Category Archives: Ecological Management

Illegal logging, black globalization, and undercover environmentalists

October 10, 2008 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Black globalization is an evocative name for how multi-nationals and mafias can blur together by using violence and global trade to avoid regulation, certification, and quality control. In the New Yorker article The Stolen Forests Raffi Khatchadourian writes about the global trade in illegally logged timber, and how an environmental NGO, the environment investigation agency, collects data to document illegal logging and encourage law enforcement.

Chances are good that if an item sold in the United States was recently made in China using oak or ash, the wood was imported from Russia through Suifenhe. Because as much as half of the hardwood from Primorski Krai is harvested in violation of Russian law—either by large companies working with corrupt provincial officials or by gangs of men in remote villages—it is likely that any given piece of wood in the city has been logged illegally. This wide-scale theft empowers mafias, robs the Russian government of revenue, and assists in the destruction of one of the most precious ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. Lawmakers in the province have called for “emergency measures” to stem the flow of illegal wood, and Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources has said that in the region “there has emerged an entire criminal branch connected with the preparation, storage, transportation, and selling of stolen timber.”

…

A fifth of the world’s wood comes from countries that have serious problems enforcing their timber laws, and most of those countries are also experiencing the fastest rates of deforestation. Until a decade ago, many governments were reluctant to acknowledge illegal logging, largely because it was made possible by the corruption of their own officials. As early as the nineteeneighties, the Philippines had lost the vast majority of its primary forests and billions of dollars to illegal loggers. Papua New Guinea, during roughly the same period, experienced such catastrophic forest loss that it commissioned independent auditors to assess why it was happening; they determined that logging companies were “roaming the countryside with the self-assurance of robber barons; bribing politicians and leaders, creating social disharmony and ignoring laws in order to gain access to, rip out, and export the last remnants of the province’s valuable timber.” In 1998, the Brazilian government announced that most of the country’s logging operations were being conducted beyond the ambit of the law.

…

In 2001, experts with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo coined a phrase, “conflict timber,” to describe how logging had become interwoven with the fighting there. The term is apt for a number of other places. In Burma, stolen timber helps support the junta and the rebels. In Cambodia, it helped fund the Khmer Rouge, one of the most brutal rebel factions in history. Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, distributed logging concessions to warlords and a member of the Ukrainian mafia, and the Oriental Timber Company—known in Liberia as Only Taylor Chops—conducted arms deals on his behalf. The violence tied to Taylor’s logging operations reached unprecedented levels, and in 2003 the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions on all Liberian timber. (China, the largest importer of Liberian timber, tried to block the sanctions.) Shortly afterward, Taylor’s regime collapsed. An American official told me that the U.S. intelligence community “absolutely put the fall of Taylor on the timber sanctions.”

Ecological Management

Ecological architecture

September 24, 2008 Garry Peterson 1 Comment

Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences Blooms and Grows, Balancing Man and Nature

Mr. Piano’s vision avoids arrogance. The ethereality of the academy’s structure suggests a form of reparations for the great harm humans have done to the natural world. It is best to tread lightly in moving forward, he seems to say. This is not a way of avoiding hard truths; he means to shake us out of our indolence.

See a slide show of the Academy and from Flickr photos.

Also, from Pruned:

The New York Times visits Alan Berger and gets a tour of his reclamation project in the Pontine Marshes. Says Berger, “The solution has to be as artificial as the place. We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape.” Much earlier, The New York Times tagged along with the landscape architect and his class to a severely polluted mining area in Colorado.

Ecological Management, Regime Shifts

Financial resilience – Taleb and Mandelbrot reflect on crisis

September 17, 2008 Garry Peterson 3 Comments

Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb writes on Edge about an unwillingness or consider and remember extreme events leads to financial disaster in The Fourth Quadrant: A map of the limits of statistics.

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

The current subprime crisis has been doing wonders for the reception of any ideas about probability-driven claims in science, particularly in social science, economics, and “econometrics” (quantitative economics). Clearly, with current International Monetary Fund estimates of the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis, the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks. But it was easy to see from the past that the pilot did not have the qualifications to fly the plane and was using the wrong navigation tools: The same happened in 1983 with money center banks losing cumulatively every penny ever made, and in 1991-1992 when the Savings and Loans industry became history.

