Sustainability Issuesfor Resource Managers

United StatesDepartment ofAgriculture

Forest Service

Pacific NorthwestResearch Station

General TechnicalReportPNW-GTR-370

November 1996

This file was created by scanning the printed publication. Text errors identified by the software have been corrected;

however, some errors may remain.

Technical Coordinators

DANIEL L. BOTTOM is a research fisheries biologist, Research and Development Section, Oregon Department ofFish and Wildlife, 28655 Highway 34, Corvallis, OR 97333. GORDON H. REEVES is a research fisheries biologistand MARTHA H. BROOKES is a science editor, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific NorthwestResearch Station, Forestry Sciences Laboratory, 3200 SW Jefferson Way, Corvallis, OR 97331.

These papers, adapted from talks given at the 1990 meeting of the Oregon Chapter of the American FisheriesSociety, reflect the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the American Fisheries Society, the USDAForest Service, or the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Sustainability Issues forResource Managers

Daniel L. BottomGordon H. ReevesMartha H. Brookes

Technical Coordinators

U.S. Department of AgriculturePacific Northwest Research StationForest ServiceGeneral Technical Report PNW-GTR-370

November 1996

In Cooperation with:Oregon Chapter, American Fisheries Society

Abstract

Bottom, Daniel L.; Reeves, Gordon H.; Brookes, Martha H., tech. coords. 1996. Sustainability issues forresource managers. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-370. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, ForestService, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 54 p.

Throughout their history, conservation science and sustainable-yield management have failed to maintain theproductivity of living resources. Repeated overexploitation of economic species, loss of biological diversity, anddegradation of regional environments now call into question the economic ideas and values that have formed thefoundation of scientific management of natural resources. In particular, management efforts intended to maximizeproduction and ensure efficient use of economic "resources" have consistently degraded the larger support systemsupon which these and all other species ultimately depend. This series of essays examines the underlying historical,cultural, and philosophical issues that undermine sustainability and proposes alternative approaches to conserva-tion. These approaches emphasize the relations among populations rather than among individuals; the integrity ofwhole ecosystems across longer time frames; the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative indicators ofhuman welfare and sustainability; and the unpredictable and interdependent interactions among "natural," scientific,and regulatory processes.

Keywords: Environmental ethics, environmental history, fisheries management, resource conservation, resourceeconomics, sustainability.

Foreword

The European presence in North America brought tothe fore new systems of reckoning with the naturalworld on the continent; structures of language thatembraced objectivist, instrumentalist, and reductionistviews of the material realm; and the introduction ofideas new to the Americas about the exclusive owner-ship of land and water. With the emergence of theUnited States as the dominant political and economicpresence on the continent—and especially during theperiod of the explosive growth of industrial capitalismfollowing the Civil War—the conquest, mastery, anddevelopment of the natural environment became thedriving force in American development. The storiesassociated with Euro-American expansion, especiallyinto the western reaches of the continent, are deeplyembedded in the national mythology; collectively theysuggest an almost transcendental belief in the efficacyof the unlimited manipulation of the natural world,whose larger purpose and function was the benefit ofhumankind.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the concep-tual framework for that pragmatic, instrumentalist, andcommercial view of nature embraced Progressiveconservationism, the assumption that orderly, system-atic, and engineering approaches toward the naturalworld would bring greater material benefits to an ever-increasing number of people As such, conservationideology preached virtues that were consistent with themodernizing world of industrial capitalism: efficiency,the elimination of waste, and the development andscientific management of resources. During thoseheady years when the lumbering, fishing, and miningindustries boomed across the American West, politi-cians, newspaper editorialists, and a host of publicistsextolled the material advantages to be gleaned in the

great outback. To build stable and progressive commu-nities and to work toward a sustainable future, boostersargued, the region required only capital, the technicalability, and a continued influx of enterprising people totransform nature's bounty to the benefit of its citizens.

As the long twentieth century draws to a close, however,those once popular stories about earthly dreams beingrealized in the fabled land of promise seem distant andfar removed from our contemporary world of vanishingspecies and diminishing resources. For the first timesince the inception of the United States in the lateeighteenth century, a sizable public audience is begin-ning to question and rethink the deeper meaning of theidea of progress. Today, those who have been themore reflective about environmental changes tendtoward the darker view of matters. William Howartharticulated that mood in a 1987 review essay about theAmerican West. "The old landscape of hope has faded,"he remarked. "Today the western news is of dying farmsand toxic dumps, the latest detonation at Ground Zero."The sense of crisis that increasingly infuses the storieswe tell about the natural world is centered in a ques-tioning about larger issues: the idea of "progress"; amarket- and science-driven propensity to examineisolated segments rather than greater ecological wholes;fuzzy ideas about the nature of science and its relation-ship to the management of resources; and an inabilityto fully grasp the complexities of the human conditionand its acquisitive tendencies. As Arthur McEvoy, oneof the contributors to this collection, observes:

1Howarth, William. 1987. America's dream of the wide open spaces,Book World, p 4

All of the dualisms that underlie our traditional think-ing about the world, between culture and nature andlaw and markets and so on, are so deeply embeddedin our culture and our legal system that it is sometimeshard to tell when they are at work in our thinking.

Western science and its accompanying thought world—centered firmly in the material realm of production,consumption, and the endless appropriation of nature—are at the root of our contemporary dilemma and theproblems we are having with our places of habitation.

The underlying historical, cultural, and philosophicalissues brought to bear on the management of naturalresources in the United States are the centerpiece ofthe papers presented here. These arguments are, indifferent ways and with varying degrees of complexity,critical of traditional forms of economic development.The collective result of those human activities, accord-ing to Courtland Smith, is a full-scale "assault on theenvironment as we know it." Conventional strategies ofeconomic growth and progress, these contributors makeclear, have not led us to the promised land. Instead ofachieving a material world of sustainable comfort, whatwe have is a morass of continuing environmental crisesthat are mostly the consequence of our cultural behav-ior. The writer William Kittredge, who has witnessed thegreat engineering transformations that have taken placeacross the western American landscape, remarked withbitter irony about his family's agricultural enterprise onthe desert sage lands of southeastern Oregon: "Weshaped our piece of the West according to the modelprovided by our mythology, and instead of a great goodplace such order has given us enormous power overnature, and a blank perfection of fields."2

Policy makers in the United States—resource managers,politicians, administrators, scientists, and their largerpublic audiences—have never been charged with"Thinking Like a Mountain," Aldo Leopold's famous pro-nouncement about the connectedness of human andnatural systems. Instead, the western world and theUnited States in particular have pursued market impera-tives, predicated on maximizing the productions ofnature. Over the years, federal agencies and privateorganizations have sought to protect the erosion of that

"natural wealth" through a variety of engineering adjust-ment mechanisms to sustain acceptable levels of thoseresources. The scientists, politicians, vested interests,and bureaucrats who supported those positions mustnow reckon with a new reality—that their fondest hopesand dreams have largely turned to disaster.

The engineering and production-driven imperatives thatwere the guiding force behind resource-managementdecisions have been based on a belief that landscapescould be made perfectible; that scientific and technicalexpertise could be employed to improve the materialand social condition of humankind; and that the naturalworld could be endlessly manipulated to achieve thatend. Time magazine epitomized that attitude in a 1951article that praised the control and management offorest lands and waterways in the Pacific Northwest forcreating a new frontier "made ready for man by spec-tacular engineering." Time cited the scientific work ofthe Forest Service and the engineering genius of theBureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engi-neers, whose combined achievements meant that theUnited States could "expand almost indefinitely withinits present boundaries." The magazine gave its fullendorsement to federal agencies who were "makingrivers behave," whose dams were accomplishing theirends through "geographical judo."3

We have some sense now that those words reflect thepathologies of an arrogant cultural view of nature, of apretend scientific expertise gone wrong, of a reduction-ist attitude toward the natural world. In an opinion col-umn in the Portland Oregonian early in 1995, acommercial fisherman pointed out that salmon hadalways played an important cultural and economic rolein the life of Northwestemers. "Can anyone . . . imagineOregon without salmon," the writer asked?4 For anyonefamiliar with the growing biodiversity crisis in the region,there is nothing surprising in the fisherman's query.

William G. RobbinsAssociate DeanCollege of Liberal ArtsOregon State University

2 Kittredge, William, Owning it all St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. 1987,p. 62.

3 Time, July 30, 1951, p. 48-51.

4 Portland Oregonian, February 7,1995.

Contents

1 Introduction

Daniel L. Bottom

5 Sustainability Across Generations: Economics or Ethics

Bryan G. Norton

13 Is Sustainability Attainable?

Courtland L. Smith

21 Sustainable Redevelopment of Regional Ecosystems Degraded by Exploitive Development

Henry A. Regier and Gordon L. Baskerville

45 Historical Interdependence Between Ecology, Production, and Management in the California Fisheries

Arthur F. McEvoy

54 Acknowledgments

Introduction

Daniel L. Bottom

DANIEL L BOTTOM is a research fishery biologist,Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Corvallis,Oregon 97333.

All [of the colonists of the 'new' lands] havearrived at what they are convinced is a virginland. All have found resources that have neverbefore been tapped and all have experienced ashort period of tremendous boom, when peoplewere bigger and better than before, and whenresources seemed so limitless that there was noneed to fight for them. Because there was enoughfor everyone, egalitarian, carefree societies withthe leisure to achieve great things have prospered.There was a period of optimism, when peopleimagined great futures for their nations. Inevita-bly however, each group has found that theresource base is not limitless. Each has experi-enced a period when the competition for shrink-ing resources becomes sharper. The strugglebetween people increases, whether it be a classstruggle or a struggle between tribes. If peoplesurvive long enough, they eventually come intoequilibrium with their newly impoverished land—and their lifestyles are ultimately dictated by thenumber of renewable resources that their ances-tors have left them.

—Flannery 1994, p. 344

The Pacific Northwest—at the edge of America's conti-nental frontier and at the close of the second millen-nium—is entering the latter stages in the history ofcolonization of all "new" lands as described by Flannery.Here, the entire sequence has unfolded in the course ofa few generations of European colonists: the rapideconomic expansion, the unbridled enthusiasm ofAmerica's manifest destiny, the increased competition

for dwindling resources, the social upheaval of resourcecollapse. Today, amid declining fisheries, forests, andwatersheds, North westerners are struggling to achieveequilibrium with their no longer new land and to decidethe quantity and quality of resources they will leavetheir children.

Perhaps what is unique about the history of Europeansettlement in this region is that it coincided with America'sindustrial revolution. The shape of today's Northwestlandscape is not the inadvertent outcome of a longhistory of unconscious decisions. It is, by and large, theproduct of much deliberate planning and technologicaldesign. Moreover, unlike the 250 years of landscapechange that led to the decline of native species andecosystems in nineteenth-century New England(Cronon 1983, Merchant 1989), the stunning collapseof Northwestern fisheries and forests during this centuryoccurred in the presence of a complex regulatory andmanagement system established, in part, to prevent it.This system was founded on the principles of scientificmanagement, which provided information and technolo-gies to control production, minimize waste, and ensurethe equitable distribution of economic resources for allpeople. Despite decades of planning and modeling forsustainable resource use, management results in thePacific Northwest nonetheless support the general claimthat "there is remarkable consistency in the history ofresource exploitation: resources are inevitably overex-ploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction"(Ludwig et al. 1993). Today, an unprecedented numberof natural-resource professionals employed by state andfederal governments, universities, and private industriesare witnessing and documenting biotic impoverishmentfirst hand. More than just another example in the history

of natural resource decline, the Pacific Northwest hasbecome a case study in the failure of the traditionaltenets of scientific management.

Not surprisingly, the inability to sustain so-called renew-able resources has sparked much debate and introspec-tion among the various professions that were supposedto ensure resource renewal.

Several years ago, the Oregon Chapter of the AmericanFisheries Society began a series of interdisciplinarysymposia to discuss the underlying cultural and philo-sophical issues in the region's expanding conservationcrisis. The first symposium, held in 1989, dealt withethical issues in conservation and the moral responsi-bilities of resource managers toward ecosystems, thepublic, and future generations (Reeves et al. 1992). Asecond series of papers contained in this volume isfrom the 1990 Oregon Chapter meeting. This collectionexamines the cultural and historical roots of resourcedepletion and the implications for developing more sus-tainable relations between nature and culture. Althoughmuch has changed since 1990, these papers are noless relevant today than when they were first presented.To understand why, we need only consider the eventsof recent years.

At the time of the 1990 Oregon Chapter meeting, globaland regional environmental concerns were receivingincreasing media attention. What has become commonknowledge seemed extraordinary then: an expandinghole in the Earth's protective ozone shield, the warmingof the Earth's climate through carbon dioxide enrichment,the unprecedented rate of global species extinction. Inthe Northwest, a storm was brewing over how to managelate-successional forests after a federal recommenda-tion to list the northern spotted owl as a threatenedspecies. Wildlife biologists became embroiled in con-troversy as they developed conservation strategies toensure the viability of old-growth-dependent owls. Atthe same time, aquatic biologists were becoming in-creasingly concerned about the fragmentation of inter-connected stream systems and the cumulative threat tomany native fish species. At its annual meeting, theOregon Chapter passed a resolution ("Biological Diver-sity and Global Environmental Change") calling onstate agencies and fisheries professionals to take stepsto minimize the risks of global and regional change tonative aquatic species and ecosystems. Then, in a finalfootnote on the last day of the meeting, biologist WillaNehlsen, without fanfare, described the widespread

decline of Pacific salmon stocks. No one fully anticipatedthe impact of these findings.

One year later, Nehlsen, Jack Williams, and Jim Lichato-wich published their paper, "Pacific Salmon at theCrossroads," a catalog of endangerment that listed 214stocks of Pacific salmon and steelhead at risk of extinc-tion or of special concern in Washington, Oregon, Idaho,and California (Nehlsen et al. 1991). By this time, theIdaho and Oregon chapters of the American FisheriesSociety had already joined several environmentalorganizations in calling for a status review of SnakeRiver sockeye and Chinook salmon stocks under thefederal Endangered Species Act (ESA). But the "Cross-roads" paper made it clear that the problem was morethan just a few upper river stocks affected by the gaunt-let of mainstem dams on the Columbia River. Scoresof other populations throughout the Columbia basin andin the smaller coastal rivers of all the Pacific stateswere also in trouble. Soon a rash of petitions were filedfor listing other salmonids as threatened or endangered.A dramatic illustration of the magnitude of the problemwas the steady decline of coho salmon, once the main-stay of the Oregon troll fishery and, today, a candidatefor listing under the ESA.

Within a few years, the regional decline of wide-ranginganadromous salmon—a cultural symbol of the greatPacific Northwest—had shifted the political debate fromspotted owls in old-growth forests to the restoration ofwhole ecosystems and their associated human econo-mies. These ideas received a national hearing in 1993when President Clinton convened a televised forestconference in Portland, Oregon. This meeting wasfollowed by the report of the Forest Ecosystem Man-agement Assessment Team (FEMAT 1993), whoseanalyses and recommendations covered numerous at-risk fish species and stocks and more than 1,000 plantand animal species thought to be associated with late-successional forests. Such concerns were not confinedto the coastal rainforest region in the range of thenorthern spotted owl; even before the FEMAT reportwas completed, others also began to assess ecologicalconditions east of the Cascade Range. An EastsideForests Scientific Society Panel (Henjum et al. 1994)concluded that watersheds and landscapes of easternOregon and Washington are highly degraded. Thepanel's final report called for developing a "coordinatedstrategy for restoring the eastside landscape and itscomponent ecosystems."

2

The papers in this volume are not a description of theresource crisis in the Pacific Northwest. But they weresolicited to better understand its common roots. As aresult, this collection of papers provides a benchmarkof changing ideas in the midst of what one day may beconsidered a revolution in resource conservation. Cer-tainly the principles of "ecosystem management" nowemerging from the Northwest experience are well rep-resented in Bryan Norton's melding of hierarchy theoryin ecology with Aldo Leopold's metaphor, "ThinkingLike a Mountain." So is Courtland Smith's critique ofthe traditional indicators of economic success implicit inmany new efforts to establish ecological performancemeasures in resource conservation. Surely Regier andBaskerville's history of New Brunswick forests andNorth America's Great Lakes offers guidance for aregional economy that has not yet made the difficulttransition to "sustainable redevelopment." And clearlyArthur McEvoy's description of the "tripartite interactionbetween ecology, production, and management" inCalifornia's fisheries underscores why many policymakers and scientists now propose "adaptive manage-ment" as an alternative approach for conserving unpre-dictable natural-cultural systems.

But despite their general agreement that traditionalsustainable-yield management has failed and thatindividual resource decisions must be placed in abroader spatial and temporal context, these papers alsoreveal a fundamental tension between the moral issuesof sustainability and the rational prescriptions intendedto achieve it. If the failure of people to protect otherspecies is a reflection of their moral disinterest, mightnot all conservation plans and economic prescriptions—the products of an intellectual detachment—prove self-defeating? How can we prescribe a moral concern forbiological diversity or plan our way to healthy ecosys-tems? Becoming committed to wildness in all its unpre-dictable and messy complexity requires more than justa cognitive transformation. I think David Ehrenfeld(1989) had it right when he said, "The ultimate successof all conservation will depend on a revision of the waywe use the world in our everyday living when we arenot thinking about conservation." Perhaps what wecolonists of the "new" lands do and do not value mustundergo the same test of survival as do all species(including our own) whose existence is supported orjeopardized by these values. Perhaps through the un-conscious process of co-evolution between nature andculture, people will begin making the kind of conscious

choices that will allow them to "eventually come intoequilibrium with their newly impoverished land."

References

Cronon, W. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colo-nists, and the ecology of New England. New York:Hill and Wang. 231 p.

Ehrenfeld, D. 1989. Life in the next millennium: Whowill be left in the Earth's community? Orion. 8(2): 4-13.

[FEMAT] Forest Ecosystem Management Assess-ment Team. 1993. Forest ecosystem management:an ecological, economic, and social assessment.Portland, OR: U.S. Department of the Interior [andothers].

Flannery, T.F. 1994. The future eaters: an ecologicalhistory of the Australasian lands and people.Chatswood, New South Wales: Reed Books. 423 p.

Henjum, M.G.; Karr, J.R.; Bottom, D.L.; Perry, D.A.;Bednarz, J.C.; Wright, S.G.; Beckwitt, S.A.;Beckwitt, E. 1994. Interim protection for late-suc-cessional forests, fisheries, and watersheds: NationalForests east of the Cascade crest, Oregon andWashington. Bethesda, MD: The Wildlife Society.245 p.

Ludwig, D.; Hilborn, R.; Walters, C. 1993. Uncertainty,resource exploitation, and conservation: lessonsfrom history. Science. 260: 17, 36.

Merchant, C. 1989. Ecological revolutions: nature,gender, and science in New England. Chapel Hill,NC: University of North Carolina Press. 379 p.

Nehlsen, W.; Williams, J.E.; Lichatowich, J.A. 1991.Pacific salmon at the crossroads: stocks at risk fromCalifornia, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. Fisheries.16(2): 4-21.

Reeves, G.H.; Bottom, D.L.; Brookes, M.H. 1992.Ethical questions for resource managers. Gen.Tech.Rep. PNW-GTR-288. Portland, OR: U.S. Departmentof Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific NorthwestResearch Station. 39 p.

3

Sustainability Across Generations: Economics or Ethics

Bryan G. Norton

BRYAN G. NORTON is a professor in the School ofPublic Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,Georgia 30332.

Aldo Leopold began his career as a forester in the aridSouthwest Territories, and ended it as a college profes-sor and public-spirited, if much-maligned, ConservationCommissioner in Wisconsin. It may seem a bit odd tobegin a discussion of fisheries management by citingLeopold—whose preferred management medium wassand, not water, and whose ethic was of the land, notthe sea—but Leopold's experiences are relevant becausehe was self-conscious and philosophical about both hissuccesses and his failures, and he proposed some gen-eral theories and conclusions about management overlong periods of time. Some of Leopold's general conclu-sions about environmental management, I am con-vinced, are very relevant to managers of fisheries today.

