Ecosystem Management: Selected Readings. - book reviews

Ecology, Jan, 1997 by Richard A. Capenter

Each of the 33 papers in this collection has been published previously in a peer-reviewed journal. This previous review obviates any additional evaluation here, and allows this review to focus on the aims of the editors: "... to assist in the dissemination of important literature that can contribute to better informing practicing scientists, resource professionals, and students about the basic issues confronting the development of ecosystem management." That rather modest goal is achieved, but whether such a "reader" is an efficient way for any interested person to become adequately informed is problematical.

To its credit, the compendium draws broadly from 69 authors in 13 journals, although two thirds of the articles are from Conservation Biology, BioScience, Oikos, and Ecological Applications. They are organized into four sections of eight papers each: diversity, ecological processes, biotic integrity, and ecological sustainability. Bracketing several research reports in each section are an overview and a concluding paper. Since none of the papers was written with this in mind, there is a lot of forced fitting. The editors offer only a two-page preface to tell the audience what is going on, and it all seems contrived and uneven. A short paper, "Biodiversity and ecosystem function" by Paul Risser, is used to wrap up the entire volume, but peculiarly, it never mentions ecosystem management! Selections range from important and defining articles by leaders in the field (e.g., Robert Costanza, Peter Vitousek, Eugene Odum, James Karr, C. S. Holling, and Bryan Norton) to interesting but highly specialized research reports on topics such as the desert topminnow and the ground-foraging ant. In length, the papers vary from 2 to 73 pages (the latter is the Holling 1992 opus in Ecological Monographs, vol. 62, pp. 447-502 "Cross-scale morphology, geometry, and dynamics of ecosystems.").

Taken as a whole, the selected readings convey a sobering message: "... the ability of science to provide sufficiently powerful tools for the understanding and implementation of ecosystem management..." is questionable. Holling, Risser, and others in this volume advocate a focus on the few dominant processes and key relationships that lead to important interactions between biodiversity and ecosystem manipulations. "Given this enormous complexity, it is easy to see why science frequently fails to provide policy makers with clear advice. ..." Having invented ecosystem management, with his colleagues, some 20 years ago, Holling now calls for inductive thinking. "Nature is sufficiently surprising that I, at least, am not smart enough to have deduced the patterns described herein and their causes without a framework that allowed nature to point the direction for me" (p. 398).

I wish the editors had written an essay summing up their findings from the considerable work they must have done in assembling the papers; that should not be left to a reviewer. Did they pick and choose to prove a point, or is the situation really this bleak? I suspect the latter but it would be helpful to have an analysis from Samson and Knopf.

An intriguing novel conceptual framework is "Organisms as engineers" by Clive G. Jones, John H. Lawton, and Moshe Shachak. They aver that all habitats on earth are engineered, most without the help of humans, but whether this idea has predictive power is not yet known. Richard J. Hobbs and Laura F. Huenneke conclude in "Disturbance, diversity, and invasion: implications for conservation" that "... [W]e must be activists in determining which species to encourage and which to discourage." But Stuart L. Pimm and John L. Gittleman in "Biological diversity: where is it?" say "We clearly know too little about where the diversity is, why it is there, and what it will become."

The research reports elicit sympathy and empathy as they document the great practical difficulties in obtaining measurements in the field, validation of models, inability to control or replicate experiments, misfits of fiscal priorities with research needs, non-linear processes, short incomplete historical records, and finding indicator species. Little of the research selected was at management scales of time and space, nor was it originally designed to directly support ecosystem management. Many of the papers lament the unpredictability of perturbations of biodiversity from exotic species.

Ecosystem management is, however, more than biodiversity. In fact, Paul L. Angermeier and James R. Karr argue in "Biological integrity versus biological diversity as policy directives: protecting biotic resources," goals of biological conservation and restoration should be based on integrity rather than species. Ecosystem management has to do with the sustainability of multiple uses and harvested production, as well. Moreover, it is a social construct. Implementation includes stakeholders, partnering, cultural heritage, core values, and economic self sufficiency. It is necessarily adaptive, and heavily dependent on monitoring of ecological condition, because of irreducible uncertainties. The non-natural science aspects of ecosystem management have politicized it, and also have led to taking for granted that the science will be there when needed. Ecosystem management: selected readings warns that this assumption is ill-founded.