It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law’s checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand. I want this to stop, and stop now— the current patching by the banking establishment worldwide is akin to using the same doctor to cure the patient when the doctor has a track record of systematically killing them. And this is not limited to banking—I generalize to an entire class of random variables that do not have the structure we thing they have, in which we can be suckers.

And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, we are riding in a bus driven a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence, which to me is a pathological problem with academia. After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited. Yet the Fed helped their bailout and exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks’ swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).

Are we using models of uncertainty to produce certainties?

…So the good news is that we can identify where the danger zone is located, which I call “the fourth quadrant”, and show it on a map with more or less clear boundaries. A map is a useful thing because you know where you are safe and where your knowledge is questionable. So I drew for the Edge readers a tableau showing the boundaries where statistics works well and where it is questionable or unreliable. Now once you identify where the danger zone is, where your knowledge is no longer valid, you can easily make some policy rules: how to conduct yourself in that fourth quadrant; what to avoid.

…

Now it lets see where the traps are:

First Quadrant: Simple binary decisions, in Mediocristan: Statistics does wonders. These situations are, unfortunately, more common in academia, laboratories, and games than real life—what I call the “ludic fallacy”. In other words, these are the situations in casinos, games, dice, and we tend to study them because we are successful in modeling them.

Second Quadrant: Simple decisions, in Extremistan: some well known problem studied in the literature. Except of course that there are not many simple decisions in Extremistan.

Third Quadrant: Complex decisions in Mediocristan: Statistical methods work surprisingly well.

Fourth Quadrant: Complex decisions in Extremistan: Welcome to the Black Swan domain. Here is where your limits are. Do not base your decisions on statistically based claims. Or, alternatively, try to move your exposure type to make it third-quadrant style (“clipping tails”).

Below I’ve redrawn Taleb’s figure. His article provides a fuller picture. Taleb's quadrants

Similarly, Scientific American reprints Benoit Mandelbrot’s 1999 How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street:

Individual investors and professional stock and currency traders know better than ever that prices quoted in any financial market often change with heart-stopping swiftness. Fortunes are made and lost in sudden bursts of activity when the market seems to speed up and the volatility soars. Last September, for instance, the stock for Alcatel, a French telecommunications equipment manufacturer, dropped about 40 percent one day and fell another 6 percent over the next few days. In a reversal, the stock shot up 10 percent on the fourth day.

The classical financial models used for most of this century predict that such precipitous events should never happen. A cornerstone of finance is modern portfolio theory, which tries to maximize returns for a given level of risk. The mathematics underlying portfolio theory handles extreme situations with benign neglect: it regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter or as impossible to take into account. It is true that portfolio theory may account for what occurs 95 percent of the time in the market. But the picture it presents does not reflect reality, if one agrees that major events are part of the remaining 5 percent. An inescapable analogy is that of a sailor at sea. If the weather is moderate 95 percent of the time, can the mariner afford to ignore the possibility of a typhoon?

Ecological Management, General

Environmental Cooperation and Resource Degradation

June 23, 2008 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

People commonly assume that environmental degradation and resource depletion will lead to conflict, however ecological problems can also lead to cooperation.

Earthtrends reviews some recent research in this area in Using Environmental Negotiations Toward Peace:

Ecological resources have factored into many national conflicts–either through competition for scarce resources or greed to exploit plentiful ones. But some scholars see another role for the environment: fostering peace. Resources managed jointly can quell regional hostilities, or better, keep lines of communication open so that a conflict never starts, these scholars say, and it seems the idea is gaining traction.

Ecological Management, General, Tools

Wiki launch of the practitioner’s guide to resilience assessment

April 23, 2008 Allyson Quinlan 2 Comments

resilience assessment logo
Last week at Resilience 2008 in Stockholm, I gave a presentation on the Practitioner’s workbook Assessing and Managing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems. The workbook incorporates key principles underlying resilience thinking and provides a framework for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems and considering options to set the system on a sustainable trajectory. The workbook builds on research by RA members and others and while it offers neither a recipe for effective management nor a panacea for resource problems, it does provide a foundation for integrated resource management that takes into account cross-scale interactions, alternate regimes, change, and uncertainty.

In the spirit of knowledge sharing, and collaboration, a wiki version of the workbook was launched last week. The workbook wiki is aimed at those who have experience applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems and who want to contribute to the on-going development of the resilience assessment guide.