Early in his career, Leopold set out, among his manyother tasks, to eradicate wolves in the Southwest Terri-tories. By the mid-1930s, he had switched from a con-scientious and efficient predator eradicator to a predatorprotector (at least in remote areas). By this time, Leopoldwas also committed to polishing old writings and creatingsome new material for a collection of nature essays.Leopold seems to have led two parallel lives: one as ahard-headed resource manager, trying to make resourcesavailable to people; the other as a romantic, sprinklinghis nature essays with empathic metaphors and specu-lating about our obligations to protect the natural world.The collection of essays, eventually to be called ASand County Almanac (1949), was accepted for publi-cation by Oxford University Press just a week before

Leopold's death; the book represented the highestflowering of Leopold-the-romantic.1

The collection was to be illustrated by Albert Hochbaum,Leopold's former student and Director of the Delta DuckStation in Delta, Manitoba. Although Hochbaum wasunable to complete the illustrations, he remained asympathetic but firm critic of Leopold's efforts in thelast decade of the older man's life. In 1944, Hochbaum,in criticism of the essays he'd seen so far, wrote: "I justread they killed the last lobo in Montana last year. Ithink you'll have to admit you've got at least a drop ofits blood on your hands." He proceeded to insist thatLeopold acknowledge that he, too, had once been adespoiler (Meine 1988, p. 453).

Hochbaum, therefore, forced Leopold to address theconflict between the romantic message of his essaysand his own actions as a young game manager.Leopold-the-manager had already reversed his posi-tion, arguing in a scientific vernacular for predatorprotection in remote areas:

It is probably no accident that the near-extinctionof the timber wolf and cougar was followed, inmost of the big-game states, by a plague ofexcess deer and elk and the threatened extirpa-tion of their winter browse foods.... It is all verywell, in theory, to say that guns will regulate thedeer, but no state has ever succeeded in regulat-ing its deer herd satisfactorily by guns alone.Open seasons are a crude instrument and usu-ally kill either too many deer or too few. The wolf

1My account of Leopold's experiences owes much to Meine (1988)and Flader (1974).

5

is by comparison, a precision instrument; heregulates not only the number, but the distribu-tion, of deer. In thickly settled counties we can-not have wolves, but in parts of the north [ofWisconsin] we can and should.

—Meine 1988, p. 458

Leopold's argument is symptomatic of his evolution asa resource manager Leopold attended the Yale ForestSchool, which was founded with a gift from GiffordPinchot's family, and immediately entered Pinchot'sForest Service in 1909. Leopold generally followedPinchot's utilitarian approach, which emphasized use ofresources, especially for material production (Hays1959). Pinchot said, for example:

the first great fact about conservation is that itstands for development... (Its} first principle isthe use of the natural resources now existing onthis continent for the benefit of the people wholive here now.

—Pinchot 1947, p. 261

Pinchot relied on economic calculations to determinepolicy, and limited production only when threats ofshortages and degradation of productive systemsbecame obvious. It was in Pinchot's spirit that Leopoldhad organized sportsmen and stockmen to eradicatewolves and mountain lions from the Southwest Territo-ries. In a 1920 speech before the Sixth AmericanGame Conference, Leopold had said:

It is going to take patience and money to catchthe last wolf or lion in New Mexico. But the lastone must be caught before the job can be calledfully successful.... [W]hen they are cleaned out,the productiveness of our proposed refuges andplans for regulation of kill, will be very greatlyincreased.

—Meine 1988, p.181

But in 1943, goaded by Hochbaum, Leopold composeda brief, but powerful, mea culpa on wolf eradication.Leopold chose a metaphor, "Thinking Like a Mountain,"to express his own journey from wolf eradicator to wolfprotector and land ethicist. Leopold told a story, perhapsfictional, of an incident that occurred on a "reconnais-sance mission" in the Forest Service's vast holdings inthe Southwest Territories.

He tells of how he and his fellow crew members shot ashe-wolf from a high rim rock; Leopold approached themortally wounded wolf in time to see "a fierce green fire

dying in her eyes." "I was young then, and full of thetrigger-itch," he confessed. "I thought that becausefewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves wouldmean hunters' paradise." Leopold perceived the result:the bones of the desired deer herd, "dead of its owntoo-much," littered the mountain.

The theme of the essay is time: "Only the mountain haslived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of thewolf," he said. Thinking like a mountain is putting one-self in the frame of time of the mountain, and "a moun-tain lives in mortal fear of its deer." For good cause:"while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced intwo or three years, a range pulled down by too manydeer may fail of replacement in as many decades."Leopold was here recognizing how and why his earlydeer management plan had gone astray: utilitarian,economically calculating management was manage-ment conducted from the time perspective of humans.Consumed with human cares, we strive for "peace inour time," and find it hard to see things from the moun-tain's viewpoint, a viewpoint measured in ecologicaland geological time, not human time (Leopold 1949,p. 129-133).

To help the reader understand the differing frames oftime, Leopold-the-romantic created a metaphor. Themountain was personified: the dead sage became bonesmoldering, along with the deer bones, under the high-lined junipers. The mountain has not only a vegetativeskeleton; it also thinks, and feels fear. If we are tomanage nature without raising havoc, we must thinklike the mountain thinks. The metaphor of the livingmountain drove Leopold's re-thinking process; organicismaided him in thinking as the mountain thinks, in thelonger durations of ecological time.

The pattern of Leopold's thinking on wolf managementwas reinforced by his more detached observation of theDust Bowl phenomenon. Leopold was careful to pointout that he was not an agronomist, that his observationswere only those of a nonprofessional. But he had tracedwhat he called "illness" in natural communities, especiallyin the Southwest Territories, even before venturing ageneral theory of fragility of arid systems in 1923, andwas hence moving toward an explanation of the DustBowl well before it occurred (Leopold [1924] 1979). Hisexplanation of the Dust Bowl, by then a fait accompli,was summarized in a succinct, but powerful passagenear the end of "Thinking Like a Mountain." Just aftersummarizing the lesson he'd learned about mountainsfearing deer, Leopold made the comparison:

6

So also with cows. The cowman who cleans hisrange of wolves does not realize that he is takingover the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit therange. He has not learned to think like a moun-tain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers wash-ing the future into a sea.

—Leopold 1949, p. 132

Leopold employed ecological terms to discuss thesetwo cases—deer irruptions and the Dust Bowl—and hethereby developed a paradigm of environmental man-agement gone awry. Leopold was ready, howevertentatively, to articulate his criticisms of Pinchot-stylemanagement and propose a broad "theory" of environ-mental management of his own. The new theory repre-sented an application of Charles Elton's communitymodel of ecological systems. Leopold met Elton in 1931at a conference on natural cycles, and they becameimmediate friends. Already acquainted with Elton'simportant 1927 book, Animal Ecology, Leopold beganin the 1930s to apply ecological theory to managementproblems (Meine 1988, p. 282-284). According toElton's theory, species are understood functionally, interms of their contribution to a larger, biotic community.

Applying Elton's concepts, Leopold theorized as follows:The failures in the two case studies resulted fromattempts to increase the output of a resource basethrough more intensive management. In both cases,initial successes were registered because productivityincreased dramatically. And in both cases, after a fewyears or decades, productivity crashed. Elton's theoryprovided an explanation of the salient facts: ecosystemsembody redundancy, with many species fulfilling eachfunction. The system changes dynamically throughtime; its complexity and redundant energy pathwayssustain the system through these changes.

Elton's ecological model explained the breakdownencountered in managed systems: complexity, whichemerged over millennia of evolution and competition,is disrupted as pervasive human activities destroyredundant pathways in the functions of the community,the flows of energy through the biotic pyramid have beensimplified and reduced. The system is ill.2 Only sharpobservers can see the gradual development of the illness.

2This essay (Leopold 1939), an extremely important one, representsa summary ofwhat Leopold had learned about environmentalmanagement. He applied Elton's community model, emphasizing therole of species as vehicles carrying energy through the pyramidallyorganized community.

But then, usually in response to environmental stress—a hard winter or a prolonged drought—the systemcollapses into serious illness. The theory thereforeexplained large-scale failures of environmental manage-ment—the Dust Bowl and deer irruptions and famines.

Leopold developed on this basis what I will call a "con-textual" approach to environmental management. Eachmanagement problem should be considered in twoways, first as a cell and second as a cell-in-context. Atfirst Leopold thought deer-wolf-hunters was a manage-able cell in the system; but he learned that in the aridconditions of the Southwest, it was not. He had also topay attention to "the mountain," the vegetative coverthat gives structure, complexity, and a certain type ofstability to ecological communities. Leopold, buildingon Elton's theoretical conception of a community, con-cluded that we must always manage any species in itscontext, that is, as a member of an ecological commu-nity. Management will not be considered adequate ifthe activity decreases the complexity of the contextualsystem (causes "illness" in the community). Underthese conditions, the larger system is in danger ofdestabilization (such as on the deer-infested mountain).

Leopold's insight was to use organicism as a metaphorto explain that cells in the mountain "organism" changeon a slower scale than do management choices ofmanagers when they think in terms of market forcesdemanding hunting opportunities. He proposed, in effect,that ecological theory, not economics, be embraced asthe comprehensive language of environmental man-agement. Accordingly, he groped toward a biologicallybased criterion of "ecosystem health." Such a criterionwould protect the ecological communities that providethe context for systems (cells) that produce resourcesdesired by people. Leopold's criterion, much quotedbut—I am convinced—little understood, is: "A thing isright when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability,and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when ittends otherwise" (Leopold 1949, p. 224-225). I amsuggesting that integrity is the most important aspect ofthis criterion, and that Leopold had set as his goal ofmanagement to protect the complexity of larger systems.

Leopold's elegant theory was unfortunately impossibleto apply, given the state of development of ecologicaltheory in his day. Although Eltonian ecology provided ageneral framework for conceiving species and com-plexes of species as embodied in a larger, contextualcommunity, it lacked an adequate conception of stability

7

as applied to the dynamic system of nature. Leopold'stheory required a dynamic conception of stability, onecapable of relating a resource-producing subsystem toits larger, dynamic context. This concern for dynamicsis what led Leopold to emphasize health and integrityof ecological systems.

He recognized the problem clearly and argued persua-sively, in 1939, that the equilibrium model was inad-equate to the complexities of management. He warnedthat a static conception of balance of nature cannotsuccessfully model natural systems:

To the ecological mind, balance of nature hasmerits and also defects. Its merits are that itconceives of a collective total, that it imputessome utility to all species, and that it impliesoscillations when balance is disturbed. Its de-fects are that there is only one point at whichbalance occurs, and that balance is normallystatic.

—Leopold 1939, p. 727

Management must be conducted with an eye on thelarger context, which is expected to change and developin its own frame of time. Inadequate management of acell can cause destabilization of the context. As Leopoldemphasized in "Thinking Like a Mountain," these inter-locking systems embody differing scales of time-themountain must think more slowly than the hunter or thedeer, and the environmental manager must think likethe mountain to manage deer-hunter interactions intheir larger context. Stability and health in nature mustbe measured in ratios, by comparing rates of change.Lacking a serviceable conception of dynamic stabilityof larger systems in which management units are em-bedded, Leopold's management theory was disabledand remained speculative.

Leopold, nevertheless, launched into a discussion ofecological systems as energy pyramids and argued that"each species, including ourselves, is a link in manyfood chains." Leopold then notes that "the trend ofevolution is to elaborate the biota," to make it morecomplex and to multiply the channels through foodchains by which energy flows to the top of the pyramid.Contextual management conceives the context ofmanagement cells to be the larger ecosystem in whichthe cell is embedded. It remains healthy only if theenergy flows in the pyramid remain open and vigorous.This elaborated biota, Leopold described as:

a tangle of chains so complex as to seem disor-derly, but when carefully examined the tangle isseen to be a highly organized structure. Itsfunctioning depends on the cooperation andcompetition of all its diverse links.

—Leopold 1939, p. 727-28

Leopold, stymied in his attempt to develop positive pre-scriptions based on ecology, did the next best thing. Hefell back upon his governing organicist metaphor andan analogical implication drawn from medicine: lackinga cure for the disease, practice preventive medicine.Caution and humility should, he concluded, guide envi-ronmental managers. If you cannot fix the complexsystem emerging through time, avoid breaking it.

Human changes differ from evolutionary changes, hesaid, which "are usually slow and local." Leopold there-fore distinguished between management activities thatare sufficiently violent to disturb their context from thosethat are not—the former interrupt the energy flows ofthe community in which they are embedded, the latterdo not. He said:

The combined evidence of history and ecologyseems to support one general deduction. Theless violent the man-made changes, the greaterthe probability of successful readjustment in thepyramid.

—Leopold 1939, p. 728

Leopold was therefore struggling toward a dynamic con-ception of ecological stability, health, and integrity. Histentative contextual model would emphasize complex-ity, the ecological processes that allow ecosystems toperpetuate themselves, rather than diversity itself. Byreturning to organicism, Leopold was proposing a newconceptualization of the goals of contextual manage-ment: to protect the autogenic functioning—the self-deter-mination—of the larger system. Economically motivatedmanagement is acceptable to that point where trends inthe exploited subsystems start to accelerate changes inthe larger, slower moving system. A system that islosing complexity rapidly as a result of pervasive andviolent changes in its subsystems is ill. But here ecologyfailed Leopold. The fledgling science had provided noquantitative measure, or even a clear qualitative con-ception, of autogenic functioning.3 Little progress has

3The most significant developments since Leopold's death havebeen applications of information theory and systems theory toecological systems; see Margalef (1963). Also, see Ulanowicz(1986) for an excellent explication of the self-organization of eco-logical systems.

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been made, since Leopold's day, in applying dynamicconceptions of stability and integrity to actual manage-ment practices and, until recently at least, little morehas been learned about how to relate processes thatoccur in different frames of time

Recently, however, a new and highly promising theoreti-cal approach, "hierarchy theory," has emerged withinecology; it bears striking resemblance to Leopold'scommunity model and contextualist approach to man-agement. Hierarchy theory, which shows promise togive more precision to the concepts that plaguedLeopold's theory of environmental management, isbased on general systems theory. It focuses not so muchon the diversity of systems as on their complexity andinternal organization—what Leopold called "integrity"(Leopold 1949, p. 224).

According to hierarchy theorists, natural systems exhibitcomplexity because they embody processes occurringat different rates of speed; generally speaking, largersystems (such as a community) change more slowlythan the microhabitats and individual organisms thatcompose them, just as an organism changes moreslowly than the organs and cells that compose it. Further,the community survives after individuals die and, whilechanges in the community affect (constrain) the activitiesof the individuals that compose it, the individuals them-selves are unlikely to affect the larger system becausethe individual is likely to die before the slow-changingsystem in which it is embedded will be significantlyaltered by its activities.

This is not to say that elements have no impact onsystems that provide their context. The elements, oftencalled "holons" in the context of hierarchical analysis,are "two-faced"; each holon "has dual tendency topreserve and assert its individuality as a quasi-autono-mous whole and to function as an integrated part (of anexisting or evolving) larger whole" (Koestler 1967, p. 343;Allen and Starr 1982, p. 8-10). As a part, the holonaffects the whole, but scale is very important here—the"choices" of one element will not significantly alter thewhole—but if that part's activities represent a trendamong its peers, then the larger, slower changing sys-tem will reflect these changes on its larger and slowerscale. One cell turning malignant will not affect anorganism significantly unless a trend toward malignancyis thereby instituted.4 If such a trend is instituted, then

4 Note, however, that changes in the abundance of some species—keystone species—in an ecosystem may have a profound effect onthelargercommunity.

the organism might eventually be destroyed by thattrend in its parts. Technology, like plows, drift nets, andrifles, permits humans to create more violent and abrupttrends than nature normally experiences. Natural sys-tems, especially fragile ones, can be overwhelmed bysuch trends initiated by economically motivated humanexploitation. Leopold's contextual approach to manage-ment, therefore, focused attention not on individualactions, but on broad social trends in the activitiesaffecting ecological systems.

The multiscalar approach of the hierarchy theorists totime and space in ecology is reminiscent of Leopold'smetaphorical discussion of differing scales of time andour perception of them in "Thinking Like a Mountain."Hierarchy theory provides a more precise conceptualmodel for what Leopold called "the land," which was forLeopold a slower changing system composed of manyfaster changing parts. He explicitly commented that ourfailure to see deterioration in the land community is dueto our failure to recognize that ecological and evolution-ary changes take place in a slower scale of time thanthe scale perceived by people. Agriculturalists and gamemanagers focus on the rapid-change systems that pro-duce annual crops. The mountain, as Leopold explainedmetaphorically, must look at the value of wolves in alonger perspective (Leopold 1949, p. 133, 206).

In ecology, which emphasizes the interrelationshipsamong systematic elements, hierarchy theory providesa useful tool for analyzing the multilayered complexityof natural systems, and shows promise to model thedynamic relations among their parts. The hierarchicalmodel may begin to point the direction toward a mana-gerially useful concept of dynamic stability and ecosys-tem health. It can locate this concept in the interrelatedfunctions of fast- and slow-changing systems. Acceler-ating changes in normally slow-changing systems mayindicate deterioration—illness—in the land communityor, perhaps, in even larger systems, such as the globalatmosphere.

If a pervasive trend in environmental management canbe identified today, it is toward a more holistic, or atleast more contextual, management model. For example,in the "Foreword" to its brochure on Chesapeake Baymanagement, the Environmental Protection Agencywrites:

The Bay is, in many ways, like an incrediblycomplex living organism. Each of its parts is

9

related to its other parts in a web of dependenciesand support systems. For us to manage the Baywell, we must first understand how it functions.

—EPA 19825

The most acute current problem in managing the Bay,the algal blooms resulting from too much run-off fromlawns, fields, and pastures, can then be interpreted asrapid change in a normally slow-changing system. Thischange, according to the model, results from accelerat-ing changes in residential development patterns, agri-cultural production, and consumer taste. Farmers,homebuilders, and fishermen tend to choose accordingto short frames of time, seeking, as Leopold said,"peace in [their] time."

Leopold's contextual model for environmental manage-ment, with or without the formal elaboration furnishedby hierarchy theory, helps us to understand long-termconcerns in management of natural resources, includ-ing fisheries. As an extreme example, take the "black-ened redfish" case. A recipe, originated by New Orleanschef Paul Prudhomme, gained so much popularity thatdemand for redfish exploded, forcing Louisiana to bancommercial taking of redfish from mid-January to Sep-tember 1988.

Acting on economic motives and in response to a rapidtrend in public tastes, fishermen concentrated theirefforts on catching redfish, for an ever-expanding mar-ket at highest-ever prices. They acted in the rapid-change system that changes on a human scale of time.But redfish populations were decimated by this rapidchange. Leopold's model interprets this result as anexample in which the maximization criterion of eco-nomic management must yield to limits defined interms of the biological abilities of the larger system toproduce redfish.

This example also explains a unique feature of Leopold'scontextual ethic—it concerns tendencies and trends,focusing on intergenerational trends in populations,rather than on actions that affect individuals. Leopold'sLand Ethic is systemic, not individualistic—it is notwrong to eat redfish—it is wrong to eat them into extinc-tion because of a runaway trend in consumer fashions.The goal of environmental management is to protect

5 For another example of contextual approaches to management,one applied to protecting old growth and biodiversity over the entireregion of the Pacific Northwest, see Harris (1984).

the larger context, the system that supports the fishery,and this requires attention to relations among popula-tions, not individuals. Management concern on thislarger scale emphasizes protecting the intertemporal"integrity" of environmental systems.

Distinguishing "resource management", which looks atresource use problems in economic time, from "envi-ronmental management," which looks at them in eco-logical time, may thus be useful. Aggregative analysesand productivity criteria usually guide resource man-agement. Trends in short-cycle management patterns,however, can overbound normal parameters of changein their larger, ecological context, which normally fluc-tuates and changes gradually through intergenerationaltime. On this environmental scale, the criterion is noteconomics, but ecological assessments of the integrityof larger systems.

Having argued that Leopold opted for a contextualmanagement model—a model that can be given moreprecise formulation in terms of hierarchy theory, onethat implies ecologically formulated constraints oneconomic activity—I wish now to argue that Leopold'sintergenerational model suggests also an intergener-ational ethic. A contextual model would place limits oneconomic activities that destroy or disrupt the larger,normally slow-changing, environing system that perpetu-ates those activities through time.

Standard economic models are ill-equipped to accountfor these constraints because they discount costs andbenefits across time, to express all values in presentdollars. This methodological approach to time prefer-ence reduces to negligibility any concerns for intergen-erational impacts of present activities. A contextual,hierarchical model, on the other hand, suggests thatcosts and benefits will be calculated within cells of alarger system, which might imply limitations based onthe need to maintain reasonable stability of populations(interpreted as slower scaled changes in environingsystems) across generations.

What is needed is a "moral filter," corresponding to themathematical filters of hierarchy theory. John Rawls, inhis infinitely fertile treatise A Theory of Justice, suggestssuch a moral filter, which he calls the "veil of ignorance"(Rawls 1971). Imagine a rational, self-interested indi-vidual, Rick, who chooses the general rules for a justsociety, knowing that he will have to live in that societysubsequently. Rick, not knowing the specifics of his

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social standing and endowments, will design a societyfair to individuals of any standing and varied endow-ments. In fact, the veil of ignorance is many veils. Byvarying Rick's knowledge, we can filter out individuallymotivated interests based on such attributes as gender,class, and economic status.

