Why ecosystem management? - Editorial

American Forests, July-August, 1994 by V. Alaric Sample

Given a choice between life and death, I choose life. This is not as straightforward a choice as it may seem. I'm talking not about my personal life but of humanity's. We as a species seem content--even intent--on killing other individuals of our species by the tens of thousands, as witness recent events in Rwanda, Bosnia, and scores of other holocausts down through human history. In light of what we appear willing to inflict on current generations, do we really care about what happens to future human generations, or about what kind of world we will leave them? Do we choose life for them as well? I think we do. These are our children, and their children's children. Like our parents before us, we want their lives to be as good as, if not better than, our own.

But what is the likelihood of that? On my kids' spring break this year, we visited Disney World and the "Carousel of Progress," designed for the 1963-64 New York World's Fair by Walt himself (theme song: "It's a great big beautiful tomorrow"). It was quaint and faintly comical in its naive optimism and technological idealism. It was a time capsule from an earlier, simpler, more hopeful age: the days before Three Mile Island, PCBs, and global warming. In one of life's sweet ironies, getting excited about the future has become a thing of the past, an anachronism in today's more complicated and anxious world. In the minds of many now, technology is as much a part of the problem as of the solution.

Though fewer people are willing to look to technology for the solutions, we still look to science to provide us a full and objective description of the problem. Science is regarded by many as the bedrock of ecosystem management--unlike social values, which are unreliable and shift over time. But social values may not have changed as much as we think. We are a nation of conservationists, and have been for generations. We are unique in the world in our invention of the concept of national parks, national forests, and fish and wildlife refuges. Collectively, we spend billions of dollars each year to conserve our natural heritage. Our values have, in fact, remained relatively constant.

What has changed is our scientific understanding of the true impact of human activities on the natural environment. Who could have known that a miracle chemical for controlling malaria-carrying mosquitoes would nearly wipe out bird populations at a continental scale? Who would have predicted that the very "swamps" that once stood in the way of practical agriculture and forestry would one day be so important that the President of the U.S. would declare that we cannot afford to lose a single acre more? The changes in science have informed our values, leading us to question old assumptions and curtail many of our past activities. We are still conservationists at heart, but our rapidly improving scientific understanding of the world around us and how profoundly we are capable of altering its functioning has changed the way we act upon those conservation values.

Today's interest in ecosystem management is driven largely by society's concern over the unprecedented rate of species loss, in temperate as well as tropical forests. In his book The Diversity of Life, biologist E.O. Wilson estimates that more than 100 species become extinct each day. To be sure, some of those losses are due to natural processes. But many others can be traced directly or indirectly to human activities, and they are occurring at a rate unparalleled in human history.

We are shifting toward an ecosystem-based approach to forest management because we care about biodiversity, water quality, and the natural processes that sustain life on earth. Our parents were the first generation to realize that the human species has the power to wipe out all life on this planet in one cataclysmic nuclear exchange. We are the first generation to realize that we could have much the same effect, slowly and incrementally, just through our phenomenal success as a species--crowding out all others with our own habitat requirements and impeding basic ecological processes in a thousand small ways until the entire system collapses.

Foresters are caretakers by nature. There is something unique about an individual who chooses to spend his or her life growing and nurturing something that will not come to fruition until one or more human generations hence. In the process of investing our efforts to benefit future generations, we nurture our families, our communities, and our society--economically and spiritually. A selfless nurturer of human and natural communities is not the mental image that most people--perhaps even we ourselves--have of a forester. But there's a little Alan Alda in each forester or we wouldn't have chosen our profession.

Coming to think of ourselves as protecting and sustainably managing forest ecosystems is at once sobering and uplifting. Sobering because we realize we don't yet--and may never--have the scientific knowledge to maintain or restore all the important pieces of a complex forest ecosystem. Sobering because every square mile of the earth's surface has been influenced by human activity, denying us a baseline for comparing the ecological functioning of managed and "natural" forests. And sobering because "adaptive management" means we are all part of an immense, high-stakes experiment, the outcome of which will remain unknown for the foreseeable future. But uplifting, too, because we have the privilege and responsibility for protecting and sustainably managing one of the earth's most valuable and productive biomes.