Feedback from those who have used the resilience assessment workbook (first made available last July), identified some of the strengths and weaknesses of the original version as well as a few gaps. The wiki editorial team will begin organizing the development of new content and a bunch of new material that will be linked to the workbook including: thematic versions of the workbook (e.g. urban resilience, coral reef resilience); modules on participatory research, adaptive co-management, assessing ecosystem service tradeoffs, etc.; research methods; translations (Spanish, Russian, Swedish); new examples and case studies.

Discussions among those who have used the workbook highlight the need for many more examples and case studies of completed assessments. People want to know how others are applying the assessment process in different settings, how they are adapting it, what problems have arisen, and how they were dealt with. A large network of people who have completed resilience assessments will be encouraged to contribute their examples and case studies to the wiki. These entries will include authorship and be reviewed by editors.

Ecological Economics, Ecological Management

Discussion of Scott’s Seeing Like a State

November 17, 2007 Garry Peterson 5 Comments

seeing like a state cover In the late 1990s James Scott wrote a very interesting book Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed about the failure of bureaucratic planning to accomodate local-tacit knowledge that doesn’t easily fit within bureaucratic systems.

The failure of bureaucratic management to cope with social-ecological diversity is a strong theme in studies of common property and human ecology. I read the book from this perspective informed Holling’s pathology of natural resource management, and found much in the book that was congruent with the pathology. From descriptions of scientific forestry in Germany that simplified the forest to an extent that foresters had to encourage local school children to raise bees for pollination. Other have read the book for different perspectives, and their responses are interesting. Below I quote from the comments of an economist and political scientist who noticed different parts of the book.

Economist Brad DeLong criticizes the book’s lack of engangement with economic thought on the collective problem solving ability of individuals. He writes:

The key fault of what Scott calls “high modernism” is its belief that details don’t matter–that planners decree from on high, people obey, and utopia results. Note that Scott’s conclusion is not just that attempts at high-modernist centrally-planned social-engineering have failed. It is–as von Mises argued 70 years ago–they are always overwhelmingly likely to fail. As Scott puts it:

… [the] larger point [is that]… [i]n each case, the necessarily thin, schematic model of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain (p. 310).

Yet even as he makes his central points, Scott appears unable to make contact with his intellectual roots–thus he is unable to draw on pieces of the Austrian argument as it has been developed over the past seventy years. Just as seeing like a state means that you cannot see the local details of what is going on, so seeing like James Scott seems to me that you cannot see your intellectual predecessors.

That the conclusion is so strong where the evidence is so weak is, I think, evidence of profound subconscious anxiety: subconscious fear that recognizing that one’s book is in the tradition of the Austrian critique of the twentieth century state will commit one to becoming a right-wing inequality-loving Thatcher-worshiping libertarian (even though there are intermediate positions: you can endorse the Austrian critique of central planning without rejecting the mixed economy and the social insurance state).

And when the chips are down, this recognition is something James Scott cannot do. At some level he wishes–no matter what his reason tells him–to take his stand on the side of the barricades with the revolutionaries and their tools to build utopia. He ends the penultimate chapter of his book with what can only be called a political pledge-of-allegiance:

Revolutionaries have had every reason to despise the feudal, poverty-stricken, inegalitarian past that they hoped to banish forever, and sometimes they have also had a reason to suspect that immediate democracy would simply bring back the old order. Postindependence leaders in the nonindustrial world (occasionally revolutionary leaders themselves) could not be faulted for hating their past of colonial domination and economic stagnation, nor could they be faulted for wasting no time or democratic sentimentality on creating a people that they could be proud of (p. 341).

But then comes the chapter’s final sentence: “Understanding the history and logic of their commitment to high-modernist goals, however, does not permit us to overlook the enormous damage that their convictions entailed when combined with authoritarian state power” (p. 341).

Political Scientist Henry Farrell responds by arguing that “rational planning” that ignores local conditions is not just a problem of state planning:

What Scott argues, as I understand it is as follows. First – that processes of rationalization lead to the destruction of metis, or local knowledge if you would prefer, and the prioritization of codifiable, quantifiable, epistemic knowledge. Second, that this process involves obvious and (sometimes quite important) trade-offs, but may often be worth it – e.g. there is no point in idealizing serf-like conditions that preserve local knowledge at the expense of human freedom. Third, that the real problem is when the creation of epistemic knowledge is combined with high modernist attempts to engage in social engineering. This arrives at similar conclusions to Hayek etc about how terrible collectivization processes are, but from different premises. Specifically, what Hayek etc would see as the result of state planning, Scott sees as the result of broader forms of rationalization (hence, perhaps, the linkages to Foucault that Brad worries about) when they coincide with a certain kind of state hubris (the hubris doesn’t necessarily follow from the creation of codifiable knowledge).