For our present purposes, we can place Rick behind aveil of intergenerational ignorance—he must design asociety that he would be willing to live in without know-ing the generation in which he is going to live. Now, ifhe worries that species can be irretrievably decimatedby culinary fashions, he will design a society that con-strains social and economic trends that tend to destabi-lize its larger environmental contexts.

If it turns out that Rick is born into a primitive society, oreven European medieval society, the intergenerationalenvironmental constraints may seem to be minimal;with hindsight and improved scientific monitoring, how-ever, we can say that conformity to these constraintsmay have protected the countryside in Greece andChina, for example, from the disastrous effects ofdeforestation and erosion and the inland fisheries fromdecimation by dams. Contextualism understands moralobligations to land systems in a historical context andemphasizes that, given our knowledge of ecologicalfragility and our powerful technological capabilities toalter those systems, a generation such as ours hasspecial obligations. As Rick foresees a society such asour own, which alters nature rapidly and has availablefrightening models projecting cataclysmic changes inthe environmental context, he would expect that societyto question the moral acceptability of such violentimpacts. He would choose a society that would struggleto delineate parameters and thresholds, based on their

best models of biology, ecology, climatology, and so on.

These parameters and thresholds would, in turn, implyconstraints on trends in individual behavior that threat-ens to accelerate destabilizing changes in a normallyslow-changing environing system. From a moral view-point, these constraints would represent "fair" treatmentof future generations—the treatment a rational, self-interested chooser would insist upon if he did not knowwhich generation he will inhabit.6

6ln this way, we can understand fairness across generations withoutintroducing the metaphysically puzzling notion of "rights" of futuregenerations See Norton (1982).

When environmentalists accept an obligation to futuregenerations, they do not see it as an obligation to anyparticular individuals; the relationship occurs at the inter-face of two systems—human economics, demography,and so on, with geophysical, biotic systems. With thisview, environmentalists believe that biological andclimatological constraints exist that correspond to themoral constraints limiting the extent to which any gen-eration could fairly degrade the world's resources.Believing this, it is not surprising that environmentalistsalso believe that people are morally required to under-take stabilizing actions when projections show thattrends in individual behavior threaten a biological orclimatological threshold, and institute acceleratingchanges in the environing systems.

These obligations are viewed holistically, organically—they are owed to the future, just as we owe our forefa-thers, not individually but collectively, for our culturalheritage; these obligations derive from a faith in thevalue of the human struggle and from the conservativeidea of Edmund Burke that a society represents "apartnership not only between those who are living, butbetween those who are living, those who are dead andthose who are to be born" (Burke 1910, p. 93-94).

Environmentalists' moral intuitions that we ought not todestroy a fish stock to cater to momentary fashions, norshould we overheat our atmosphere by releasing, in afew decades, all the carbon stored in fossil fuels overmillennia are not based on a balancing of future winnersand losers, however. Rather, they are based on thebelief that we ought not to destabilize the normallyslow-changing systems on which the daily activities ofmany generations depend. In this sense, I concludethat in contextual environmental management—man-agement that is sensitive to the importance of trends inwhole populations across ecological scales of time—economic considerations become ethical considerations.

References

Allen, T.F.H.; Starr, T.B. 1982. Hierarchy theory:perspectives for ecological complexity. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Burke, E. 1910. Reflections on the revolution in France.London: Dent.

Elton, Charles. 1927. Animal ecology. New York:MacMillan.

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Environmental Protection Agency. 1982. Chesa-peake Bay: introduction to an ecosystem. Washing-ton, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Flader, S. 1974. Thinking like a mountain: AldoLeopold and the evolution of an ecological attitudetoward deer, wolves, and forests. Columbia, MO:University of Missouri Press.

Harris, L. 1984. The fragmented forest. Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

Hays, S. 1959. Conservation and the gospel of effi-ciency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Koestler, A. 1967. The ghost in the machine. NewYork: MacMillan.

Leopold, A. 1939. A biotic view of land. Journal ofForestry. 37: 727-730.

Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County almanac. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Leopold, A. 1979. Some fundamentals of conservationin the Southwest. Environmental Ethics. 1: 131-148.

Margalef, R. 1963. Perspectives in ecological theory.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Meine, C. 1988. Aldo Leopold: his life and work. Madi-son, Wl: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Norton, B.G. 1982. Environmental ethics and therights of future generations. Environmental Ethics.4: 319-337.

Pinchot, G. 1947. Breaking new ground. Reprint.Washington, DC: Island Press.

Rawls, J. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA:The Belknap Press.

Ulanowicz, R.E. 1986. Growth and development:ecosystem phenomenology. New York: Springer-Verlag.

12

Is Sustainability Attainable?

Courtland L. Smith

COURTLAND L SMITH is a professor, Departmentof Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis,Oregon 97331.

People adapt to a wider range of habitats than any otheranimal because of culture. Culture, which includes thevalues and behaviors about economic enterprise andecological practice, can also sow seeds of self-destruc-tion. In Western culture, economic and ecologic valueshave been increasingly at odds with one another.

One view is that economic growth is necessary to pro-mote progress and prosperity. Those looking at alteredenvironments stemming from economic growth worrythat continued diminishment of resources, loss of species,and degradation of habitats threaten the sustainabilityof society. The resolution of these apparently contradic-tory economic and ecologic views is at the heart ofachieving sustainability. Those promoting progress argueeconomic growth is needed to fulfil pressing environmen-tal and economic needs. If prosperity requires economicgrowth, then sustainability is not primary. The futurewould depend on adapting to the changed environmentsnecessary to continue economic growth. Those promot-ing sustainability predict human society will not persistwithout stopping thedestruction of resources and habitats.

Since the 1930s, maximum sustainable yield manage-ment of fish and forest resources gave hope for main-taining environmental quality while also producingsustained growth (Mason and Bruce 1931, Russell1942, Steen 1984). Subsequently, "sustainable" hasbecome a modifier for agriculture, development, econom-ics, energy, environment, fisheries, forestry, futures,growth, livelihoods, and world. Most meanings ofsustain-

ability suggest being able to continue living in a habitator using a resource in the same way well into the future.

Experience of Fisheries as a Model

Fishery scientists have a half century of experience withsustainable yield management (Larkin 1977). Maximumsustainable yield is institutionalized in legislation estab-lishing fishery management practices. Maximum sustain-able yield is, "the largest average catch or yield that cancontinuously be taken from a stock under existing envi-ronmental conditions" (Ricker 1975:4).

Sustainable yield management has been successful infew fisheries. Most fish stocks are overfished and con-tinue to be fished at higher rates than biologists thinkcan be sustained. Why after 50 years of sustainableyield management are fish stocks in such poor condition'?

The answer lies in the culture within which sustainableyield management is practiced. Because of the culturalpriority given to economic growth, sustainable yieldmanagement is a continual struggle to hold off theenvironmental threats posed by economic growth pres-sures. Fisheries, then, represent on a smaller scale theproblem society faces as a whole. If sustainable yieldscannot be achieved for fisheries, where knowledge isusually good about what it takes to attain sustainability,then how will sustainability be successful in much morecomplex systems?

Growth, Productivity, and Distribution

Western economic values promote growth and produc-tivity. These values propel Western cultures on a path

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of rapid material gain, but thwart a course toward sus-tainability. Economic growth forces come from the basicassumption that satisfaction increases with quantity.Increased productivity—getting more outputs with fewerinputs—in Western cultural beliefs is key to improvingpeople's well-being. The benefits from economic growthand productivity get distributed quite inequitably. Thepush for rapid growth, promotion of productivity gains,and the resulting distributional inequalities obstructattaining sustainability.

Growth

Classical economics rests on a utility function thatassumes satisfaction increases with quantity. Althoughsatisfaction does not increase with more pollutants,toxins, and waste products, individual and organizationalbehavior typically bear out the assumption that peopleprefer more, rather than less. The daily competitionbetween individuals, agencies, and firms to increasetheir gross product shows the preference for more. Whoprefers lower compensation and less acclaim? Whatstate agency in the legislative process of fiscal resourcescavenging is comfortable with a declining budget?What individual or firm is satisfied with fewer financialresources and less influence? Western economic valuesassume that the competition between individuals, agen-cies, and firms helps in achieving greater productivity.

Fisheries, like all renewable resources, have limits to thequantity that can be produced. When confronted withsome physical limit, be it the size of a fish stock, watersupply, or habitat availability, the first inclination of thosewho promote economic growth is to get around theconstraint and provide more. Typically, one solution fordeficient fish stocks is augmentation. For example,increase the stock size by raising recruitment and growthor by reducing predation and competition. Action to over-come limits captures more popular support than accept-ing limits. Even so, stock size eventually reaches someconstraint past which additional increase is not attainable.

If technology to increase supply does not work to raisequantity, another alternative is substitution. People seekto find something that is more abundant and can replacethe item in short supply. The ideal for a substitution isthat it should perform as well or better than the originaland should be of lower cost, be it hatchery for wildsalmon, plastic packaging for paper, ceramic magnetsfor metal, silicon sealants for rubber, plastic ornamenta-tion for chrome, or glitter for gold. Relative to the issue

of sustainability, substitutions mean giving up streamsprotected by old growth for silviculture and salmon forelectricity. Substitutions commit some plants and animalsto extinction to pursue economic growth.

In fisheries, limited-entry programs have been a mecha-nism to control growth in fishing effort, but fisheries stillsuffer from excess fishing capacity and fish stocks arestill in jeopardy. Several reasons explain the poor results.First, matching the numbers who can fish to stock sizeis politically very difficult. Second, productivity improve-ments reduce the effectiveness of limited entry programs.Even with the same number fishing, improved catchingability means the same number of people take more fish.

Limiting entry is an input control on the number fishing.An alternative is output controls on the amount of fishcaught. These controls do not work any better becauseof social and political pressures to raise harvest quotasand because of errors in calculating the quotas toohigh. Attempts to create property rights in fish stocks,too, fail to solve the problem. Short-term economicincentives favor exploitation and not long-term protection(Krautkraemer 1988, Clark 1990). In timber, the privatelands were overcut before public lands. Attainingsustainability has been no more successful in forestrythan in fisheries (Regier and Baskerville, this volume).Classical economics emphasizes not just the amount ofgrowth in resource output but also the rate of growth.

Fast economic growth is held out as an example tofollow. Economic policy makers highlight those commu-nities, industries, and nations with the highest economicgrowth rates. The quest for growth, however, yields twoquestions: How does growth improve social conditions?and, If growth is necessary, what rate of growth is best?That is, why is 10% better than 5%, 1%, 0.5%, or 0.05%?Is growing as fast as possible the best rate? Experienceswith rapid asset growth in banking, sales growth in busi-ness, and program growth in government show rapidgrowth is not inherently good. If economic growth isdesirable, perhaps greater concern should be given tofinding an optimal rate.

What might be the optimum growth rate? Economicgrowth might be viewed like a speed limit. The rate ofeconomic growth depends on road conditions. As ageneral rule, the larger and more complex the system,the slower the safe growth rate. Small and simplesystems can grow rapidly because their parametersand the interaction effects are better known.

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With human life expectancy at 75 years, having someidea of what could be expected in the next two genera-tions or a person's lifetime is a reasonable time horizonfor considering the implications of growth. Let's assumematerial goods double in the next 75 years. The dou-bling of consumption in 75 years requires a sustainedeconomic growth rate of 1% a year. If population growsat 1% and people's preferences do not change, then allthe gain in material well-being merely satisfies theincreased number of people, and the average well-beingdoes not change. The world population growth ratesince 1850 averaged about 1.2% per year (Westing1981). National economic growth rates from 1965 to1988, as measured by gross national product, averaged1.5% (World Bank 1990:179). During the same period,however, population growth rates were about 2%(World Bank 1990:229). When population is growingmore rapidly than the economy, aggregate well-beingdecreases.

National economic systems are large and complex. Theyshould grow slowly. Growth having important effects onecosystems should be slowest of all. In ecosystems, thefeedback loops are very complex. Interactions can bemasked, and the linkages between components of eco-systems magnify some of the changes. Taking ecosys-tem factors into account, would reducing plannednational macroeconomic growth rates by a factor of tenimprove the probability of achieving sustainability?Rather than trying to push national economic growth at5%, would maintaining it at 0.5% be a more prudentgoal? Slower growth rates lengthen the doubling time.A 0.5% versus 5% growth rate lengthens the doublingtime from about 14 years to 139 years. With growth ata rate of 0.5%, it takes practically two lifetimes for adoubling and allows time to adjust to the impacts ofgrowth. If economic growth is slowed, so too mustpopulation growth be slowed. To improve well-being,the population growth rate should be half or less of theeconomic growth rate.

No one is clear on the mechanisms by which economicgrowth helps people live better and solves environmen-tal problems, nor do they measure the results. Thetypical argument is that economic growth allows environ-mental degradation to be repaired and poverty to bealleviated. By what mechanism is the gain in net producttransformed into restored habitats and enhanced well-being? Rather than accepting the assumption that growthhelps solve problems, proponents of economic growthneed to demonstrate how the results actualiy occur.

Gross indicators—like amount of fish caught, dollars ofcatch, and more people choosing to fish or live in aplace—are used to show a healthy community. Nationaleconomic growth usually is measured with a generalmeasure like gross domestic or national product (GDPor GNP). Gross indicators, especially GNP, have oftenbeen criticized as measures of economic health. InDaly and Cobb's (1989:62-84) critique of GNP as ameasure of economic success, they point out thatincreased consumption of resources shows up on theasset side, not as a liability. The GNP is not adjustedfor the long-term costs of stock rebuilding, habitat resto-ration, waste disposal, toxic waste clean-up, curingenvironmental illness, or improving air and water quality.Like the GNP, businesses refer to assets or salesvolume as gross indicators of success. Raw growth innumbers of people, sales, or units produced may notyield any net benefit and can even cause a loss. Thesenumbers are not measures of real economic success.

Daly and Cobb (1989:401-455) suggest the Index ofSustainable Economic Welfare as a better measure ofeconomic well-being. This index corrects for some ofthe problems in traditional GNP measurement of growth.For the period from 1968 to 1986, U.S. per capita GNPshowed a 37% growth in constant dollars. The per capitaIndex of Sustainable Economic Welfare, also measuredin constant dollars, showed a 9% decline.

As a measure of growth, GNP is achieved by using upcapital resources to give the illusion of economic growth.It is no assurance of long-term sustainability.

Productivity

Coupled with generating greater quantities throughgrowth to raise people's satisfaction are improvementsin productivity—generating more of something with thesame or less effort. In Western economic values, pro-ductivity equates with economic efficiency where thebenefits from an activity should exceed the costs.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris discusses the biopsycho-logical behavior of humans. Harris sees both growth(getting more) and productivity (getting more with lesseffort) as part of the basic human makeup. In identifyingthese basic assumptions about the human enterprise,Hams (1979:62-63) says:

People need to eat and will generally choosediets that offer more rather than fewer caloriesand proteins and other nutrients.

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People cannot be totally inactive, but whenconfronted with a given task, they prefer to carryit out by expending less rather than more energy.

Western economic values complement these drives.Economic policy makers argue that productivity is cru-cial to elevating people's well-being. The BrookingsInstitution (Nourse et al. 1934:3) proposed that if theU.S. economy were modified to increase productivity topre-Depression rates,

. . . every citizen who cared to exert himselfcould attain a material standard of living equal atleast to that of the so-called "middle class" in theprosperous days before the collapse of 1929. . . .

The message that well-being only improves as produc-tivity improves is a persistent economic policy theme.

Theoretically, productivity gains should create more forsociety while also promoting conservation. The problemis in knowing what choices will achieve productivity goals.Since the 1930s, benefit-cost analysis has becomeincreasingly part of decision making to exploit resources,alter habitats, and make ecological modifications. Ben-efit-cost analysis weighs where society gets a greaterbenefit for some expenditure. Such benefits generallyequate with quantity without qualitative distinction.

Benefit-cost analysis is subject to much criticism.Bromley (1990:97), for example, notes:

Curiously, the identification of benefit-cost analy-sis with efficiency via Pareto improvements hascome despite overwhelming evidence from withineconomic theory of the logical fallacies inherenttherein.

Norgaard and Howarth (1990:5) point to an inherentweakness of benefit-cost analysis as done by neoclas-sical economists by pointing out:

The problem is that when they undertake ben-efit-cost analysis, they forget their other demandcurves are constantly changing. If demandcurves are constantly changing, values areconstantly changing. And if they are changing inways which are neither random nor predictable,values over the period of economic decisionscannot be determined.

Benefit-cost analysis rests on the assumption thatcurrent social values will persist into the future. For

example, in the 1980s, the Northwest Power PlanningCouncil rested its salmon recovery plan on increasedproduction from hatcheries. People's values changed,and in the 1990s, protection of wild and endangeredsalmon runs received priority.

Fisheries are particularly sensitive to productivity growth.People who fish continually try to catch more fish withthe same or less effort. For a resource at its maximumsustainable yield, this means people who fish continuallyget better and place more pressure on a limited resource.Even with limits to the number of people fishing or theircatch, those still fishing continue to improve their abilityto catch fish. Productivity improvement is one way togain an edge over competitors. Because the peoplewho fish constantly improve their productivity, fisherymanagers continually fall behind in limiting fishing effortto attain the maximum sustainable yield.

In a fishery at the maximum sustainable yield, produc-tivity gains will improve well-being only if the number ofpeople fishing decreases. If the number of people fishingstays the same and the fish resource is at the maximumsustainable yield, the productivity gain of one personbecomes a loss for another. The implications of thefisheries experience in a sustainable system is that thenumber fishing must decline for productivity gains toincrease net well-being.

Distribution

Distribution is the third factor making the attainment ofsustainability difficult. How are the benefits from growthand productivity improvements distributed? Who arethe beneficiaries?

Correlated with overfishing is greater inequality amongthose catching fish (Smith 1990). In commercial fisher-ies, the number of people needed to take the catchdecreases. In 1899, the top 5% of salmon gillnetterscaught 12% of the salmon. In 1971, the top 5% caught47% of the salmon. As the Oregon bottom trawl fisherygrew very rapidly from 1976 to 1980 and averagecatches declined, the top 5% of trawlers increased theirshare of the catch from 15 to 26%. As the number ofpeople fishing with very low catches becomes larger,many of those with low catches have difficulty justmaintaining their current situation. Focusing on immedi-ate needs prevents people from considering the long-term sustainability of fish stocks.

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For resource managers, greater inequality in catchescauses several problems. First is numbers—the problemof regulating many people with small catches. Second,greater inequality and more regulation increase theinclination to cheat and poach. More catch is takenillegally, outside the purview of management. Third,with inequality, people become driven to meet theirbasic needs. Fishing becomes obsessive as more andmore fish must be captured to meet mortgage and boatpayments, satisfy basic needs, and just break even.Finally, divisions among participants created by inequalitysegregate those fishing, and they begin to prey uponone another in the management process. Inequalitypromotes environmental scavenging. Rich and poorseek to satisfy their needs and degrade habitats withoutmuch regard for the future.

Achieving sustainability depends on having a conceptof the future. Poverty shortens people's future orienta-tion. The poverty facing many of the world's peoplethreatens to topple any attempt at sustainability. A fifthof the world's population, mostly children and theirmothers, go to bed hungry each night (World Bank1990). The current demands for basic survival to pro-vide food, housing, and health care outweigh the abilityto look ahead.

When the daily task is meeting basic needs, the treecut down or the fish taken do not enter people's long-term calculations. The poor person's problem is surviv-ing today, for if enough food is not found, or shelter doesnot protect against the heat or cold, or if adequate healthcare is not available, there is no tomorrow.

People can only contemplate tomorrow when they arewell-fed, adequately housed, and healthy; otherwise,what is the meaning of sustainability? From the view-point of someone who has a future sustained by ade-quate food, housing, and health care, destruction ofresources is shortsighted. From the point of view ofpoverty, today's survival is the top priority. The wholeissue of sustainability is beyond the time horizon ofpoor people.

If economic growth solves problems of poverty, itsrecord is subject to question. Productivity improvementshould generate the real gains to improve people'swell-being, but poverty rates show no evidence ofhaving improved to any significant degree.

Micro Principles and Meta Concerns

Many have noted that ecology and economy both derivefrom the same root—meaning household. Ecology isthe relation between the members of the householdand the environment of the house. Economy is house-hold management. Economics encompasses the rela-tions between those within the house—individuals,firms, resource owners, nations. As commonly used,economics is deductive, deterministic, propositional,and particular.

