engaging the civic community
in normative discussions about the current state of science and government, and about the desired future for these
institutions, is a role of the scientific community that needs to be nourished and sustained. Nonetheless, as students
of resource management, we have an obligation to examine the arguments of critics of ecosystem management who embrace
alternate visions of the best way to ensure a good life and a health planet for our descendants. We also need to
be explicit about the social and political challenges that turning the principles of ecosystem management into
practice will entail, and to warn of potential pitfalls along the way. One of those pitfalls is assuming that
science alone�more science, better science, heeded science�is sufficient. Thus, we have expended considerable effort
in the past few years in making the argument that underlies this book, that is, ecosystem management is not just
about the science, it is also about social and political change. Throughout, we have explored ecosystem management
from the perspective that natural resource policies and management philosophies reflect the state of politics as
much as they do current science.
Natural resource and environmental management have never been based solely in science, or even in the best available
science. It is impossible to separate values from science. Ecosystem management is in large part a social movement
that embraces a new philosophical basis for resource management. We therefore need to be explicit about the values
and policy preferences that this new approach assumes. Whether society can move toward ecological sustainability
will depend on the health of our governance processes and the political will to take the necessary steps to ensure
the integrity and resilience of democratic ideals as well as critical ecological processes. Just as other natural
resource and envi-ronmental policies evolve, so too will ecosystem management, and political considerations will
play a large part in determining how it evolves. In our explorations into the theory of ecosystem management and
its political challenges, we have been assisted and influenced by the work of numerous collaborators and partners.
We would like to thank the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station and Roger Clark for pro-viding
partial support for our initial work on institutional barriers and incen-tives for ecosystem management. Among
the products of that support was a 1994 workshop focusing on preparation of a problem analysis to guide future
research and study on the institutional dimensions of ecosystem management. Interactions with participants at
that workshop, as well as with members of the SAF Task Force and the Summary Team of the 1995 Ecological Stewardship
Conference, were instrumental in shaping our ideas about the ori-gins and future potentials of ecosystem management.
Partial financial support from the University of Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station and a sabbatical leave
for Hanna granted by the University also assisted us along the way.
We have always enjoyed the interaction and support of a number of current and former colleagues at the University
of Arizona and around the country, including Donna Chickering, Jeanne Clarke, Maia Enzer, Gerry Gray, Helen Ingram,
Lynn Jungwirth, Dave King, Jonathan Kusel, Mitch McClaran,
Al Sample, Denny Schweitzer, and Margaret Shannon. Sabrina Burke, who is now an AmeriCorps leader, made significant
contributions to this book both as partner on our overall work in the institutional barriers and incentives pro-ject
and in shaping our early conceptions of material that appears in chapters 3�5. Laura Tanzer, graduate student in
the School of Renewable Natural Resources, assisted with bibliographic chores and figure 4.1. Thanks are also due
to Ana Rodriguez who kept things moving smoothly administratively at the Water Center. Barbara Dean and Barbara
Youngblood at Island Press have been supportive and forthcoming as our editors. Finally, we are indebted to Mary
Wallace, currently a doctoral candidate in the University of Arizona�s political science department, for the critical
contributions she made as part of our research team, and particularly for her efforts as co-author on early ver-sions
of chapters 2�5. Mary�s insights into social change and political theory helped us identify and refine many of
the points in those chapters, and her
ideas are reflected throughout the book. While the assistance and support from colleagues and friends were critical,
we nonetheless accept full responsi-bility for any errors of omission or commission. If we generate further debate
and discussion about the efficacy and feasibility of the political challenges of ecosystem management, we will
have served our purpose well.
Hanna J. Cortner
Margaret A. Moote
Tucson, Arizona
Summary
Resource management in the United States is undergoing a fundamental change. Traditional sustained-yield approaches
that focus on commodity-production and human resource use are steadily giving way to ecological approaches, often
referred to as ecosystem management, that have long-term ecological sustainability as their primary goal. To achieve
that goal, ecosystem management emphasizes socially defined goals and objectives, integrated and holistic science,
collaborative decision making, and adaptable institutions. Political considerations are an essential component
of ecosystem management, yet its socio-political context has been largely ignored by those studying and writing
on the subject.
The Politics of Ecosystem Management is the first book to focus entirely on the political challenges facing ecosystem
management as it moves from theory to practice.
The authors examine:
the history of natural resource management in the United States
the theory behind ecosystem management
potential inconsistencies and contradictions in the themes of ecosystem management
political philosophies that undergird traditional resource management
alternative political principles inherent in ecosystem management
opportunities and barriers for achieving collaborative ecosystem management
The Politics of Ecosystem Management considers the sweeping and profound changes that will be required of the
American governance system-its political philosophy, institutions, notions of citizenship, and politics, as well
its resource management practices-if the shift to ecosystem management is to be realized. It is a lucid and accessible
volume that represents a vital contribution to the literature for students, researchers, and professionals involved
with any aspect of developing and implementing ecosystem-based approaches to resource management.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 Politics and Natural Resources: Making the Link
Chapter 2 The Evolution of Ecosystem Management
Chapter 3 A Paradigm Shift?
Chapter 4 Policy Paradoxes
Chapter 5 Philosophical Underpinnings
Chapter 6 Collaborative Stewardship in Action: Building a Civic Society
Chapter 7 Effective Governmental Policies and Structures
Chapter 8 The Future of Ecosystem Management