Thus, I think there is a argument against the Hayekians which is not very far from the surface of Seeing Like a State and which can be drawn out quite easily. First – Scott makes it clear that the processes of market development and of state imposition of standards goes hand in hand. Brad talks about how the very first example that Scott draws on – German scientific forestry in the nineteenth century – is intended to show the failures of state planning. But as Scott makes clear, the relevant failures are driven as much by the market as by the state – Scott writes about how the “utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial trees)” and about how the forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably. Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.

This is an important sub-theme of the book, and indeed of our understanding of how states and markets have developed hand-in-hand. Sometimes, the state has sought to impose its view for reasons of its own interest and survival (whether this be the promotion of ‘public order,’ the increase of fiscal revenues or whatever), sometimes at the behest of market actors who are interested in standardization, and sometimes for rationales that blur these two together.

…

This leads on to the second point – that a lot of what Scott argues is correct. His claim, as I read it is less about the specific problems of state-created institutions, than the ways in which a large variety of abstracting institutions or standards miss out on, and perhaps undermine important forms of local knowledge. As I understand him, any standards sufficient for impersonal exchange are likely to abstract away the actual relationships that people have with their environment. Here, Scott is less a closet-Hayekian than a more-or-less-overt Polanyian, who develops some of Polanyi’s arguments (especially his claims about the institutional consequences of long distance trade, and the economy as an instituted process) to make them sharper and more interesting.

…

Another, more homely example is food. Brad criticizes Scott’s discussion of the much-cited tasteless tomato arguing that it are an example of market success rather than failure – people bought tasteless tomatoes because they were cheap. This seems to me to have a bit of a flavor of a revealed preferences argument, and also to miss the point. I lived in Florence for three years, a city which has cheap and delicious tomatoes, despite being some distance from the parts of Italy where tomatoes are grown. While I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that the deliciousness of the tomatoes had a lot to do with informal relationships between the small shops where you bought the tomatoes, the small companies that delivered them, and the small farms from where they were bought. Certainly, this would be consonant with the research that I and many others have done on the Italian political economy and how it works. Italy protects small businesses and local communities in a lot of ways. This means that it misses out badly on certain economies of scale. It also means that certain kinds of high quality production are possible in Italy that are difficult or impossible to replicate elsewhere – a myriad of small firms cooperating to produce final goods through purely informal means. Hence the success, for example, of Italian sunglasses, shoes, and (the rather unglamorous topic of my own research) packaging machinery. All of these build on forms of informal knowledge that would likely be damaged in a more standard market economy, where collaboration happened (to the extent that it did), within the hierarchy of the firm, or through arms-length contracts.

Thus, there are trade-offs. Italian firms in small-firm districts are excellent at gradual innovation and refinement of knowledge – in part because of their reliance on metis. They are not so good at producing profound, industry-changing forms of innovation. They also tend to stick closer to home than their equivalents in other countries (somewhat ironically, they replicate the logic of Avner Greif’s mediaeval Maghribi merchants far more than the behaviour of his Genoese traders).

…This allows me to come back to the roots of my disagreement with Brad. Brad is a fan of markets, and believes that they contribute in very important ways to human freedom. I agree with him on this. But I think that Brad sometimes underemphasizes the real trade-offs that markets may involve, and overstates his criticisms of people who are concerned with these trade-offs. Sometimes, perhaps often, these trade-offs are relatively slight – as Brad says, many forms of redundant local knowledge can be discarded without compunction. Sometimes, these trade-offs are real, but still worthwhile – while we should acknowledge the costs of markets, we should acknowledge that the benefits of introducing them are higher. And sometimes they are not worth paying – there are areas of social life where marketization has more downsides than advantages.

Ecological Management, Ecosystem services, Networks

Green Lands, Blue Waters

April 3, 2007 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Chad Monfreda has an post on WorldChanging ‘Green Lands, Blue Waters’ and Nested Activism on the ecological problems produced by industrial agriculture in the Mississippi River Basin and an innovative project to try and transform the river basin Green Lands, Blue Waters.

a long-term comprehensive effort whose mission is to support development of and transition to a new generation of agricultural systems in the Mississippi River Basin that integrate more perennial plants and other continuous living cover into the agricultural landscape.