Economics looks at the household from macro andmicro perspectives. Macroeconomics deals with pro-duction, prices, employment, and monetary policy ofaggregates like nations. Microeconomics focuses onindividuals, firms, and resource owners. Too often,when resource managers consider ecological problems,narrow concerns control considerations about the eco-logical system. Individuals, firms, and industry organiza-tions pressure resource managers to relax concerns forthe ecosystem. Letting principles about maximizingeconomic efficiency filter up to influence the ecosystemfosters narrow, short-term, microeconomic perspectiveswhen the need is to be holistic, systemic, and synthetic(see Norton, this volume).

Ecology needs to be long-term, holistic, and meta. Thefirst-order question is the suitability of the ecosystem tosupport life. Ecology, as a meta concern, gets lost withthe application of the short-term economic focus ongrowth and productivity.

The popular presentation of economic principles sug-gests that individuals and firms who are maximizingeconomic efficiency will generate economic growth thatallows ecological problems to be solved. Prolongedexperience shows that maximizing economic efficiencyalso depletes resources, threatens habitats, and causesecological problems.

Resource management has become dominated bymicroeconomic considerations. The linkage betweenfishery biology and economics—bioeconomics—beganwith the recognition that the fisheries model for popula-tion growth and harvesting is logically the same as theeconomic model of capital growth and consumption(Gordon 1954, Schaefer 1957, Crutchfield and Ponte-corvo 1969, Clark 1990). Microeconomics is very goodfor explaining the success and failure of fishing firms.Maximizing net present value is an important decision-

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making criterion for the individuals and firms. Maximiz-ing economic efficiency stimulates competition andencourages innovations.

Microeconomic priorities, however, keep resourcemanagers from making the hard decisions required tosustain fish stocks. Unfortunately, the profit formulaonly includes known current costs and looks at immedi-ate benefits. Maximizing economic efficiency does notaccount for long-term costs, nor does it look at theimpacts of short-term profits on the whole ecosystem;further changes in people's tastes and preferences arenot considered.

Adapting to our ecosystem is a meta problem. It requiresa more holistic, integrative, and long-term perspective.Microeconomic theory asserts that the logic of maximiz-ing economic efficiency is complementary to maximumsustainable-yield management. The practical result,however, is ever-increasing destruction and devastationof the ecosystem. Profits explain the success of firms,but not the persistence of ecosystems. What is good atthe microeconomic scale is not necessarily what isneeded at the meta ecosystem scale.

The relation between macroeconomic theory aboutnational monetary policy and the microeconomic behav-ior of firms illustrates how different scales of theoryoperate. During times of inflation, the monetarist wantsto hold down the growth in currency, which drives upinterest rates, increases unemployment, and causessome firms to fail. Higher interest rates make gettingthe capital necessary for expansion more difficult. Higherunemployment hurts workers. Yet the macroeconomicpolicy of the monetarist has priority over the microeco-nomic needs of individuals and firms because the healthof the national economy is more important. If ecosystemsustainability is to work, ecological policy needs priorityover macro and microeconomic decision making.

Alternatives

Fisheries provide a model of how ecological and eco-nomic values interact in society as a whole. Fisheriesrepresent in more manageable form the problems facingWestern culture as a whole. But what can be done?

One choice is to continue as in the past; that is, accept-ing our addiction to economic growth, recognizing thatsustainability is not attainable, and living with constantlychanging environments. Continuing the pursuit of eco-

nomic growth, as the solution to problems of economyand ecology, means persistence of past patterns ofextinction for species that cannot survive ecosystemmodifications. Support for the durability of past practicesis found in Simon (1980,1981) and Simon and Kahn(1984), among others.

A second choice is to change the value foundation anddevelop sustainable economic and ecological paradigms;that is, move away from economics solely concernedwith maximizing economic growth. Bioregionalism andGaia [Gaea] (Sale 1985, 1986; Lovelock 1979, 1988),steady-state economics (Daly 1977, Daly and Cobb1989), the Genesis Strategy (Schneider 1975), Buddhisteconomics (Schumacher 1973), rights of future genera-tions (Norgaard and Howarth 1990), and ecologicallycentered values (Leopold 1949; Berry 1975,1981, 1989;Devall and Sessions 1985) are possibilities. Each requiresnew values upon which society bases decisions. Thesevalues require weaning from addiction to economicgrowth as the problem solver.

A third choice is to make some relatively simplechanges to the Western practice of political economy.The World Commission on Environment and Develop-ment (1987) proposes controlling population growth,while using improved productivity to address inequali-ties among peoples. This goal involves setting a speedlimit, particularly for economic growth. If growth andproductivity are deeply rooted in the human condition,we need to acknowledge this. If growth and productivityare fundamental human needs, new paradigms andvalue changes may be quite difficult to effect. Retainthe microeconomic, market-oriented values of classicaleconomics, but require that growth and productivityoperate within the ecological constraints required toachieve system sustainability. This approach requires

actually measuring whether real economic growth istaking place, assessing what activities increase produc-tivity, and analyzing how the benefits become distrib-uted. Most of all, this approach requires a much longerplanning horizon, something on the order of a lifetime,75 years.

Adopting this third approach raises distribution as theissue of primary concern. A sustainable ecology mustmake distribution the first consideration. Bromley(1990:91) notes how the Western economic paradigmseparated production from distribution. Growth andproductivity became the sole concerns. Economistsassumed that distribution would take care of itself.

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The inequality represented in persistent poverty killsfuture orientation.

I do not presume to know which of these approachesfuture human societies will take. Western economicvalues are leading the assault on the environment aswe know it. Human survival requires an ecosystemcapable of supporting human life.

Acknowledgments

This paper is revised from a version given at the AnnualMeeting of the Oregon Chapterof the American FisheriesSociety, February 7, 1990. In preparing the revisions,the comments of Dan Bottom, Jerry Moles, Richard B.Norgaard, David W. Orr, Charles Warren, and numerousstudents have been especially helpful.

References

Berry, Wendell. 1975. A continuous harmony: essayscultural and agricultural. New York: Harcourt Braceand Jovanovich.

Berry, Wendell. 1981. The gift of good land: furtheressays cultural and agricultural. Berkeley: NorthPoint Press.

Berry, Wendell. 1989. The hidden wound. Berkeley:North Point Press.

Bromley, Daniel W. 1990. The ideology of efficiency:searching for a theory of policy analysis. Journal ofEnvironmental Economics and Management. 19(1):86-107.

Clark, Colin. 1990. Mathematical bioeconomics: theoptimal management of renewable resources, sec-ond edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Crutchfield, James A.; Pontecorvo, Giulio. 1969.The Pacific salmon fisheries: a study of irrationalconservation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Pressfor Resources of the Future.

Daly, Herman. 1977. Steady-state economics: theeconomics of biophysical equilibrium and moralgrowth. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Daly, Herman; Cobb, John, Jr. 1989. For the commongood: redirecting the economy toward community,the environment, and a sustainable future. Boston:The Beacon Press.

Devall, Bill; Sessions, George. 1985. Deep ecologySalt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc.

Gordon, H. Scott. 1954. The economic theory of acommon property resource: the fishery. Journal ofPolitical Economy. 62(2): 124-142.

Harris, Marvin. 1979. Cultural materialism, the strugglefor a science of culture. New York: Random House.

Krautkraemer, Jeffrey A. 1988. The rate of discountand the preservation of natural environments. NaturalResource Modeling. 2(3): 421-437.

Larkin, P.A. 1977. An epitaph for the concept of maxi-mum sustained yield. Transactions of the AmericanFisheries Society. 106(1): 1-11.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County almanac. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Lovelock, J.E. 1979. Gaia, a new look at life on Earth.New York: Oxford University Press.

Lovelock, J.E. 1988. The ages of Gaia: a biography ofour living Earth. New York: Norton.

Mason, David Townsend; Bruce, Donald. 1931.Sustained yield forest management as a solution toAmerican forest conservation problems. Portland,OR: Mason and Stevens.

Norgaard, Richard B.; Howarth, Richard B. 1990.The rights of future generations and the role of ben-efit-cost analysis in the policy process. Unpublishedpaper, American Political Science Association meet-ing, San Francisco.

Nourse, Edwin Griswold; Tyron, Frederick Gale;Drury, Horace Bookwalter; Leven, Maurice;Moulton, Harold Glenn; Lewis, Cleona. 1934.America's capacity to produce. Washington, DC: TheBrookings Institution.

Ricker, W.E. 1975. Computation and interpretation ofbiological statistics offish populations. Bulletin, Fish-eries Research Board of Canada. 191 p.

Russell, E.S. 1942. The overfishing problem. Cam-bridge: The Cambridge University Press.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1985. Dwellers in the land: abioregional vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1986. Human scale New York:Cowan, McCowan, & Geygheyon.

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Schaefer, Milner B. 1957. Some considerations ofpopulation dynamics and economics in relation tothe management of commercial marine fisheries.Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada.14: 669-81.

Schneider, Stephen H. 1975. The genesis strategy:climate and global survival. New York: Plenum Press.

Schumacher, E.F. 1973. Small is beautiful: economicsas if people mattered. New York: Harper and Row.

Simon, Julian L. 1980. Resources, population, envi-ronment: an oversupply of false bad news. Science.208: 1431-1437.

Simon, Julian L. 1981. The ultimate resourcePrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Simon, Julian L; Kahn, Herman. 1984. The resource-ful Earth: a response to Global 2000. Oxford: BasilBlackwell.

Smith, Courtland L. 1990. Resource scarcity andinequality in the distribution of catch. North AmericanJournal of Fisheries Management. 10: 269-278.

Steen, Harold K. 1984. History of sustained-yieldforestry: a symposium. [Dates of meeting unknown];[location of meeting unknown]. Santa Cruz, CA:Forest History Society.

Westing, Arthur H. 1981. A note on how many humansthat have ever lived. BioScience. 31 (July/August):523-524.

World Bank. 1990. World development report 1990.London: Oxford University Press.

World Commission on Environment and Develop-ment. 1987. Our common future. London: OxfordUniversity Press.

20

Sustainable Redevelopment of Regional Ecosystems Degradedby Exploitive Development1

Henry A. Reiger and Gordon L. Baskerville

HENRY A. REGIER is a professor, Department ofZoology, University of Toronto, Toronto, OntarioM55 1A1, and GORDON L BASKERVILLE is aprofessor, Forest Resources Management Department,University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BritishColumbia V6T 1Z4.

Introduction

Think Globally, Act Locally

Conventional economic development, which exploitsecological and other features of a locale, is usuallyundertaken with the aim, among others, that benefitswill cumulate and contribute to regional economicgrowth and to "progress," with some consideration thatthe people of the locale will also receive some benefitfrom the exploitation. Local disbenefits, say in the formof bad ecological consequences, also tend to cumulateand to become apparent, eventually, as regional degra-dation. Whether intended or not, conventional localactions and their consequences tend to cumulate pow-erfully at regional scales, and thus local actions shouldbe viewed in a regional context, with respect to goodand bad aspects alike.

We focus our attention on economic developmentpracticed during recent centuries in North America, butespecially with respect to two case studies: the NewBrunswick forests and the Great Lakes fish (see fig. 1).

1 Adapted from. W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn, editors. 1986. Sustain-able development of the biosphere. Published with permission of theInternational Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg,Austria

Part of the economic development during recent decadesin the Third World may resemble, in some ways, theprocess of North American development outlined here.The resemblance may be weak with some Europeancountries, where renewable resources have not beensubjected to so rapid a development pressure and havebeen managed differently, at least recently.

In his statement on the issues surrounding the "thinkglobally, act locally" philosophy, Holling (1984) usesglobal in the sense of biospheric rather than, say, ofsome rather arbitrary level of aggregation. As haveothers, we have difficulty in demonstrating local-bio-spheric links, though we "know" that such links arealmost infinite in number. We deal in this chapter withlocal-regional links and submit that our contribution maybe seen as a small-scale analog of the issue of linksacross gaps of larger scale.

From the perspective of an interested layperson, theconceptual link from the local to the regional may involvea connection between relatively concrete local realityand relatively general and somewhat imprecise regionalinferences that are comprehensible only as abstractarithmetic summations or mathematical expressions. Alink to a biospheric scale might involve a connection tophenomena that may appear so abstract (e.g., computersimulations) as to be almost unreal. How do we demon-strate interactive and cumulative linkages across differ-ent scales and modes of cognition in such a way thatthe new comprehension contributes to the sustainableredevelopment of all these scales within scales? Wecannot give clear advice, but we both are involved withregional projects in which attempts are underway to

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Figure 1—Eastern North America showing the Canadian Province of New Brunswick and the binational Great Lakes.

forge useful links between the local and the regional, tobe operative in both directions.

Development and Redevelopment

Within the context of economic development, "to develop"generally means to use available resources in such away as to achieve local or regional progress throughincreased economic growth, usually measured by asuitable regional indicator, such as total jobs created,and net value added. Underdevelopment may meanthat some resources are not used to their full economicpotential, with the result that local or regional economicprogress is slower than it might otherwise be. Overdevel-opment may mean that some important resources areovertaxed, again to the disadvantage of regional eco-nomic progress. Misguided or improper developmentmay mean that mistakes have been made concerningthe use of some resources—for example, through theonce-only destructive use or sacrifice of a renewableresource important to the sustenance of a futureeconomy. These and other variations on the concept ofdevelopment have rather close conceptual parallels in

the study of the harvest of renewable resources and ofthe use of the natural environment.

We do not deal with the extraction of nonrenewable re-sources as related to economic development, except tomention that some general parallels exist in North Amer-ica between improper and excessive harvesting of renew-able resources and improper and wasteful extraction ofpetroleum and some mineral ores. Both of these majorprocesses, as conventionally practiced, severely dis-rupted the natural functioning of the affected ecosystem.

We personally experience no euphoria in contemplatingrecent versions of what is implied in North America byeconomic development, economic growth, and progress.Nevertheless, these terms are widely used the worldover and have been accepted as central to the study ofthe sustainable development of the biosphere; we canput them to objective use without necessarily endorsingvarious connotations subjectively. Perhaps we can helpto develop a set of connotations for the term sustainableredevelopment that may be acceptable for both objectiveand subjective purposes.

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In many parts of the world, the natural environment andits renewable resources have been misused, overused,and abused to the point of severe degradation. Sustain-ability for some desirable mix of valued uses has beenvitiated in such areas through destructive abuse, over-intensive use, or ill-informed practices in general. Theonly reasonable option in such areas is a redevelopmenttoward sustainability. Various terms or slogans havebeen used that relate in some way to a reversal of thedegradation, whether ecological, anthropological, social,economic, industrial, or urban—for example, reform,rejuvenation, remediation, restoration, rehabilitation,reforestation, resettlement, reindustrialization, rezoning,renewal, recovery, revitalization. Taken together, all ofthese terms that are relevant in a region might constitute"redevelopment"; ecological rehabilitation of such areasis obviously crucial, else sustainability is an empty ormisleading slogan.

Throughout North America in particular, major aquatic,forest, grassland, and cultured ecosystems have beendegraded. Major, though perhaps only partial, Americaninitiatives toward ecosystem or regional redevelopmentinclude the Tennessee Valley Authority initiatives insouthern Appalachia, the Soil Conservation Serviceinitiatives on the Great Plains, and regional reforestationin the Southeast. In subsequent sections, we presenttwo case studies of more recent initiatives toward rede-velopment: the forests of New Brunswick in easternCanada and the Great Lakes of central North America.Our cases are similar yet different. The New Brunswickcase represents a deliberate provincial effort to redevelopa rural community economy based on forestry before thenatural productive base becomes too severely degraded:opinion leaders in New Brunswick have suddenly recog-nized the associated problems and opportunities. TheGreat Lakes case represents deliberate internationalefforts, to date costing perhaps over $10 billion (1985U.S. dollars), to rehabilitate massively degraded eco-systems, especially those of the Lower Lakes. For vari-ous reasons, the Great Lakes industrial and agriculturalheartland lost its vitality and vigor, and people recognizedthat ecosystem degradation was part of the problem. Itis now widely expected that successful rehabilitation ofthese lake ecosystems will have both a direct and acatalytic role in the revitalization of this binational heart-land, even though the apparent additional monetarybenefits of a rehabilitated chain of Great Lakes may beonly a small fraction of the wealth created in the Basin(Thurowetal. 1984).

In both cases, we have greatly simplified the record toenhance understanding. We show that integrated re-gional redevelopment of degraded systems must beserved by appropriate information systems, which mustexplicitly link the local and regional scales of concern.With respect to spatial and temporal scope and scale,and to detail of resolution, a regional information systemobviously falls somewhere between biospheric andecosystemic information systems. Information systemsalready exist in some, perhaps primitive, form for theredevelopment initiatives mentioned here. Progress inredevelopment will likely depend on the further creativedevelopment and thoughtful use of such informationsystems.

The Forests of New Brunswick

The setting and a historical sketch—The province ofNew Brunswick is largely forested (85% of its 78,000km2) and has been so in the 10 millennia since the lastcontinental glacier melted. During the past two centu-ries, the economic development of sparsely populatedNew Brunswick has depended primarily on the exploitiveuse of forests and secondarily on the exploitive use offisheries and agricultural soils. The province has neverserved as an industrial heartland to any other region,nor is it likely to do so in the future. It is relatively free ofthe pervasive and massive pollution that attends largeindustrial and urban concentrations, though the effectsof atmospherically transported acid rain and toxic fall-out, and of climate warming, all resulting predominantlyfrom the improper and excessive combustion of fossilfuels, will soon become as apparent there as elsewhere.

In this sketch of the history of conventional exploitivedevelopment and of opportunities for sustainable rede-velopment in New Brunswick, we focus mainly on theforest industry. Consideration of fisheries and agriculture,of human settlements and pollution, and of the outbreaksof the spruce budworm would complicate the accountbut would not greatly affect the inferences that can bedrawn from a simplified account of the forest industry.

The development of the New Brunswick forests hasbeen a long process (Tweeddale 1974, Wynn 1980). Inthe early 1800s, the forests provided large white pinetrees for ship masts, which meant selecting high-valuespecimens and bringing them out with considerablecare. Although this extraction generated a step in thedevelopment of the local economy, it was at a very lowscale, and the quality of life associated with it was, in

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the prosaic sense, hardy. But the die for future develop-ment was already cast: "For profit is the first motive ofall men," as Nicolas Denys (1908), a naturalist-cum-earlydeveloper of the early 1700s, wrote in his diary of 1708.

Continued development (read "progress through eco-nomic growth") was temporarily arrested by the unavail-ability of very large, and very old, white pine trees.Development proceeded, however, with the harvest ofwhite pine to less-stringent quality standards to producesquared timbers for building, most of which were ex-ported. This product provided considerably more localemployment than did the search for masts and resultedin a modest improvement in the quality of life of thepioneer communities.

One course then taken in the development sequencewas to broaden the harvest to include younger trees. If300-year-old white pine are harvested faster than theyare recruited to that age class, the development maybe extended by a shift to younger, smaller trees. Suc-cessive steps in the development of the white pineindustry (fig. 2) began with the high minimum standardacceptable for raw material at point A, and continueduntil the white pine available were of a size character-ized by point B, which then became the acceptableminimum standard.

By the middle of the 1800s, the next major step in theprocess of development began with the emergence ofa major sawmill industry that produced finished timber,again mostly for export. The work contributed "valueadded" to the product, enabling the local society to gainsome additional economic benefits from the resource,but also the regionally based lumber industry gained.To develop this lumber industry further, the source ofraw material was again broadened, with changingminimum standards of acceptability, to include not onlythe remaining large and small white pine trees avail-able, but also the larger white spruce. This change is amovement in the minimum standard acceptable for rawmaterial from B to C (fig. 2). The sawmill industry con-tinued to grow (develop) in a manner that requiredquality raw material faster than the forest was producingthat quality, with the result that the minimum acceptableraw material gradually moved from C to D on the lowercurve in figure 2.

The sawmill industry reached its peak in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries and has beendeclining ever since, with the number of sawmills in the

Figure 2—The diameter of white pine and white spruce stems asrelated to age of the stem. Stem size is a crucial factor in sawmillefficiency. Early exploitation began with white pine at point A, contin-ued using smaller stems until point B, where it was equally efficientto switch exploitation to include large white spruce at C. Continuedexploitation mined the largest stems until current limits of acceptabil-ity were reached at D.

province today only a fraction of that in the heyday ofthe industry in the late 1800s. The surviving sawmillindustry uses not only the available spruce logs (andthe small amount of white pine available) but alsobalsam fir trees. Currently, the minimum acceptablesize for all these species is a fraction of the original.

Although the sawmill industry was developed largely onthe basis of individual trees, a pulp and paper industryemerged in the province shortly after the beginning ofthe twentieth century, an industry based on whole standsof trees. The arrival of the pulp industry happened tocoincide with poor lumber markets and the relative non-availability of large individual stems suitable for efficientuse in the kind of sawlog operation that had evolved inthe nineteenth century. Pulp mills can use smaller trees,although harvesting of larger trees makes for a cheaperraw material. Just as the sawmill development was basedon harvesting only the best individual stems and leavingthe poor-quality material (highgrading), so pulp andpaper development was based on harvesting the standsof best species and lowest logging cost while bypassinglower quality stands (also highgrading). Because of thelarge wood volumes required by pulp mills, people gen-erally harvested nearly pure stands of the usable species(spruce and fir), leaving behind stands of species notusable for pulp. Pulp mills marked a major developmentfor the local economy, capturing not only a much largerportion of the value of the finished resource by spin-offemployment, but also by generating a better quality ofemployment.

Initially, the pulp and paper industry used stands ofsmaller spruce trees and, as these became less avail-

24

able, raw material standards were relaxed to includestands of larger fir trees as well. Since the mid-1950s,the industry has adapted technologically so that it canuse stands of very small trees of softwood species andsome hardwoods. To characterize the impact of thepulp and paper industry on the resource, we examinehow these utilization standards relate to stand develop-ment—that is, to natural production in a stand. How aparticular softwood stand (that is, a population or com-munity of trees) might develop in terms of volume perhectare and of average tree size is shown in figure 3,from its regenerating stages, through maturity, andovermaturity, to breaking up in old age. Combinationsof minimum volume per hectare and maximum treesper cubic meter determine the operability or availabilityof a stand for economic harvest. At the beginning of thedevelopment of the pulp and paper industry, only thosestands represented by the range A and A' (fig. 4) wereconsidered economically usable. These operable standshad reached both the specified economic minimumtotal volume per hectare and the specified economic

Figure 3—Softwood stand development as seen by the developer.Above: The accumulation of volume over time, showing how muchwood is available at various times. Below: Average tree size as itchanges over time. Operability constraints work in two ways: (a) thestand must have enough volume per hectare to be worth developing-for example, 100 m3/ha, and (b) the stand must be made of individualstems large enough to be commercially harvestable: forexample,5 trees/m3give the points A and A', and the constraints of a minimum50 m3/ha and a maximum of 10 trees/m3 give the points B and B'For the first set of constraints, the stand is harvestable (operable)between A and A' and B and B', respectively.

Figure 4—Volume development in a spruce-fir stand. The curveshows the merchantable volume per hectare at any point The rangesA-A' and B-B' are periods when the stand is economically operableThe point A is determined by both a minimum volume per hectareand a minimum average tree size. The point A' is determined by theminimum volume per hectare. The stand is operable (that is, eligiblefor harvest) in the range A-A'. If the operability constraints of volumeper hectare and average tree size are relaxed, then A moves to Band A' moves to B'. In this case, the stand is operable for the periodfrom B to B'. The process may continue to some ultimate stateidentified here by the extremes C and C.

minimum average tree size harvestable, but they hadnot yet broken up to the point where less than the mini-mum volume remained, below which it was not eco-nomic to harvest. Clearly, when stands of type A-A'were harvested faster than they were recruited to thisrange, a shortage of material for the mills occurred overtime, which could have forced a reduction in their output.Analogous to the case for sawlogs from individual stems,the answer to such a constraint was to change theutilization limits for whole stands to the range B-B'(fig. 4); the advent of a biomass approach suggestsextension to the range C-C.

New capital investment and technology—of both hardand soft types—were required to effect a shift from A-A'to B-B'. This shift then permitted further development ofthe economy in that the broader utilization standards(at B-B') gave an almost instant increase in sustainableproduction. For example, a harvest of 400,000 m3/yearfrom a forest was not sustainable when the standutilization limits were set at A-A', but was sustainable,and could even be increased to 600,000 m3/year, whenthe utilization standards were set at B-B' (fig. 5). Furtherindustrial development was possible by harvestingstands comprising several species, only some of whichwere suitable for pulping (fig. 6). Harvesting in thesemixed stands faced similar utilization standards for totalvolume and average tree size and had the additionallogistical problem of working around the trees of unus-able species, but it also gave a larger growing stockand a more sustainable harvest.

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Figure 5—Three reasonably possible futures for the same initialforest, but harvested subject to different operability constraints.Curve A: With operability limits set at A-A' (from fig. 4) the totaloperable growing stock increases at first, but cannot sustain aharvest of 400,000 m3/year. The growing stock goes to extinction inthe fifth decade Curve B: With operability limits set at B-B' (fig. 4),the total operable growing stock is larger than in A, and the largerharvest rate of 600,000 m3/year is sustainable, although the growingstock is driven dangerously low near the end of the forecast period.Curve C: with operability limits at C-C (fig. 4), the total operablegrowing stock is again larger and the harvest of 800,000 m3/year issustainable. Note that the initial increases in operable growing stockare artifacts, in that the wood was always there in case A but wasnot counted because of the operability constraints. Also note that theapparent gains in sustainable harvest are each achieved by harvest-ing younger (poorerquality) raw material.

Figure 6—Volume development in a mixed stand where only thesoftwood volume (lower curve) is usable. The softwood volume issubjectto operability constraints shown in figure 3. When the soft-wood species are harvested, all or nearly all of the other speciesare left standing.

As with the pulp and paper industry, the lumber industryalso innovated technologically to use less-valued species,smaller trees, and stems of lower quality in the manu-facture of such products as laminated beams, plywood,and chipboard. Such innovations are capital intensiveand involve advanced technology. In effect, capital andtechnology are used to mitigate reduction in the qualityof the resource.

Examining the conventional saw- and pulp-mill examplesof development clearly shows that both constitute formsof highgrading. The lumber industry was built on high-grading individual stems, and the industry declinedbecause of inefficiency when recruitment to these qualitystandards could not match the harvest rate imposed onthe trees of that quality by the highgrading. The pulpand paper industry was built on the principle of high-grading at the stand scale, where whole stands of parti-cular species and size characteristics were removedand the utilization standards lowered from time to time,as necessary, to sustain the development (Swift 1983).In both cases, the forest resource was clearly used todevelop the economy. In fact, the use was very effec-tive, in that each step in the process:

• Allocated a larger proportion of the economic benefitsto the local society.

• Increased the number of jobs locally.

• Improved the quality of those jobs.

• Improved the quality of life in the local society.

At present, however, New Brunswick faces a situationwhere further development is no longer possible. Infact, sustaining the forest-based industry will be barelypossible even with major forest management efforts ofa redevelopment type (Reed 1978).

Exploitive development—Some further considerationof the concept of exploitive development is appropriateat this point. Clearly, without specifications of quantity,quality, timing, and location, the notion of sustainabilityis meaningless. A sawmill industry has existed foralmost 200 years, but no one would claim that productquality was sustained for any significant period withinthose 200 years. What did survive was an industry thatused poorer and poorer quality raw material and wasstrongly dependent on capital-intensive technologicalinnovation to create a quality product out of raw materialsof low quality. A forest industry, broadly defined, wassustained, but the productive structure of the resourcewas not.

Two points to consider with respect to this resourcedevelopment are, first, development was not a singlestep taken to achieve a specified goal, but rather itinvolved a continuous expansion of local and regionaleconomic benefits, narrowly defined, that became agoal in itself. In this context, for any resource a point indevelopment certainly exists beyond which sustainability

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is no longer possible because of biological limits of theresource system. The second point really attacks thenub of the issue. Historically, development in resource-rich areas is driven by the clarion call of government,industry, and enterprising people "to develop ourresources." Clearly, primarily the resource-based indus-tries are what have been developed, secondarily theregional economy, and tertiarily the local economies—but the resources have not been developed at all. Theresources have been characteristically run down orruined by resource development—surely one of thesaddest paradoxes of human activities. Highgradinghas been degrading.

In New Brunswick, the forest-based industry may nowbe characterized as overdeveloped, and the forestresource is in urgent need of redevelopment. The exist-ing economic structure is derived from a sequentiallowering of utilization standards and broadening of thetarget species mix. The existing economy could barelybe sustained by a further lowering of utilization standardsalong with a very aggressive management program,but the limits of development in the traditional economicsense have been reached. The key here is that resourcedevelopment has been measured throughout this pro-cess in terms of the immediate social and economicresults and not at all in terms of the productivity of theresource that was used. The resource was used toachieve the development, but using the resource alteredits dynamic structure. The resource structure changedwith respect to:

• The size and stature of particular species in thestands.

• The species composition of the various stand mixesthat were available in the forest.

• The age structure of the stands in the forest as awhole.

Instead of progressive overexploitation of the resourceto manage (read "expand") the economy, the resourcemust now be managed (read "redeveloped") to main-tain the economy. Put bluntly, gaining further develop-ment or even sustaining the existing rate of developmentby mining the forest is no longer possible. Maintainingthe existing rate is possible with proper management,but any expansionist development must be delayedseveral decades until the results of new managementmeasures take effect.

Some characteristics of these limits to developmentare of interest. Perhaps the most striking is that each ofthe individual development steps took place at the treeor stand scale. Local (tree and stand) actions, whichwere taken out of context of the regional forest picture,have accumulated to produce an unacceptable regionalresult. The problem literally was created piece by piecelocally, and then recognized and felt regionally. Further,the design of the solution to problems created by devel-opment must proceed at the regional scale. The standsthat have been highgraded successively for sawlogsnow support a mixture of poor-quality stems and unus-able species. Harvest of only the usable species forpulping has resulted in an increased occupancy of landby non-economic species. Indeed, the only way left todevelop in the conventional way is by moving to a lowergrade of product, which will result in a weaker economicposition, based on the massive mechanization requiredto use the very low-quality natural product.

The result of such development has been a dramaticchange in the productive structure of the forest. Aplausible age structure for the various stands of theforest before development is shown in figure 7, alongwith the age structure for the developed forest. Con-ventional development has transformed the productivestructure into that of a young forest. Given the presentage structure, either the pressures must be relaxed toallow some time for recovery or massive assistancemust be given to the natural regrowth of the forest. Toachieve some recovery time requires a relaxation ofharvesting pressure, which implies a loss of some ofthe development gained over the last half century. Thatis not a socially acceptable alternative. Intervention instand and forest dynamics, to increase the rate of avail-ability of materials, requires major expenditure in termsof forest management. These costs are clearly charge-able to maintenance of the development. Because thesecosts were not there previously, they substantially reducethe economic value of the accumulated development inconventional economic terms. To hold its own, theprovince must give up some of its resource-based eco-nomic development to achieve resource redevelopment.

Sustainable redevelopment: design and implemen-tation—Discovering overdevelopment is not easy, anddesigning redevelopments can be downright traumatic.Recognizing incipient overdevelopment is difficult, inpart because the necessary information is rarely avail-able until after the event. During the process of non-sustainable development of an economy, data gathering

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Figure 7—Age-class structures for forests before and afterdevelopment. The predevelopment forest shows stands at allstages of development when related to the volume develop-ment curve in figure 4. The postdevelopment forest has beenharvested intensely enough to prevent stands from growingbeyond 100 years from initiation. Thus, the stands in the range100 to 160 years, which would contain the largest individualtrees, are no longer present.

with respect to the resource is centered on such featuresas the total area available for use at the time of datacollection and the total volume available for harvest atthe time of data collection. These inventories weredesigned to provide a picture of what was available onthe ground at that time. They were carried out andreported entirely in the context of the development atissue, i.e., they had an economic (or an accounting)base. Thus, the first unavoidable sign of overdevelop-ment was when one of these inventories undertaken tojustify the newest step in development showed lessresource than expected, even after the usual adjust-ments for lower utilization standards (Tweeddale 1974).

To discover why a conventional inventory showed lessmaterial than could be expected on the basis of thehistorical sequence requires that resource dynamics beexamined. Not surprisingly, not much information isavailable on dynamics because the information gather-ing had concentrated on a static inventory of materialthat had immediate economic value. The first approxi-mations of forest dynamics were therefore based onsimple assumptions (Baskerville 1976, Hall 1978). Theemphasis of studies of forest dynamics was on forecast-ing the availability of particular quantities and qualitiesof raw material in the future, rather than on what wasactually there. A major difficulty was that the problemwas perceived at the forest or regional scale, wheredata on dynamics were particularly poor. So a bridgehad to be built from the relatively data-rich tree andstand scales to the regional forest scale. This exercisein problem definition is not simple and is resisted by aconsiderable amount of rationalization. One hears that

"someone is always forecasting a timber famine and itnever comes about, and this one won't either"'; that"forecasting with models is silly because everyoneknows that with computers it's garbage in garbage out."The realists of the world will state incessantly that "whatcounts is what is." And some people are certain thattechnology will permit even lower utilization standardsor, indeed, the use of materials other than wood toproduce paper. The point here is that there is significantresistance to the recognition of overdevelopment of theindustry and the need for resource redevelopmentbecause such recognition forces change in the estab-lished ways of using the resource for economic gain.

The need for redevelopment of the forest and the forest-based industries of New Brunswick eventually reachedthe social and political agendas, despite all these formsof resistance. In the end, even the most myopic recog-nized that the local industry was competing in worldtrade and that it was inefficient with respect to thatmarket. The inefficiency in trade was traceable in largepart to a high cost of raw material, which in turn was theresult of the changed forest structure, which of coursewas the result of development. The gains in develop-ment in terms of quality of jobs and the local economywere, in the end, imperiled because of the inefficiencyof the resource in the processing part of the system.Sawmills that could not adapt technologically to thesmaller tree size closed. Major technological changestook place in pulp mills, and interest in maintainingcertain pieces of physical plant associated with pastdevelopment was reduced.

When awareness of nonsustainability finally dawned, itwas simultaneously accepted that the economy couldno longer be managed by mining the resource, so theresource must henceforth be husbanded. This recogni-tion (or cognition) by the decisive players in industryand government was a relatively sudden event, occur-ring in an interval of about five years from 1975 to 1980.The turning point came when the decision makersceased to argue about whether or not a problem existedin maintaining the flow of quality raw material. Oncethat occurred, action toward redevelopment followedrather quickly (Fellows 1980, Ker 1981).

Acceptance of a need for change came first to the deci-sive players in industry and government and not to thegeneral public. The public did, indeed, voice an earlierneed for change; however, their desires had a definiteair of unreality, in that they demanded a continuation of

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all (or even more) of the economic benefits of develop-ment in full measure, while corrective action was to betaken at no cost. Tension developed because industryand government had inadvertently obscured the evi-dence of the problems of development by the choice ofdata collected on the resource. This incredible lack ofpublic understanding of the historical linkages betweenthe benefits and the problems persists, indeed hasintensified, five years into the redevelopment program.

For the New Brunswick industries based on the forestresource, the program of redevelopment has involvedseveral closely related activities. Once the industrialcapacity clearly exceeded the ability of the forest tosustain raw material of the desired quality, the resourcehad to be reallocated to ensure even (or steady) re-source use. The reallocation of access to the resourcewas not just in terms of areas of domain as had beenprevalent in the economic development phases, butrather related to access to a particular piece of the pro-ductive structure of the forest. Allocation was to a shareof the sustainable productivity of the resource, ratherthan to the standing inventory on some particular pieceof ground at the moment of allocation (Hanusiak 1985).

Recognition of the need to allocate access to productiv-ity required an entirely new approach to the acquisitionof information on the productive state of the forest. Newsurveys of the forest were needed that sought to char-acterize the resource in terms of its dynamic structure,rather than in terms of a static storehouse of raw mate-rial. These new surveys required major expenditure interms of a new form of aerial photography for the prov-ince, with special tests of methods of photointerpretationto discover the best ways to capture information on thestage of development for each stand. Methods forhandling this geographic information had to be developed(Erdle and Jordan 1984). Not surprisingly, this task hasproved to be complex, and the first approximation ofdata acquisition on forest dynamics is just a first step.

A major characteristic of the recognition of the need forredevelopment is the appearance of concern with fore-casting future development on the regional forest scale.During the period of development, interest in the futurerarely extended beyond the current-year harvest, and atbest to a five-year harvest plan. Those facing the realityof redevelopment have suddenly acquired time horizonsof 40 to 50 years. The need to forecast wood availabilityby amount, quality, location, and timing has resulted inthe development of a large array of models that attempt

to mimic dynamics at the stand and forest scales. Thesemodels were very simple at first, but are quickly devel-oping as more information on dynamics becomes avail-able, and as the necessity for forecasting becomesmore clear. To manage a forest, explicit forecasts mustbe made of the availability of raw material in terms ofquantity, quality, location, and time for a variety of pat-terns of intervention (such as harvesting, planting, andthinning). The forecasting tools were developed andaccepted at a surprising rate. Approaches that wererejected as unnecessary, or unrealistic, five years agoare now embraced and ardently developed to improvetheir reliability.

The most traumatic element of redevelopment hasbeen the need to actually design and implement man-agement interventions. During the earlier period ofdevelopment, much experimental work with silviculturewas done, along with a certain amount of what mightbe termed the anecdotal practice of silviculture. All ofthis effort was characterized by an approach at thelocal or stand scale. The managers would examine astand and, based only on what they saw at the localscale, determine the "best" silviculture action to betaken. Through this approach, some considerableexperience had evolved with such tools as planting,precommercial thinning, and fertilization. With accep-tance of the need for redevelopment, however, theselocal silviculture actions clearly had to be determined inthe context of regional forest dynamics. Given that theharvest that can be taken is limited and that moneyavailable for silviculture also is limited, it is crucial thatforestry actions be taken in the right places, in the rightamount, and at the right time so that the developmentof the whole forest is regulated in the manner necessaryto reach a goal of true resource development (or ofeconomic redevelopment). Thus, the focus of interven-tion design has moved from the stand to the forestscale (Hall 1981). The question is no longer what canbe done at this particular place but rather "what set oflocal actions taken in what places in the whole forest,and at what times, will cause the regional forest totransform and grow towards a particular chosen goal?"For a generation of managers, accustomed to makinglocal stand decisions out of context of any regionalforest picture, the necessity to place their actions in thisregional context is proving difficult. A major problemhere is that virtually all of the decision aids that havebeen developed in past decades are aimed at the standor local scale, rather than at the larger scales. That is,economic decision-analysis methods assumed that,

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whenever management began, it would be carried outby a series of stand-by-stand local decisions. Majorefforts are now underway to develop decision aids thatplace local actions in the regional context of forestdynamics.

Choosing a plan of management interventions for rede-velopment is a complex matter. To be realistic, the planmust recognize that implementation of redevelopmentwill be local in nature (just as all of the actions of devel-opment were local in nature), but that these local inter-ventions must be consistent with a regional pattern ofresource development (Hall 1981). Management plan-ning becomes an orchestration of local events to achievea regional goal—what will be done, to what extent it willbe done, when, and where—in order that a regionalpattern of development, over time, is achieved. More-over, management must address the real issues of whopays for this management effort and who carries it out.

Making all this happen on the ground is crucial. Imple-menting the plan as it is drawn up and providing aregular audit of performance of the forest are essentialsteps. This problem is unique to the stage of redevel-opment because it was not necessary during develop-ment to worry about matching management platitudeswith what was actually happening on the ground. Duringredevelopment, however, it is essential, for instance,that the actual harvest be taken in the same manner asused in the forecasts for management design. This needin turn requires a high degree of geographic control(Erdle and Jordan 1984). If, in the actual on-the-groundimplementation of the harvest schedule, the "oldestfirst" rule is not followed and any younger stands areharvested because of local economic advantage, thensome older stands escape harvest and will decay andbecome nonavailable for harvest. The net effect of thisdeviation of the real harvest schedule from the plannedschedule is a reduction in the actual sustainable har-vest. That is, in management, and particularly in man-agement for redevelopment, the way things are doneon the ground must be the same as the way thingswere done in the calculations determining sustainability.If the on-the-ground rules as determined in the plancannot be implemented, then the plan must bechanged to show an appropriately lower, sustainablerate of harvest. This requirement for making realitymatch the plans is perhaps the major source of tensionin redevelopment (Hanusiak 1985).

The Fisheries of the Great Lakes

The setting and a historical sketch—The GreatLakes lie at the southern edge of the ancient LaurentianShield where they straddle the Canada-US, border(fig. 1). Lake Superior is the largest and deepest lake,farthest upstream, and apparently created by tectonicevents. The other four lakes were formed, or at leastdeepened and enlarged, by the continental glaciation ofgeologically recent times. The current ecological realityof the Great Lakes Basin is the result of some 10 millen-nia of the natural processes of postglacial successionand some two centuries of the effects of people ofWestern cultures.