Chad’s describes how he thinks this project represents ‘nested activism.’ His description sounds a lot like how the case of Kristianstad Water Realm in Sweden has been analyzed by Per Olsson and other (see Olsson et al 2004). He writes:

I see four ways in which Green Lands, Blue Waters foreshadows a kind of “nested activism” that goes beyond network-centric advocacy by deliberately seeking synergistic connections between organizations working at different scales.

First, nested activism engages interests across multiple spatial scales and multiple political jurisdictions. It doesn’t recruit participants from a single spatial scale, like the watershed or basin. Nor does it look towards a single jurisdiction, like community activists, state scientists, or national NGOs. Instead nested activism blends the logic of bioregionalism with political realism by deliberately forging horizontal links within and vertical links across spatial scales and political jurisdictions. In the case of Green Lands, Blue Waters, a three-tiered network emerges: watershed-level learning committees, state-level coordinating committees, and a basin-level body with a national voice. Multiple scales and levels lend players secret allies who mount actions in places that those players can’t access themselves.

Second, it leverages mutualisms to create solutions. Nested activism is active, meaning it doesn’t just respond to problems but proactively creates solutions. It’s one thing to identifying win-win relationships; it’s quite another to make them happen. Synergies, however, are only possible if members are diverse. Getting together with people just like yourself too easily leads to monopoly, disenfranchisement, and battles over turf.

Third, what I’m calling “nested activism” aims for durability without ossification. One of the main problems with big non-profits is the tendency for funding cycles to freeze them into a risk-averse state. A lot of capital becomes tied up in slow-moving organizations, whose predictability opponents learn to outmaneuver. On the other hand, network-centric advocacy’s distributed capital is speedy but insufficiently coordinated to press for the kinds of structural changes so badly needed. By contrast, not-too-strong, not-too-weak links among diverse, nested actors encourage persistent alliances but also relinquish old ones that cease to serve their purpose.

Fourth, a flexible prolematique is essential for the first three points. In order to get initial buy-in from diverse interests, and to keep them involved over the long-haul, nested activism should encourage what in the lingo of science studies we might call the interpretive flexibility of a boundary object around which everybody can rally, even as they define it differently. In the case of Green Lands, Blue Waters, revenue-seeking investors, research-oriented academics, and election-minded politicians can gather around the object of Continuous Living Cover Systems for very different reasons. Nobody can define the solutions, or even the questions, from the outset; rather, they emerge from interactions within the network.

Green Lands, Blue Waters’ motto is to keep working lands working. What’s clearly not working is piecemeal thinking that sacrifices broadly optimal solutions for merely efficient ones. And master plans to deliver utopia hardly bear mentioning. Truly transformative solutions are harder, messier—nested, active, full of niches, and diverse. They balance compromise and collaboration. They are about creating a better world, rather than mending a broken one.

Ecological Management, Gaming

Modelling Water Management in Bhutan

March 15, 2007 Garry Peterson Leave a comment

Modelling in Bhutan Ralf Yorque memorial competition is a best-paper competition in the journal Ecology and Society. The award aims to stimulate creative transdisciplinary research. The winning paper for 2006 was:

Companion modeling, conflict resolution, and institution building: sharing irrigation water in the Lingmuteychu Watershed, Bhutan

by Tayan Raj Gurung, Francois Bousquet, and Guy Trébuil.

Who work at the Ministry of Agriculture, Bhutan; CIRAD, France; and the CU-Cirad Project, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.

The paper used multi-agent systems to facilitate water management negotiations in Bhutan. They nicely connect user resource management games with computer modelling to improve water management.

Ecological Management, Reflections

Ecosystem Reality – Modelling: Reflections Pt 5

February 27, 2007 Buzz Holling 2 Comments

The second advance produced by our series of studies of large scale ecosystems was a set of deep case studies with modeling efforts that could be used in a comparative analysis of ecosystems behavior and ecosystems management. Those examples included some 20-30 examples of crisis-ridden histories of forests, fisheries, agriculture, human diseases and water resource development.

One theoretical study suddenly helped significantly, when my eyes were opened to the essential way to understand and display the (relatively simple) causes of complex behavior (Ludwig, Jones and Holling, 1978). It was Don Ludwig and Dixon Jones who taught me the way, using the essence of qualitative differential equation theory.