Exploitive human uses, direct but indirect, have intensi-fied at something like an exponential rate until about adecade ago; today, the overall effect may no longer beintensifying, but it remains, on balance, high. The GreatLakes are downwind of the industrialized Ohio Valley,from which airborne pollutants are often carried longdistances. In contrast to the size of the area from whichpollutants are transported through the atmosphere intothe Great Lakes, the watershed of the Basin is smallcompared to the surface of the water, with no largerivers flowing into these lakes from the surroundinglandscapes; hence the lakes are not rapidly flushed.Many of the small rivers and nearshore areas of thelakes are not as severely degraded as they were twodecades ago. (The Cuyahoga River flowing into LakeErie is no longer a fire hazard!)

Over 35 million people now dwell in the Basin. Mostlive in large urban concentrations with imperfect sewer-age and sewage treatment systems, though most areless imperfect than they were a decade ago. Many ofthe residents work in industries that pollute because ofrather obsolescent capital stock erected at a time ofgreat interest in the nonrenewable resources of theBasin (iron, coal, and limestone) and of little concernfor those resources that were potentially renewable atsustained rates. Major uses (including abuses) of theGreat Lakes have been separated into about 20 classes,of which fishing is but one (Francis et al.1979).

By about 1930, the people of the dozen or so largestcities in the Great Lakes Basin had turned their backsto the lake shores and coastal waters that had becomedegraded; apparently the degradation was taken to bean unfortunate but necessary sacrifice to industrial-economic progress. Cities that thrived had dirty air, foul

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waters, and some urban slums. Today, however, thesituation has changed, and people and institutions inthe Great Lakes region are seriously searching for anew basis for the regional economy. In fact, the watersof the Great Lakes, and in particular the coastal waters,are now seen as a great natural resource, at least iftheir quality can be improved and then maintained.Somehow, an ecologically rehabilitated aquatic ecosys-tem is expected to contribute directly and also catalyti-cally to the postindustrial redevelopment of the region(Thurow et al.1984). Rehabilitation of the fish, togetherwith restoration of high water quality, are beginning tobe linked by the public to the goal of sustainable rede-velopment of the whole Basin's economy. It is comingto be accepted that the state of the fish community is avalid integrative indicator of ecosystem quality (Ryderand Edwards 1984) and—somewhat more distantly—of the regional quality of life for humans. Some evensuggest that the Basin provides the single best indica-tor of the state of biospheric husbandry as practiced inindustrialized North America. The lake trout in theGreat Lakes indicate what the white pine indicates inNew Brunswick.

The historical sequence related to highgrading in forestryhas a close counterpart in fisheries of the Great Lakes.In fisheries, the process is sometimes termed "fishing-up," whether among size of quality classes within astock or species (Ricker 1961), among locales within anecosystem or region (Regier and Loftus 1972), or amongspecies within an entire fish association (Regier 1973,1979). By about 1940, the most preferred species in theGreat Lakes were exploited by the fisheries to the pointof a risk of overexploitation, if not, in fact, beyond thepoint of overexploitation (see figs. 8 and 9).

Throughout the process of fishing-up (or progressivehighgrading), the enterprising fishers also progressivelyadded value to their products through salting, refrigera-tion, freezing, filleting, smoking, precooking, and so on.An approximate parallel to the plywood and chipboardproducts may be canned fish and (as yet experimental)fish sausages. Something comparable to the pulp andpaper stage of the lumbering industry has not yetemerged in the Great Lakes, but it has appeared else-where with new Japanese technology to produce surimiproducts (such as artificial scallops and crab legs) fromthe macerated flesh of low-valued finfish species. Seri-ous plans have been drafted to bring this surimi tech-nology into the Great Lakes fisheries.

Figure 8—Value to fishers (1970 U.S. prices) of a kilogram offish whole weight as a function of the average size of a species atsexual maturation (log scale) (Regier 1973).

Before 1940-55, the fish association of the Great Lakeswas strongly and adversely affected ecologically by fourstresses caused by people: fishing, blocking of streamsby dams, loading of putrescible organic waters intostreams and estuaries, and physical destruction ofwetlands. During 1940-55, these four stresses werejoined, and often superseded in local intensity, by fouradditional stresses: cultural eutrophication, industrialpollution, pesticides and other hazardous chemicals,and expansion of low-valued or harmful exotic fishspecies, such as the alewife and the sea lamprey. Theselatter four stresses had appeared locally long before1940, but it was only then that their effects came to beregionally pervasive in many parts of the lakes. Otherstresses of various kinds were also acting (Francisetal. 1979) and sometimes intensifying, but they mustbe set aside as miscellaneous in this short account.

The year 1955 may be taken as the beginning of grow-ing public cognition that the Great Lakes, as parts of asystem, were severely debased. In general, the lowerthe lake in the drainage system, the more thoroughly itwas debased. The total binational cost of all the relevantstudies and corrective efforts between 1955 and 1985is unaccounted, but might well exceed $10 billion (1985U.S. dollars). Most of the scientific efforts to understandthis problem and almost all practical efforts to do some-thing about it before 1985 were focused on locales andhave attempted to deal with the problem one factor(even one chemical) or one species at a time.

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Figure 9—Lake Erie fish landings, by selected taxa, in kilograms.

At about this point in our historical sketch, conventionwould dictate that an account be given of the structuresand processes of the governance of these binationalGreat Lakes, with a strong emphasis on the role of theInternational Joint Commission (Willoughby 1979). Fora study of sustainable redevelopment of the biosphere,we do need eventually to deal in depth with the gover-nance institutions. Suffice it here to say that no govern-ment agency—binational, federal, provincial, or state—has asserted or been given a mandate for leadershipwith respect to an integrated program of sustainableredevelopment that is now so necessary. No govern-ment agency has sufficient responsibility or authority to

act locally and to think regionally in an integrated, eco-systemic way. Clearly the "think regionally" part of theaphorism is made more difficult to achieve in thismulticity, multijurisdiction, binational situation; however,intergovernmental and broader networks are evolvingthat are beginning to serve this function. Within the (asyet) piecemeal efforts to correct the causes of thedegradation of the Great Lakes are many detailed differ-ences in the politics and practices of different jurisdic-tional, governmental, and intergovernmental entities. Butthese differences do not obscure the basic unity withinthe sequence of exploitive development of the twocenturies of domination of the Great Lakes by Europeans

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and their descendants. Time lags may occur betweenjurisdictions, different priorities, internal inconsistencies,and so on, that can be very annoying, but the historicaldegradative trends and current corrective efforts aresufficiently similar that they can all be subsumed underthe generalized concepts of exploitive development andsustainable redevelopment.

Exploitive development—We now examine some ofthe main ecological phenomena related to exploitivedevelopment of the Great Lakes, and thus also relatedto sustainable redevelopment. Francis et al. (1979)have sketched some of the main effects on the fishassociation (and on other highly valued, sensitive eco-logical subsystems) of the many stresses operating inthe Great Lakes. This approach has been fine tuned tothe very degraded Green Bay (Harris et al. 1982) andto the relatively well-conserved Long Point with its bays(Francis et al. 1985). The disheartening realization hasemerged that most, if not all, of these stresses, actingsingly or jointly and to excess, entrain an ecologicalsyndrome of degradation or debasement (Rapport et a!.1985).

Some features of this syndrome, as it relates especiallyto fish, have been sketched as follows (Paloheimo andRegier 1982, Regier and Grima 1984):

• The major ecological stresses associated with humanuses as conventionally practiced often act synergisti-cally within the ecosystem so as to exacerbate eachother's adverse ecological effects; they seldom actantagonistically so as to cancel out adverse effects.

• The stresses separately and jointly act to alter thefish association from one that is dominated by largefish, usually associated with the lake bottom and lakeedge, to one characterized by small, short-lived, mid-water species. A similar change happens with respectto vegetation; firm-rooted aquatic plants originallynearshore are supplanted by dense suspensions ofopen-water (pelagic) plankton algae. Further, theassociation of relatively large benthic invertebrates onthe bottom (such as mussels and crayfish) is sup-planted by small burrowing insects and worms (suchas midge larvae and sludge worms). Broadly similarchanges occur in the flora and fauna of the wetlandsand near-shore areas bordering these waters.

• With the above changes, an increased variability inabundance of particular species occurs from year toyear, but especially in landings of different fish species

by anglers and commercial fishers. Fluctuations arealso more pronounced in the species associations ofwetland, benthic, and pelagic areas.

• The shift from large organisms to small organisms isnot accompanied by a major increase in the totalstanding biomass of living material, but it is accom-panied by a reduction in the production of the mostpreferred species.

• In the offshore pelagic region, a new fish association—mostly of exotic species—may be created in whichthe small fish, such as alewife and smelt, may serveas a food resource to large predatory fish, such assalmon, which, however, must be maintained throughthe capital-intensive technology of fish hatcheries.

• Market and sport value per unit of biomass are gen-erally much lower with small mid-water fish speciesthan with large bottom species, and processing costsare higher. Similarly, the aesthetic value to recreation-ists of the rooted plants nearshore is higher than aturbid mixture of suspended algae and pollutants.

• The effect on fisheries, in the absence of the put,grow, and take stocking of hatchery-reared predators,is that nearshore, labor-intensive specialized fisheries(sport and commercial) tend to disappear, thoughhighly mechanized, capital-intensive offshore enter-prises may persist, if the combined stresses do notbecome excessive and if the fish are not so contami-nated as to become a health threat for those who eatthem. Yachts may quickly sail from polluted marinasthrough the foul coastal water to the less-offensiveoffshore waters. Beaches are posted as hazardous tohealth.

• The combined effect is one of debasement and de-stabilization of the system of the natural environmentand its indigenous renewable resources with respectto the features of greatest value to people.

Rapport et al. (1981) have termed the above list a"general stress syndrome" and have inferred that sucha syndrome may be observed in terrestrial as well asaquatic ecosystems that are subjected to the stressestypical of conventional exploitive development (Rapportet al. 1985). Indeed, we see analogs for each of theabove symptoms in the New Brunswick forest example.Discovery of this syndrome has rendered obsolete anygeneral policy of managing human uses of ecosystemsas though they were ecologically independent. Recallthe point made in the preceding section about forests:conventional development acted destructively on the

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underlying natural processes that had generated high-value resources. Some stress and consequent distur-bance of the natural generative processes are inevitablewhen humans intervene, but the extreme, combineddestructiveness of the various abuses related to exploit-ive development was a result of deeply misguidedpolicies and practices, which may have made contem-porary sense, but which often involved self-imposedignorance. Sustainable redevelopment must seek tocooperate more closely with the natural processes thatyield resources of high value.

Sustainable redevelopment: design and implemen-tation—Attempts to arrest and reverse the degradationof parts of the Great Lakes ecosystem, including itsfisheries, were begun over a century ago. Gross pollu-tion with organic matter such as sawdust and offal wascontained, in part. Destructive fishery practices wereoutlawed, such as dynamiting or setting nets acrossstreams used for spawning. Fishways were mademandatory for dams, but the fishways were seldomeffective. With the advent of steam and electrical power,many of the small dams across tributaries of the GreatLakes fell into disuse and were washed away. In largerivers, in this region and elsewhere, bigger and betterdams were constructed, often without functional fishways.

Several factors were responsible for the escalation ofthe degradative practices—an escalation that remaineduncontained until very recently. These factors, whichmust be reformed in a design for redevelopment, were:

• An unstated policy, shared binationally, that degrad-ative abuses be addressed only after some particu-larly abused groups of the public raised a great clamor.Thus, time lags were common, seldom less than adecade, between the experts' and abused people'sawareness of degradation and some beginnings ofcorrective action, almost always initiated slowly bythe government. This problem was not as severe withthe New Brunswick forests, perhaps because of thelower population density and the smaller number ofnonconsumptive users. Also in New Brunswick, amore direct feedback imperiled the economic struc-ture, which may have attracted the attention of busi-ness and bureaucracy sooner than in areas wherethe links are less direct, as with dirty water in theGreat Lakes.

• Such corrective actions as were taken were designedso as not to impede exploitive development to aserious degree, as was also true in New Brunswick.

Corrective actions were seldom fully effective, some-times hardly effective at all, and sometimes theyredirected the problem to other parts of the ecosystem.

• An unbroken tempo appeared in the advent of newuser groups with direct and indirect demands onthese ecosystems. The feasibility (or likelihood) thatnew users were likely to exacerbate the environmen-tal impacts of existing users was generally ignored.

• The spatial and temporal scales of the degradativeimpact of various user groups tended to increase withtechnological advances related to those uses, butmay have become progressively less apparent to thelaypersons, even the most observant—such as withacid rain, atmospherically transported toxic contami-nants, leaching from landfill sites, consumptive use ofwater, and so on. The related effects are not readilyseen until researchers present generalizations andabstractions of regional impacts.

• Corrective action usually consisted of an attempt toreduce the extent and intensity of the abuse with littleeffort at mitigation or at rehabilitative intervention(ecosystem therapy) to foster recovery processesconsistent with the natural healing processes. Aconventional engineering approach tends to move aproblem to a different place or time. It does not ap-preciate that biological systems have a memory orimprint of past actions—that just stopping an abusedoes not necessarily lead to self-correction. Correc-tive intervention is often required.

The lag between public awareness of a serious problemand public perception of an improvement after correctiveaction is now about a quarter of a century. The aggre-gated rate of ecosystemic degradation in the GreatLakes may have peaked (or ecosystem quality mayhave "bottomed out") in the early 1980s—or it may notyet have done so. Problems with contaminants leachingfrom landfill sites, from acids and toxic materials trans-ported atmospherically, and from consumptive use ofwater appear to be waxing, while those caused by acidrain, toxic fallouts, nutrient loading, and exploitive fishingare waning. Whether or not the aggregated rate haspeaked, the evidence does indicate that the rate ofdegradation has been slowed.

The five policy factors sketched above appear to applyto both our cases of regional fishery and regional forestrydevelopment. As a policy, sustainable redevelopmentmust establish a framework that focuses the design of

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corrective actions on these factors. At the regionalscale, focused discussion on how to correct them, as asystemic set, has been initiated only recently.

A mandate for a binational policy of sustainable redevel-opment for the Great Lakes, with some managementresponsibility at the binational scale, may be inferredfrom a study of several binational agreements in thecontext of what we now know about the ecologicaleffects of uses and their interrelations within the GreatLakes ecosystem. These agreements include:

• The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, served by theInternational Joint Commission (IJC).

• The Migratory Birds Convention (MBC) of 1917,served by an intergovernmental committee.

• The Great Lakes Fishery Convention (GLFC) of 1954,served by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

• The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements of 1972and 1978, overseen by the IJC.

Crucial gaps remained in 1985 that had not been suffi-ciently addressed by then:

• An agreement on long-range transport of atmosphericpollutants, with its acid rain, toxic fallout, and smog-related aerosols.

• An agreement on consumptive use, extra-Basindiversion of water, or both.

• An agreement with authority to take specified, localcontrol actions in a regional control context, i.e., onlevels and flows.

Human practices related to the following ecologicalfeatures are being managed—in a weak sense of theword—under the four rather general agreementssketched above: water levels, water flows, water qual-ity, and local air quality (IJC); fish quality and quantity,and the predaceous exotic lamprey (GLFC); and water-fowl, shorebirds, and, by implication, the wetlands (MBC).Within an ecosystem context, uses of most of thesefeatures obviously cannot be managed effectively in theabsence of complementary management of some otherfeatures. For example, the interrelationships betweenwater quality, fish quality and quantity, the sea lamprey,fish-eating shorebirds, and wetlands as nursery areasfor fish and birds is well documented in the scientificliterature. Those who have a responsibility for manage-ment must have the full perspective.

An ecosystem approach has been endorsed by the twonational parties to these agreements, as well as byvarious other levels of government. With respect towater quality, the ecosystem approach has been en-dorsed formally at the regional or Basin scale in the1978 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and explic-itly, though less formally, at both the Basin and lakescales, as the policy of the Great Lakes Fishery Com-mission. This ecosystem approach is beginning to beinterpreted in the sense of what we have termed Basin-wide sustainable redevelopment (Research AdvisoryBoard and International Joint Commission 1978, Inter-national Joint Commission 1982, Lee et al. 1982). Asyet, no specific codification of the meaning of the eco-system approach has been accepted widely. Ecosys-tem understanding of sublake ecosystems is quiteadvanced (Harris et al.1982, Francis et al.1985) com-pared with that of lake ecosystems or of the entireBasin ecosystem. In the context of "think regionally, actlocally," few people have yet learned to think regionally,probably because it requires that personal (economic)issues be subsumed in a larger community context.That is, we live in and see the local context, but theregional context must be some sort of abstraction thatcannot be seen or felt, but can only be comprehended.

Public and political commitment, such as it is, to reversethe degradation of the Great Lakes has come at a timeof growing awareness that major parts of the old indus-trial base of the Great Lakes region will likely wane inabsolute terms. Examples are the steel and automobileindustries and related waterborne transportation services.Urban growth has slackened and some local jurisdic-tions have experienced net reductions in human popu-lation. Concern is great that the region not be relegatedto a hinterland of the American Sun Belt (disparaginglycalled the Parched Belt) to which some of the seemingabundance of fresh water in the Great Lakes might bediverted. How a thriving regional modern economymight receive major benefits from the sustainable rede-velopment of the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem is notclear, though many opinion leaders believe that theGreat Lakes themselves are the key to such redevelop-ment. Obviously, the choice of indicators of redevelop-ment is crucial. "Think regionally, act locally" does notcome easily with respect to a Basin ecosystem that isfractured into many jurisdictions and subject to manyincompatible uses. Somehow the people of the Basinmust together choose a future, and make a long-termcommitment to its realization, rather than just passivelywait for something better to come along.

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Attempts to achieve sustainable redevelopment of thefishery depend on the progress of reform with the fish-ery and also on rehabilitation of the habitat of the fish,the environment. In a properly managed fishery in aproperly managed freshwater ecosystem (of the GreatLakes type), the fish association is dominated by native,self-reproducing, highly valued, bottom-oriented (benthic)species that achieve large size and old age in the natu-ral state. Recall that, by 1955, the fish association waswell on its way to an inversion, toward dominance byexotic, low-valued, mid-water (pelagic) species thatremain small and die relatively young; by 1960, theinversion or debasement was almost complete. Themain stresses responsible were excessive fishing of thepreferred species (highgrading), invasion by the sealamprey which prefers fish quite similar to those thatpeople like, invasion or introduction of small pelagic fishthat thrive in enriched waters, eutrophication throughenrichment, pollution of spawning streams, and a mis-cellany of additional causes.

Corrective local measures began to show promise inthe early 1960s. These local measures have generatedlocal responses, but as yet only limited, mostly informalcoordination has happened at the regional Basin scale.These measures include:

• Direct control of the sea lamprey through barriers andselective chemical lampricides, with the sterile maletechnique due for field testing.

• Reform of fishing practices to permit a recovery ofpreferred species; in some jurisdictions, commercialfishing was limited in favor of sport fishing, whichexerts less intense fishing pressure on the valuedspecies.

• Hatchery rearing and stocking of native species, suchas the lake trout, in an attempt to reestablish self-reproducing stocks where they had been extinguishedin recent decades.

• Hatchery rearing and stocking of non-native specieson a put, grow, and take basis, especially salmonidsof various species, to suppress the vast stocks ofsmall pelagic species and to supply a highly valuedsport fishery.

• Environmental programs for reducing the loadings ofphosphates to reverse eutrophication and to fosteroligotrophication, which favors the valued nativespecies.

• Ecological rehabilitation of some streams that flowinto the Great Lakes to provide productive spawningand nursery areas, especially for large, native andsome non-native salmonids.

• Banning some persistent pesticides, such as DDT,which were washed into the lakes and transportedand deposited onto the lakes by atmospheric pro-cesses, and then interfered with normal developmentof young fish and other creatures.

By 1984, all the lakes showed signs that the fish asso-ciations were beginning to revert to a state of domi-nance by large benthic species originally native to thelakes. How quickly or how far this process will go islargely a function of what people will do next with theGreat Lakes Basin ecosystem, and particularly dependson how we orchestrate our more local endeavors withinthe Basin context.

The fact that these preferred native species are sodependent on a healthy aquatic ecosystem has stimu-lated interest in proposals to use some of them as"indicators of ecosystem quality" (Ryder and Edwards1984). A deep oligotrophic ecosystem should supportthriving stocks of lake trout, a shallower mesotrophicpart of the system should support walleye and yellowperch, and a nearshore part of the system should sup-port black bass and pike. Aquatic systems dominatedby such species are likely to provide water of a qualitysuitable for domestic use after minimal treatment, to beproductive of fish species that are highly valued bysport and commercial fishers, to be healthy for thecontact recreation so important in heavily urbanizedareas, to be attractive for recreational boating andnature study, and to be naturally self-regulatory to animportant degree if all the uses are practiced in a man-ner that is well informed in the context of sustainableredevelopment. Sustainability must be defined accord-ing to type, intensity, and frequency of use—subject toecosystemic maxims defined locally and regionally.

Sustainable Redevelopment of Regional NaturalResource Systems

Degradation and recovery in general—Innis (1938),Rea (1976), and others have exposed some far-reachinggeneral parallels in the way various renewable resourceswere exploited in Canada and the United States duringthe past two centuries for the purpose of what is nowtermed economic development. Parallels can be tracedin the histories of the exploitation of the New Brunswick

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forests and of the Great Lakes fisheries, though theseparallels may not be as close as between New Bruns-wick fisheries in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and NewBrunswick forests, or as between Great Lakes fisheriesand Great Lakes forests (Flader 1983).

The breakdown of ecosystems, as ecosystems, underhuman influences and their recovery after relaxation ormitigation of those influences is attracting increasingattention (Holdgate and Woodman 1978, Francis et al.1979, Cairns 1980, Barrett and Rosenburg 1981). Withrespect to ecosystem organization in a quite generalsense, the closest biotic counterparts in ecosystemslike the Great Lakes and the dominant species of treesin a natural forest like that of eastern Canada may bethe dominant, large, relatively sedentary species of fish(Regier 1972). In the pristine forests of eastern Canadatwo centuries ago, as in the pristine Great Lakes, muchof the total living biomass was contained within suchdominant species. Elton's energy pyramid of trophicrelations is sometimes incorrectly taken as indicativeof biomass proportions in natural biotic associationsof lakes, such as the Great Lakes. In natural lakes, theplant species, both the macrophytes and the phyto-plankton, have a quick turnover, but some individualsof the large species of terminal consumers and preda-tors survive for decades, such as lake trout and lakewhitefish, and some up to perhaps a century, such assturgeon and snapping turtles. These relative rates(and corresponding biomass proportions) are reversedin forests between, say, white pine and insectivorousbirds. Note that the turnover rates of the economicallymost-valued components are quite slow in each case,and hence recovery after abuse stops will also be slowin each case.

Incidentally, in natural grasslands and wetlands therelative biomass of producers versus consumers pluspredators may not be as strongly skewed as in forestsor lakes. Grasslands and wetlands appear to be moreat the mercy of climate and natural fire with "wipe out"events more frequent and less localized than in eitherforests or lakes. Neither the plants nor animals tend togrow very large or old in grasslands and wetlands.Large animal species of the forest tend to exploit grass-lands and wetlands for forage, and large animal speciesof the lakes tend to use wetlands for spawning andnursery areas. Rapport et al. (1985) have shown thatthe terrestrial and aquatic degradation syndromescaused by exploitive developments of many kinds are,in some ways, similar ecologically. The degradation

syndrome may be seen as a pathological reversal ofthe usual natural developmental, successional, andmorphogenetic processes that have been characterizedby von Bertalanffy (Davidson 1983) as follows:

Bertalanffy's model of hierarchical order wasfurnished by him with four related concepts: Aslife ascends the ladder of complexity, there isprogressive integration in which the parts becomemore dependent on the whole, and progressivedifferentiation, in which the parts become morespecialized. In consequence the [system] exhib-its a wider repertoire of [functional] behavior. Butthis is paid for by progressive mechanization,which is the limiting of the parts to a single func-tion, and progressive centralization in whichthere emerge leading parts that dominate thebehavior of the system.

The science of surprise and the practice of adaptiveenvironmental management of C.S. Holling and hiscolleagues (Holling 1978, 1986; Regier 1985) mayrelate in the first instance to both the normal, naturalmorphogenetic sequence and the human-causedexploitive degradative sequences, in a general systemscontext. For example, forest resource degradation is asurprise because we were not collecting data on forestdevelopment and degradation—but if proper data hadbeen gathered, such a surprise would not have occurredor would have been less serious. One of the implicationsof Holling's ideas is that ecological sequences havediscontinuities that may involve emergent behavior inthe natural morphogenetic sequence and, presumably,may involve complementary submergent behavior inthe human-caused degradation sequence. Such con-cepts can be helpful in comprehending the generalconsequences of opportunistic exploitation and fordesigning rehabilitative husbandry in a policy of sustain-able redevelopment.

Mobilization of public and political support for redevel-opment is hindered by a variety of incorrect mythsabout natural processes and characteristics of ecosys-tems, such as the following:

• Large species tend to be inefficient producers ofresources and should be sacrificed in favor of smallerspecies with quicker turnover rates. This approachignores the self-regulatory roles of large species thatfavor other valued features of these ecosystems.It also plays down the difference in per-unit value,with economic and aesthetic values of some of the

37

dominant species high in comparison to most of thesmall species. In any case, the relative productivity ofharvestable smaller species in aggregate is not likelyto achieve twice that of harvestable larger species,and the difference in per-unit net values are likely tobe greater than twofold, in inverse proportion to therate of production.

• Natural succession of lakes involves eutrophicationand thus the preferred species of fish that thrive inless fertile waters are passing phenomena anyway.This assumption is basically incorrect in that internalecosystemic processes in lakes are generally oligo-trophic, but eutrophication is generally caused byexternal processes, such as atmospheric loading withvolcanic ash or by human loading of nutrients into thelakes, which override the natural processes thatregulate nutrient concentrations.

• As forests age, their susceptibility to natural forestfires, blow downs, and insect pest outbreaks increasesgreatly. A natural forest tends to be a rather intricatemosaic of somewhat different associations, all atsomewhat different stages of succession, and conse-quently not at all at great risk from natural causes.

General features of sustainable redevelopment—Let us look again at the concept of sustainable redevel-opment. One can argue that the pulp and paper industryhas been sustained and expanded in New Brunswick,but such sustainability was achieved only by virtue ofdrastically reducing the standards for raw material. Thischange has driven up the cost of raw material becausethe smaller material is more costly to harvest and handle(fig. 10). To be meaningful, the word sustainability mustbe accompanied by definitions of quantity, quality, time,and location. Does the conventional development of awhite pine industry for 50 years before it runs out ofsuitable resources constitute sustainability? Does theexistence of pulp mills for 50 years constitute sustainabil-ity? Is development still considered sustainable when itresults in depreciation of the resource? How is quality ofthe resource to be specified, in that the quality of raw ma-terial determines the quality of the associated industry?

Where the specifications for sustainability include quan-tity, quality, location, and time, one need expect relativelyfew resource problems with development. In the absenceof such specifications, development inevitably wandersinto trouble. Development in our society has meant quickand short-term economic benefit, with the higher theinterest rate, the shorter the time horizon. Development

Figure 10—The relation of raw material value (pulpwood,sawlogs) and cost of logging (pulp or logs) to the averagediameter of trees in a stand. Normally, market pressures limitpulpwood to smaller trees, and larger trees are processed forsawlogs. The cost of logging strongly depends on tree size butis little influenced by the intended raw material.

does not refer to the resource, all brave words at pulpmill or fish plant dedications to the contrary! Frequently,plans for sustainable development include all the high-est platitudes with respect to resource management thatone could hope to see, but it is rare to see any mech-anism that forces implementation of these fine ideals.

Two characteristics of redevelopment need emphasis.The first is that the transition from development to rede-velopment (or from exploitation to husbandry) necessarilyproduces substantial tension. Tension develops betweenindustry (whether forestry or fishery), government, andthe public, and the tension is heightened by a mutuallack of trust among the players. Industry believes thatneither the government nor the public understand theintensity of the world-scale competition in which it is en-gaged. Government does not trust industry to maintainthe necessary long-term horizon for a redevelopmentprogram, and fears that the public may not understandthat redevelopment will necessarily cost a temporaryreduction in the flow of benefits from the resource. Thepublic does not trust either industry or government, whoare seen to be creators of the problem and henceunlikely candidates to design and execute a solution.None of these players has a very good understandingof the relation between local actions and regional goals,and consequently they each occasionally produce ratherunrealistic action proposals. For example, the publichas been so long taught that a tree should be plantedfor every one cut, or a fish stocked for each harvested,that the focus on local action is almost exclusive. Publicoutcry during the design of redevelopment has centeredon local events, with the most naive notions about what

38

the forest or lake system in the regional sense will do iftheir local actions are followed and with no sense of theorchestration of these local actions. A most counterpro-ductive feature of this tension is the desire of somemembers of all parties to demonstrate that it is someother "they" who are to blame. In fact all three—industry,government, and the public—applauded and shared inthe development that has caused the problem.

The second characteristic of redevelopment worth not-ing has to do with the geographic reality of planning thecontext of acting locally while thinking regionally (or glo-bally). Many may talk about managing a resource and,indeed, about specific management actions, withoutever specifying the actual location of these actions oreven recognizing the need for such specification. Somemay actually plan resource management without deal-ing with the regional context of local actions, althoughescaping the implications of context is impossible. Thatis, a plan that states that 5000 ha will be planted everyyear, 2000 ha precommercially thinned, and 3000 haharvested, implies that someone knows precisely whereeach of these activity sums will be accumulated. (Asimilar statement applies to stocking lake trout in theLakes.) When a management plan is implemented onthe ground or in the water, however, explicit geographicreference in a regional context is inescapable and con-sequently few real redevelopers exist. Any plan requiresimplementing a series of local actions, which togethercumulate to the desired regional effect. If the plan doesnot specify the geographic pattern of these local events,then the plan cannot be implemented. This statement isperhaps the greatest learning experience of the redevel-opment phase.

So important is geographic control to implementingmanagement that, in the historical absence of a techni-cal capability for geographic control, exploitation wasall that was possible. Certainly, if relating the parts of ageographically dispersed system in terms of both attri-butes and location is impossible, only the broadest formof management control can be done. Fortunately, suchlimitations are being rapidly erased by computerizedmapping systems embodying relational data bases(Erdle and Jordan 1984). For the first time, these sys-tems allow the planner not only to design a regionalresource redevelopment strategy, but also to identifyreadily the geographic locations where particular tacticalactions must be taken to accomplish the regional strat-egy. In systems where broad geographic extent adds toboth the cost and complexity of resource exploitation

and to the cost and complexity of resource management,the ability to analyze the same resource data at appro-priate scales for strategic and tactical designs is a majortechnological breakthrough. Characteristically, the ex-ploitation nterests have been as aggressive as manage-ment interests in implementing these expensive systems;this is true for the New Brunswick forestry example, butnot for Great Lakes fisheries. In resources with manyusers and many managers with disparate responsibility,authority, or both, a common geographic data base iscrucial for avoiding antagonistic strategies and permit-ting coherent management design.

Management has been much talked about in the pastand, indeed, a certain amount about planning as well,but little of the discussion has come to grips with thefact that to make a plan happen on the ground and inthe water, in the forest and lakes where it really counts,management plans must specify where the local eventswill take place to achieve a specified regional effect.What separates real management (or husbandry) fromthose highest platitudes of development is the specifica-tion of geographic control of actions in the sense of: dothis, at this time, to cause this to happen at this place inthe future, so that the whole forest or lake ecosystemwill develop along this desired pattern. Management,then, is acting locally while thinking regionally.

Local and regional decision making—In NorthAmerica, the nature of rights to the direct use of arenewable resource and to the indirect use of the habi-tat that generates the renewable resource is very com-plex (Regier and Grima 1984, 1985). The heuristicschema in figure 11 may aid understanding of rightsfrom the perspective of how these rights are exercisedby the putative owners of them, and of how societyadministers the allocation and supervises the exerciseof the rights.

A right to determine the use of a designated part of arenewable resource, its habitat, or both may be heldexclusively by designated individuals or by duly consti-tuted groups of individuals, or may be shared nonexclu-sively with others. From a complementary but orthogonalperspective, such rights may be transferred or exchangedbetween individuals or groups largely at their own initia-tive, or they may not be transferable (Dales 1975).

Eight different combinations of these two criteria areshown (fig. 11). The four outer corners are rathersharply defined, hard or formal manifestations of thefour possible combinations, and the four inner corners

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Figure 11—A perspective, expanded from a scheme by Dales (1975), on the variety of ways in which rights to theuse of fish and similar resources are managed in North American Society. In the four inside characterizations, theexclusivity and transferablilty of user rights are satisfied in a practical manner. User rights in these four insidetypes are less sharply defined than those in the four corners. The schema may be viewed to have a soft core witha more sharply defined hard shell or edge.

are less clearly defined, soft or informal counterparts ofthe outer set. Note that exercise of an illegitimate righthas been included, in part to complete the schema, butalso to take note of the fact that such illegal actions arenot uncommon and do affect the exercise, by others, oftheir legitimate rights.

Regier and Grima (1985) have suggested that the setof four hard elements, where they are condoned inpractice by society, may become organized into a kindof competitively interdependent complex. In contrast,

the soft elements may develop into a more mutualinterdependent complex. Where a particular complex isdominant, the interdependent process may link with therelevant social mores to effect a kind of positive feed-back reinforcement of the dominance—for example,free enterprise and exploitation.

In some very general way, the interdependent hard setmay be used by the forces that dominate conventionalexploitive development, especially as imposed from ametropolis onto a hinterland. This use may happen with

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41

Table 1—Institutional or policy mechanisms for managing aquatic ecosystems and for allocating the use of fish and theirhabitats.a

Mechanism

Prohibition

Regulation

Direct governmentintervention

Grants and tax incentives

Buy-back programs

Civil law

Insurance

Effluent charges

License fees

Demand management

Transferable developmentrights in land-use planning

Specific property rights, aswith transferable individualquotas

Instrument of control

Exclusion of sport fish from commercialharvests

Specification of zero discharge of some toxicsorcontaminants.

Specification of low phosphorusconcentrations in sewage effluents.

Specification of gear and area, in fishing.

Control of non-native sea lamprey bylampricide. dams, etc.

Development of islands and headlands withfill and dredge spoils.

Subsidy to industry for antipollutionequipment.

Subsidy to commercial fishers to harvestrelatively undesirable species.

Government purchase and retirement ofexcess harvesting capacity.

Losers enabled to sue despoilers in civil court.

Compulsory third-party insurance for claims ofdamage.

Charge for waste disposal, either direct costof treatment or indirect cost of impacts onecosystem.

Tax or charge on harvester, scaled toamount of use.

Rates involve marginal cost pricing, peakresponsibility pricing, orboth.

Limited rights to develop one area exchangedfor broader rights to develop another.

Purchase of pollution loading rights topredetermined loadings.

Harvest rights to explicit quantities to bepurchased.

Purpose orobserved consequences

Improve recreational opportunities for anglers.

Reduce exposure of biota and humans topoisons.

Control eutrophication which, if intense,degrades the aquatic ecosystem.

Reduce fishing intensity to preventoverfishing.

Foster recovery of lake trout and otherpreferred species to benefit fishers.

Provide recreational facilities and spawningareas to benefit anglers, boaters, etc.

Lower pollution rates and distribute costsmore widely.

Reduce competition from undesirable speciesto benefit preferred species and their users.

Reduce excess fishing capacity andcompensate owners of the excess capacity.

Preserve ecosystem amenities for broaderpublic; recompense losers.

Reduce pollution loadings because insurancepremiums are scaled to loading.

Reduce pollution, allocate resources tohigh-value, profitable uses, or both.

Foster efficient use of resource bydiscouraging overcapitalization, recoveringfair return for the owners (public) of theresource.

Improve overall efficiency of use and fosterconservation.

Direct the development to areas preferred bygovernment.

Limit pollution and foster efficient use ofresources.

Limit effective fishing effort and allocateresources to high-value uses, profitable uses,orboth.

a Items at the top are largely administrative, and those at the bottom have a prominent role for the market system (examples relate to theGreat Lakes of North America).

private capitalism where the free market is a dominantelement within the set, or with state capitalism wherethe administrative element (linked to the internationalmarket) is dominant.

Locally, in an established, healthy human community,much of the exercise of rights occurs within the generalframework of the soft, informal set. This use is seenmost clearly with respect to sharing within a family,whether nuclear or extended. This more informalapproach to the identification and practice of rights maybe severely distorted by cultural invasion of the moreformal approaches associated with conventional devel-opment. Also, some of the small-scale, less informalrights enjoyed by a community may be vitiated by theexercise of the exploitive rights of the developers.

North American societies have had great difficulty indealing with the injustices and inequities visited on localcommunities by external developers. The wrongs haveoften been rationalized by a rather simplistic utilitarianethic of the greatest good for the greatest number, withsome abstract logic about the desirability of Pareto-optimality, if only it could be implemented. We think ofwhat has been done at federal and provincial scaleswith the objective of maximizing the net value added,with less consideration of how the resulting benefits aredistributed among people. Is value added a good mea-sure of progress?

Currently, a swing to neoconservatism has brought withit a preference for the market as an allocator of rightsto use and has brought antipathy for the administrativefunction which had come to be dominant. Such achange in preferences may be interpreted as a shift inthe center of gravity of the whole interactive complex,now involving both the hard and soft sets (fig. 11). Theshift is toward the lower left of the figure and away fromthe upper left and also away from the central soft set.Green parties, as yet minuscule in North America,would presumably favor some dominance by the softset over the hard set.

Compromise intergrades of various kinds have beendeveloped within the spectrum of strictly administrativeand strictly market methods (left side, fig. 11; see table 1,page 42). Some of these compromises could also beadapted to serve as intergrades between the hard andsoft sets. To be most effective in redevelopment, theselection of mechanisms must be chosen and designedto use a constructive feedback loop to make developers

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want to manage because it is in their interests. All elsemay be futile.

In the context of rehabilitative husbandry for sustain-able redevelopment of regional ecosystems, the com-plex regime of rights should be organized so that awell-functioning interdependent soft set of localallocative methods should not be overridden destruc-tively by an interdependent hard set of allocative meth-ods serving primarily those interests defined at aregional scale.

Acknowledgments

We thank A.P. Grima, J.P. Hrabovsky, and R.E. Munnfor helpful criticisms. J. Retel typed numerous versionsof the manuscript.

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Regier, H.A.; Loftus, K.H. 1972. Effects of fisheriesexploitation on salmonid communities in oligotrophiclakes. Journal of the Fisheries Research Board ofCanada. 29: 959-968.

Research Advisory Board and International JointCommission. 1978. The ecosystem approach.Windsor, ON. 47 p.

Ricker, W.E. 1961. Productive capacity of Canadianfisheries—an outline. Resources for Tomorrow.Ottawa: Queen's Printer: 775-784. Vol. 2.

Ryder, R.A.; Edwards, CJ. 1984. A proposedapproach for the application of biological indicatorsfor the determination of ecosystem quality in theGreat Lakes Basin. Windsor, ON: Report to theScience Advisory Board of the International JointCommission, Great Lakes Regional Office.

Swift, J. 1983. Cut and run: the assault on Canada'sforests. Between the Lines, Canada.

Thurow, C; Daniel, G.; Brown, T.H. 1984. Impact ofthe Great Lakes in the region's economy. Chicago:The Center for the Great Lakes.

Tweeddale, R.E. 1974. Report of the forest resourcesstudy 1974. Fredericton: Province of New Brunswick,Department of Natural Resources.

Willoughby, W.R., ed. 1979. The joint organizations ofCanada and the United States. Toronto: University ofToronto Press.

Wynn, G. 1980. Timber colony: a historical geographyof early nineteenth century New Brunswick. Toronto:University of Toronto Press.

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Historical Interdependence Between Ecology, Production, and Managementin the California Fisheries

Arthur F. McEvoy

ARTHUR F. McEVOY is a professor, School of Law,University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.

The organizing topic of this set of papers was "thenature of our obligation as fishery professionals topresent and future generations." Entailed in that orga-nizing topic, so the symposium's organizers informedthe participants, were three subsidiary questions. Thosequestions were, first, what is it that fishery managersare trying to sustain and why? Second, what social,political, or scientific problems undermine sustainablefisheries management? Finally, how might fishery man-agers undertake the intensive management of commer-cial resources without irreversibly altering the ecosystemsupon which these and other resources depend? Thisarticle is an effort to address those questions from theperspective of the historical record of fisheries manage-ment in California, since it began to be actively con-cerned with the health of its fishery resources in the latenineteenth century (McEvoy 1986, 1988).

Fisheries management is an object lesson in JohnMuir's aphorism about Nature, to the effect that onceone begins pulling at any particular aspect of the natu-ral world, one inevitably finds it hitched to everythingelse in the universe (Teale 1973). What stands outfrom the history of the fisheries in this one jurisdictionare, first, the truth of Muirs notion that everything isconnected to everything else and, second, how richlytextured that truth is. That history suggests short an-swers to each of the three questions the conveners ofthis symposium put forward, in reverse order. How dowe manage commercial resources without altering theecosystems in which they are embedded? The answer

to this one is easy: it's not possible. What social, political,or scientific problems undermine sustainable manage-ment? The answer to this one is easy, too: all of them.The first question—What is it that we're trying to sustain,exactly?—is the really interesting one. Moreover, the wayin which one approaches the second and third questionsdepends a lot on how one answers the first one.