It all started when Don took a half page I wrote explaining the essence of the causes of forest changes mediated by spruce budworm in eastern Canada. He then turned that into a coupled, three differential equation model that expressed the interacting dynamics of budworm, foliage and trees. Meanwhile Dixon, with help from Bill Clark and I, had been developing the big simulation model of the system that emerged out of a series of workshops with the scientists and policy people in New Brunswick. As part of our philosophy of economy in modeling, I had been careful to leave out the effects of avian predation, relying on an eventual check with measured behavior of the whole system in nature to tell us what essentials we had missed. When we discovered that the behavior of the simulation model simply did not match the field behavior, we used it and our ecological knowledge to discover the “missing process”, as a kind of interactive, diagnostic procedure.

The missing piece turned out to be one with certain specific nonlinearities at low densities of budworm and low volume of foliage. The only process we could discover to fill the bill was predation by the 35 different species of insectivorous birds. That linked us back to my earlier set of predation discoveries and we added the effect using the predation equations and parameter data from the field. The effect added progressively stronger predation as budworm densities rose from low levels, and faded thereafter as budworm populations increased- that is, a domed shaped response. Since the densities of birds were essentially constant, that predation effect gradually weakened as the forest aged and the increasing volume of foliage dispersed the searching by birds. The result was periodic outbreak of the insect in older forests.

When these same bird predation effects were then added to Don’s differential equations, that too began to reflect what occurred in nature. So it was a beautiful example of the power of linking three key methodological concepts; Don’s qualitative differential equation approaches, Dixon’s scientifically infused simulation modeling and my general process analysis modeling (Ludwig et al. 1978). The advance led to a clear way to understand and compare the 20-30 examples of complex ecosystem behavior in totally different kinds of situations (Holling, 1986).

The results appeared in the second paper discovered by the students i.e. in Holling 1986. It is a chapter in the first (and maybe only) significant book that deals with sustainability in a fundamental, interdisciplinary way. That book was Bill Clark’s inspiration and creation. My chapter for the first time developed the theoretical discoveries emerging from the comparison of those ecosystem studies. Some of the key features of ecosystems popped out: e.g. there had to be at least three sets of variables, each operating at qualitatively different speeds. There was an essential interaction across scales in space and time covering at least three orders of magnitude. Non-linearities were essential. Multi-stable states were inevitable. Surprise was the consequence.

And a puzzle emerged concerning what seemed to be an inevitable pathology of resource management. In case after case, the same pattern appeared. An economic or social problem was identified as being present or looming in the near future. It was then narrowly defined and treated in a least cost manner for fast corrective response. Then, unknown to all, the system evolved.

First, the problem seemed to disappear. Budworm outbreak populations became controlled, forest fires were suppressed before spreading, water was stored and irrigation became possible for agriculture, fisheries were augmented with hatchery stocks, and so on. Second, industry expanded: pulp mills, tree harvesting, agriculture, fisheries and with that, regional economic and social development.

Third, slow, unappreciated changes occurred that meant that resilience was restricting, was declining. In most cases, the resilience declined because spatial heterogeneity shifted to a more homogeneous state. A “spark”, once initiated, could therefore spread up scale. That is, conditions for outbreaks in healthy forests spread, forest stands became more homogeneous in age and became fuel rich, salt accumulated in soil as soil water levels rose, natural fish stocks gradually went extinct leaving fisheries precariously dependent on a few enhanced stocks. All became disastrous surprises waiting to happen.

Slowly decreasing resilience faced fast increasing economic and social dependencies that made retreat and redesign extremely difficult. Working with nature was rarely conceived. Instead, the response to correct the surprises, started or continued a sequence that maintained the evolving system with more and more costs. The classic example of that is the Everglades, which, after over 80 years of four crises, now is launched into an eight billion dollar restoration, with little active adaptive design. In contrast, the Columbia River system is deeply involved in a policy that indeed does exploit natural forces in an interesting adaptive scheme.

Other examples of “command and control”, of passive and active adaptation in regional social/ecological systems have been recently described in Olsson et al 2006, leading to a set of considerations and actions we identified for successful transformation toward adaptive governance,

This universal pattern represented one of the social traps later discovered as a potential for panarchies. Subsequent avoidance of the trap can occur through learning and actions to enhance resilience by reintroducing spatial heterogeneity at appropriate scales. But often the remedial responses simply continued and extended the process, protected by gradually increasing investments of money to monitor, subsidize and control.

And I used the paper to present the first big theoretical synthesis. That was the place where the Adaptive Cycle was first described and presented. That is, there are four components of change in ecosystems, the traditionally known and slowly evolving exploitation and conservation phases and the newer, fast, unpredictable creative destruction and renewal phases. The first two are when capital and skills are slowly accumulated, but resilience is typically gradually lost. The last two are when unpredictability explodes, capital is freed for other roles and novelty can become implanted. Moreover, those same four components seemed to provide a general metaphor for all systems, and examples were discussed from economics, technology, institutions and psychology. In fact, I discovered that the creative destruction phase had already been posited decades earlier by an economist, Joseph Schumpeter, for international businesses. Maybe economists were not all so narrow!

References

Holling, C.S. 1986. The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change. In: W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn (eds.). Sustainable Development of the Biosphere. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. Chap. 10: 292-317.

Holling, C.S. and A.D. Chambers. 1973. Resource science: the nurture of an infant. Bioscience 23(1): 13-20.

Ludwig, D., D.D. Jones and C.S. Holling. 1978. Qualitative analysis of insect outbreak systems: the spruce budworm and forest. J. Animal. Ecol. 44: 315-332.

Olsson, P., L. H. Gunderson, S. R. Carpenter, P. Ryan, L. Lebel, C. Folke and C. Holling 2006. Shooting the Rapids: Navigating Transitions to Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems. Ecology and Society 11 (1): 18. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art18/

Walters, C.J. 1986. Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources. MacMillan, New York.

Walters, C., and Martell, S. 2004. Fisheries Ecology and Management. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ.

Ecological Management, Reflections

Ecosystem Reality – Workshops: Reflections Pt 4

February 26, 2007 Buzz Holling 2 Comments

The second paper the students identified was: Holling, C.S. 1986. The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change. In: W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn (eds.). Sustainable Development of the Biosphere. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. Chap. 10: 292-317.

For me, the 1973 “Resilience’ paper launched the Adaptive Management work, with Carl Walters at the University of British Columbia- a great friend and a truly brilliant, maverick scientist who walks a non-traditional path that creates new traditions. His work on adaptive management methods has been a classic contribution to the field (Walters 1986). More recently he has advanced ecosystem dynamics understanding using his creation of foraging arena theory which had its beginnings in my own predation work (Walters and Martell 2004).

The resilience research led us to mobilize a series of studies of large scale ecosystems subject to management- terrestrial, fresh water and marine. All this was done with the key scientists and, in some cases, policy people who “owned “ the systems and the data. So the process encouraged two major advances.

One advance developed a sequence of workshop techniques so that we could work with experts to develop alternative explanatory models and suggestive policies. We learned an immense amount from the first experiment. That focused on the beautiful Gulf Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Vancouver. We chose to develop a recreational land simulation of recreational property. I knew little about speculation, but we made up a marvelous scheme that used the predation equations as the foundation- the land of various classes were the “prey”, speculators were the “predators” and a highest bidder auction cleared the market each year. The equations were modifications of the general predation equations. The predictions were astonishingly effective and persisted so for at least a decade. As much as anything, it reinforced the earlier conclusion that these equations were powerful and general. But the important conclusion concerned the workshop process and the people.

The essence of those workshop methods were fun to present in a critical paper where the workshop processes were described and where key personalities were represented in delightful cartoons drawn by Roy Peterson, a cartoonist in Vancouver, and methods were expressed as a game. (Holling, C.S. and A.D. Chambers. 1973 ).

It was fun to reveal the truth about characters like Snively Whiplash, The Blunt Scot, The Utopians and The Peerless Leaders and such in this way, but a reviewer in Ecology turned it down by saying “no one wants to know about the games people in British Columbia play!” BioScience reviewers were more enlightened so I happily published there.

Those approaches helped shape the essential design and maintain the flexibility of the big international Resilience Project that I began about two decades later. It produces a turbulent, broad and delightful process of mutual discovery for those who chose to be part of it.

I learned that the key design was to identify large, unattainable goals that can be approached, but not achieved; ones that relate to fundamental values of free speech, freedom, equity, tolerance and education. And then to add a tough design for the first step, in a way that highlights or creates options to design, later, a second step—and then a third and so on. We found that the results were steps that rapidly covered more ground than could ever be designed at the start. At the heart, that is adaptive design, where the unknown is great, learning is continual and actions evolve.