Many of our problems in sustaining fisheries historicallyhave stemmed from the fact that managers have tradi-tionally understood their task as one of sustaining a flowof wealth from something they identify as a "resource"into something they identify as "the market," both ofthose things conceived of as distinct from one anotherand each from their environments. The history of Cali-fornia fisheries management makes clear that, as amatter of fact, everything is connected to everythingelse and that people have problems when they try totreat things as if they were not.

What a fishery is, descriptively, and what managementought to try to sustain, prescriptively, is an interactionbetween three variables: an ecosystem, a group ofpeople working, and the system of social control withinwhich the work takes place. Each of the three variableshas a good bit of its own independent dynamism, buteach varies continually in response to changes in theother two. So it is not possible, in the nature of thecase, to manage a resource as if it could be describedand manipulated at arms' length. The best that fisheriesmanagers can do is to monitor and adjust the interactionbetween a volatile ecology, a creative economy, andsociety's understanding and control as they go along.

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Ecology

The ongoing history of fisheries management is bestunderstood as an ecological one, consisting of a tripar-tite system of ecology, production, and management asit has moved through time. In California, the data forsuch a history are as variegated as the state's fisheriesare themselves

There are, first, a lot of useful historical data on Cali-fornia ecology, both on land and offshore. Army andWeather Service records of temperature and precipita-tion date back to the 1840s (McAdie 1903); we knowfrom these records, for example, that the period between1880 and 1920 tended to be cooler than the periodsbefore and after. We also know that the decadesbetween 1910 and 1940 were significantly drier thanaverage. We know, finally, that significant climaticanomalies, probably associated with the El Nino-South-ern Oscillation occurred in the mid-1950s, in the early1920s, in the early 1880s, and the mid-1860s. All ofthese anomalies were associated with serious crises inthe fishing industry, in response to which industrypressed for some political solution (Hubbs 1948,Radovich 1961, Cane 1983).

We also have an interesting set of geological datadeveloped by the Scripps Institution from fish scalesdeposited in anaerobic sediment in the Santa BarbaraChannel (Soutarand Isaacs 1974). These sedimentsare annulated, like tree rings, because winter sedimentfrom the coast is darker and thicker than summer sedi-ment; what the people at Scripps did was to take coresout of the sediment, date the layers, count the numberof scales from different kinds of fish in each layer, andcalibrate those measurements to modern estimates ofthose stocks' populations. The end result of all thatwork is a census of the major pelagic schooling speciesin the system (sardine anchovy, and mackerel) thatgoes back some two millennia (Smith 1978). We knowfrom these data that the aggregate biomass of theseschooling fishes has varied widely and continuously: itwas extremely high in the 1830s, and again at the turnof the twentieth century, when the major industrialfisheries of this century (for salmon, sardine, and tuna)were first developed. We also know that since thesardine fishery collapsed in the late 1940s, the aggre-gate population of such fishes has remained far belowany numbers in the geological record.

In this record, further, is an interesting relation betweenpopulations of sardine and anchovy. These two speciesare ecologically very similar, except that the anchovyhas a shorter life span and breeds at a higher rate thanthe sardine does. What this knowledge does for us is toprovide an index of the relative volatility of conditions inthe system: highly unsettled conditions favor a specieslike the anchovy that turns its population over morerapidly; more stable conditions tend to favor the sardine(Smith 1978, Smith and Lasker 1978). We thus knowthat the system was both highly stable and productivein the 1860s, the 1890s, and the 1930s. The first periodwas when the sardine fishery was in its heyday. Thesystem was in disequilibrium in the 1880s, when govern-ment fishery management began in California, duringthe World War I decade, and during the late 1940s andearly 1950s, when the sardine fishery collapsed. On thewhole, the California Current system is extremely vola-tile and all of the fisheries in them are vulnerable torandom environmental shock. In sum, clearly a greatdeal of change takes place in the system, some of itquite drastic, whether people are working it or not. Peoplewho develop expectations about a fishery's productivityin good times may be caught by surprise a few yearsdown the road.

Contemporary observations provide a wealth of moretraditional historical data. We know, for example, thatmassive die-offs of sardine occurred off the southernend of Baja California in 1602 and off Monterey duringthe last week of May 1858, the first because the Span-ish explorer Vizcaino noted it in his diary (Wagner 1928),and the second because the Monterey newspaperreported that a lot of Indians had come from inland togather the fish for drying. We know that when RichardHenry Dana visited Santa Barbara in the 1830s, little orno kelp grew along that stretch of coast (Dana 1841),but in 1888 the kelp was so thick that coastal steamershad to have channels cut for them before they couldcome into port (USFC 1888). This last item tells us a lotabout the system that we can correlate with the historiesof the sea otter trade, the Chinese abalone fishery, andthe near-shore market fisheries whose staples wereyellowtail, barracuda, sea bass, and other kelp-livingspecies (McEvoy 1986).

Finally, more-or-less systematic observations weretaken by scientists, most of them on government pay-rolls, from time to time beginning in the 1860s. In all,direct observations by scientists and lay people providegood evidence as to what kinds of fisheries were pros-

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pering at what times, and which ones were doing poorly.It is thus possible, given current knowledge about thedynamics of the California Current system, to comparewhat modern science suggests was really going on inthe system with what people at the time thought wasgoing on and what they did about it. Perhaps not sur-prisingly, correlation between what people thought washappening to them at the time and what the data sug-gest was really happening is usually rare.

Production

All of these measurements tell us something about theecology leg of the tripartite system. The second leg isthat of production. The most striking characteristic ofthe industry's economic history is the familiar, cyclicalpattern of boom-and-bust: new resources are discoveredor come within reach of developing technology, harvestsgrow exponentially for a while, they level off, and thefishery collapses. The story, told in a single iteration, isunremarkable. What is remarkable about it is the innu-merable quantity of its historical iterations and theseeming inability of people to do anything to prevent it.

One interesting aspect of this cycle as it has played outin California, however, has to do with the nature ofeconomic development in the fisheries, both extensive(in the sense of geographic expansion) and intensive(in the sense of technological development). That is,that more or less coherent agglomerations of capitaland labor tend to persist through the industry's history,shifting to new stocks or moving to new waters for newsupplies of old stocks or changing their techniques inthe service of either strategy when they deplete theirold ones. One very interesting example of this phenom-enon concerns the Sacramento River salmon fishery ofthe late nineteenth century.

The Sacramento River salmon fishery was establishedin the late 1860s by a couple of men from coastal Maine;these people were refugees from a salmon fishery thattheir families had worked since before the AmericanRevolution but had since begun to decline under theimpact of agriculture, industry, and other competinguses of water (Dodds 1959, Merchant 1989). Onceestablished on the Sacramento, salmon fishing contin-ued sporadically until the late 1870s, when the climatesuddenly changed from a hot and dry "continental"regime to a cool and wet "marine" pattern. Suddenly,the runs of salmon in the system were unbelievable. Atits peak, the fishery probably took 10 million pounds of

chinook salmon out of the Sacramento River each yearbetween 1879 and 1883. The runs were so heavybetween September 15 and 17, 1880, that fishers atSacramento simply threw 9,000 dead chinooks backinto the river because no one would buy them. Theboom phase of this fishery lasted exactly four years, orone modal chinook life span.

As the industry collapsed, most of its capital and labormoved northward, more or less bodily, first to the Colum-bia River, then to Puget Sound, and then to Alaska,depleting each fishery in turn. The industry behaved alittle like a group of slash-and-bum farmers, except thatenough people stayed behind at each place, makingtheir average cost and no more, as the economics ofthe "tragedy of the commons" would predict, to makesure that the stocks got no chance to recover (Crutch-field and Pontecorvo 1969).

One California salmon processor moved from Sacra-mento to Monterey at the turn of the century and didtwo things: he outfitted a few motorized boats andbegan trolling offshore for salmon, which boosted theharvest but intensified the pressure on the Sacramentostocks; and he modified his cannery and a few of hisboats and began fishing sardine. The sardine industryspread north along the coast to British Columbia,boomed during the twenties and thirties, and collapsedafter 1945. In the early fifties, the sardine industrymoved bodily, canneries and boats and even a fewscientists, to Peru (Paulik 1971, Clark 1977).

The economic history of this part of the California fish-ing industry is thus one of a more or less coherentaggregation of labor, capital, and technology that en-dured nearly two centuries, from the 1770s to the1970s. The industry had a kind of malignant ecologicalunity as it moved through two centuries and into threeoceans. The same kind of story can also be told aboutwhales and tuna (McEvoy 1986). The point is about thenature of technological and economic change in thefishing industry that comes to light only when one looksat it from an ecological and historical perspective.

Another interesting thing about fisheries in general andthose in California in particular is the remarkably highdegree of informal order under which they operate.Until about World War I in California, the fishing busi-ness as a whole consisted of a handful of disaggregatedsectors, each made up of a different ethnic group fishingtarget species with which they had been familiar in their

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home countries. Chinese fished squid and abalone,New Englanders fished salmon, Italians fished nearshoremarket varieties, Portuguese hunted whales, and so on.Given the relative weakness of the state's fishery man-agement apparatus before World War I, each of thesedisaggregated fisheries operated under its own law,more or less independently of the others and certainlyfrom the state. The one Indian group that survived intothe twentieth century more or less intact, those peoplewho fished salmon in the Klamath River, likewiseretained a great deal of power to order its harvest in itsown, traditional ways.

These regimes could be quite vigorous. In the words ofthe San Francisco Chronicle in 1907,

if anyone imagines that it is possible for a Chi-nese or member of any other nationality than anItalian to catch crabs in this bay for the market,let him try it. If any Italian thinks it is possible tocatch crabs for the market without joining theAssociation, let him try it.

"Everything is governed by laws which the fishermenhave made for themselves," reported David Starr Jordansome years earlier (Goode 1887).

Would-be competitors of these ethnically proprietaryfisheries certainly seldom saw anything of substance inthese arrangements except monopoly and piracy.Modern economists usually pay little attention to themeither, as do law enforcement officials except when, asin Indian treaty fisheries, the courts force them to. Therecord suggests, however, that these tight little ethnic ortribal associations served an ecological function by linkingthe allocation of access to the resources to the long-termwelfare of the group, and that their management record,historically speaking, in many cases looks at least asgood and sometimes a lot better than that of the bureau-cratic, scientific agencies that superseded them.

Similar groups that exist today, among the Cree Indiansof James Bay, Canada, for example, or among lobsterfishers in parts of Maine, likewise close off access totheir fisheries, maintain a similarly high degree of orderin their harvest, and tend to generate more net socialincome on a more sustainable basis than neighboringgroups not so highly organized (Acheson 1975, Berkes1977, McGoodwin 1990). In California, the very cohe-siveness of these groups and the relative prosperitythat they derived from that cohesiveness incited theenvy of less organized competitors, who called on the

political machinery of the state to destroy them, thusexposing those fisheries to the market failures thatmake up tragedies of the commons. The point here is arelatively conservative one, that a systematic, ecological,mutually reinforcing relation exists between the socialand cultural organization of harvesting groups and theecology of their target stocks.

Thus, a reciprocal, interactive relation exists betweenthe ecological processes that determine a stock's pro-ductivity and the social and cultural processes thatmake fishers behave in the ways they do—that is, be-tween the ecological and productive parts of my tripar-tite model of the fisheries. For a long time, of course,people thought that no such interactive relation existed;that is, that nature was essentially a passive store ofresources from which harvesters could always takemore and it would grow back. We know better than thatnow, although the idea persists, frequently hidden deepin the assumptions we make about what fisheries man-agement is all about. Nowadays, the notion manifestsitself whenever people act as if nature were resilientenough to take whatever burdens they can put on it,that some technical way of making nature producemore than it seems willing to will always be found, orthat what all fishers want, when they resist outsideintervention into their affairs, is to get more for them-selves, beggar their neighbors.

Management

The reciprocal relations between the ecology of resourcesand the economic use of the resources is relativelyeasy to grasp. Fishers go where nature makes resourcesavailable to them; nature, in turn, changes its characterwhenever human use has an appreciable impact on it.Less intuitive is the reciprocal interrelations betweenmanagement and both industry and ecology. Manage-ment, including both lawmaking and the scientificresearch that (at least ostensibly) informs it, clearly hassome impact on the structure of the fishing industry andconsequently, as the industry works in a responsibleenvironment, on the ecology of the resources. At thesame time, however, management is itself a product ofthe historical interaction between production and ecol-ogy, between fishers and fished.

Frequently, lurking deep within our assumptions aboutfisheries management is an assumption not unlike theone that postulates a sharp, hermetic distinction be-tween ecology and production. Here, fishery managersfrequently assume that the regulatory process goes on

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in isolation from the interaction between nature andproduction that it is supposed to monitor and regulate.This assumption about the management process, inturn, has two aspects to it. One facet of the assumptionis the idea that lawmaking goes on in isolation, unaffect-ed by the struggle for resources in the marketplace.The other aspect is the common assumption that thescientific information on the basis of which lawmakersregulate the fisheries comes to them as objective truth,free of political charge either in its generation or in themanner in which lawmakers put it to use. Both of thesepreliminary assumptions are wrong; both science andlaw are inextricably knit into the systematic interactionbetween ecology, production, and regulation that con-stitutes fisheries management in the real world.

The first incorrect assumption is that lawmaking some-how goes on in isolation from the struggle for resourcesthat leads to fishery depletion. What lawmakers aretheoretically supposed to do, whether they are regula-tors, legislators, or judges, is to identify market failuresthat lead to "tragedies of the commons" like fisheriesdepletion; once they discover these market failures,their job is to fashion regulations to correct them(Christy and Scott 1965, Hardin 1968, Cheung 1970).Market failures stem from a number of readily identifiablesources: free rider problems, jurisdictional incoherence,overly high discounts placed on future income fromrenewable resources, poor accounting of uncertainrisks to the resources, and the difficulty of translatingethical or otherwise nonmonetary values into measuresthat can be balanced against the economic costs of fishleft uncaught.

Lawmaking, however, is subject to all of the samekinds of market failures that the unregulated economyis. The legal system is a kind of market for legal entitle-ments to use resources in certain ways; inasmuch aspeople struggle in that legal market for rights to useresources, "the law" and "the market" are simply differ-ent modes of bargaining between economic actors(Hurst 1982). It is certainly true that much of whatpasses for resource management amounts to little morethan one well-organized interest group or another press-ing the state to give its members access to resourceswhile denying it to others. Most restrictions on fishinggear fall under this head: the controversies betweenpeople who troll for salmon offshore, those who fishsalmon inshore for recreation, and the Indian tribesshould come immediately to mind.

California history is replete with examples of this kind ofstruggle for resources displaced from the market intothe legal system. The California Fish and Game Com-mission spent most of the first 30 years of its historyengaged in a process whereby it commissioned one oranother scientific study of fisheries problems, noted thenear-uniform conclusion that the one-third of the state'sfishers who were Chinese were to blame for thoseproblems, and with little trouble urged the state legisla-ture to burden the Chinese fisheries with season restric-tions, gear restrictions, export prohibitions, and so on.

As it turns out, Chinese fishing had little or nothing to dowith any of the problems that led fishers of Europeanbackground to demand that the state take legal actionagainst them. In the 1880s, Chinese abalone huntersdid well and Italian market fishers did poorly, for example,not because of any ecological link between the two, butbecause the fur industry had by that time wiped theCalifornia Current system clean of sea otters, whichallowed populations of intertidal mollusks to bloom andthereby led to a depletion of the kelp forests that providedhabitat for the market fishers' targets. Indeed, the recordhints that, by the late 1880s, Chinese gathering haddepressed populations of abalone and sea urchin enoughthat the kelp forests were reviving in those neighborhoodswhere the Chinese were active (McEvoy 1986). Tocontemporary observers, however, Italian trouble andChinese success, plus the instinctive notion that Natureherself had only a passive role to play in the humaneconomy, led to a political result in which resourcesmanagement amounted to a struggle between harvestersonly, in the state capitol no less than on the water itself.

Perhaps a more dramatic example of this reciprocalinteraction between lawmaking and market strugglecomes from the sorry history of the California sardinefishery. Here, California assembled the world's mostsophisticated research-and-regulatory apparatus tomanage what at the time was the most intensive fisherythe world had ever seen (Thompson 1919). By the late1920s, the California Fish and Game Department hadidentified all of the then-accepted signs of overfishing inthe stock and recommended a catch limit of 250,000tons (Clark 1939). Later research indicated that thiswas close to the fishery's sustainable yield at the time,even with discounting for occasional years of reproduc-tive failure built in (Murphy 1966, MacCall 1979).

The problem was that the state legislature had the legalauthority for regulating commercial, as opposed to

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recreational, fisheries: what happened was that theFish and Game apparatus had to join the commercialfishery and (especially) its allies in the state's poultryindustry in a political struggle over allocating access tothe fishery. As a result, the fishery went essentiallyunregulated. In 1935, Oregon and Washington respond-ed to California's inability to rein in its fishers by givingtheirs unlimited access to the stock as well. By the endof the thirties, the sardine fishery was seriously over-capitalized and catches had leveled off; it collapsedsuddenly in 1945-46 and again in the early 1950s,never to recover. Here was a particularly clear exampleof the reciprocally constitutive interaction betweenproduction and lawmaking: the"tragedy of the commons"reproduced itself, more or less unchanged, in the veryregulatory processes that were supposed to correct itsevil effects in the market.

If market struggle shapes the regulatory process byinfluencing the outcome of political bargaining in legis-latures and administrative agencies, it also does so byinfluencing the character of the scientific informationmade available to lawmakers as a basis for their allo-cations. This in turn, takes place in two arenas, both bydetermining the kinds of questions that scientists aregiven to answer about a resource and by influencingthe ways in which lawmakers respond to whateverinformation their scientists are able to generate for them.

In the nineteenth century, both state and federal fisher-ies science concentrated single-mindedly on increasingthe flow of resources from the environment into themarket. One way to do this was through prospecting fornew resources; a great deal of this kind of activityoccurred at all levels of government in the last threedecades of the century.

Another way to maintain the flow of resources into themarket was to enhance the productivity of decliningfisheries through applied science. Government scien-tists, then, restocked depleted waterways with exoticspecies of fish and propagated particularly valuablespecies like salmon and trout artificially, in governmenthatcheries. As it turned out, a few successful transplantsof exotic fishes to California waters (shad and stripedbass) were at least counterbalanced by the balefuleffects of others (German carp and brown catfish, mostnotoriously) (Smith 1895, Elton 1958). Observedincreases in the salmon harvest at the turn of the twen-tieth century, meanwhile, were almost certainly due, notto the hatchery work, but rather to changes in climate,

changes in the distribution of the salmon's prey species,the opening of an offshore troll fishery for immaturesalmon, and the steady decline of pollution from themining industry inshore (Larkin 1979, McEvoy 1986).The state, however, claimed in 1900 that "by the effortsof this Commission, the salmon has been restored toour state" (California Fish and Game Commission 1900).

Not only to harvesters, then, but also to the publicofficials whose job it was to oversee the industry, fishwere like gold nuggets: valuable commodities to berecovered from their state of nature and transformedinto cash for the one, a valuable source of politicalcapital for the other. So long as government apparentlymaintained the supply and drove unwanted competitorsout of the business, further inquiry into the biology ofvaluable fisheries seemed to have little point. Naturewas thoroughly plastic and could be manipulated in theservice of enterprise to the limits of human ingenuityand political will. That observed changes in the fishingbusiness might have been due to the collective behaviorof the harvesters, to changes in other industries, oreven to the weather was simply not a legally meaningfulquestion. Inasmuch as most fishery research was paidfor through political appropriations, moreover, it was nota scientifically meaningful one, either.

The second way in which the interaction between law-making and market struggle influences the role offisheries science in management has to do with theeffects that knowledge has on the regulatory process.Here again, a telling example comes from the history ofthe sardine industry. The sardine is very vulnerable toenvironmental change in its first few days after hatch-ing: if conditions aren't just right while fish are in thelarval stage, the whole generation will die (Smith 1985).What happened was that conditions were good forsardine recruitment between 1900 and 1940, while thesardine fishery was in its growth phase, but when con-ditions turned bad in the 1940s, the stock could nolonger sustain such a heavy draft as the industry wasplacing on it and collapsed. What extinguished thesardine, then, was the interaction between an overcapi-talized fishery and a volatile ecology (Murphy 1966,MacCall 1979). Precisely the same thing happened inPeru some 30 years later (Clark 1977).

Until the mid-1960s, one could take either of two posi-tions in the political controversy over regulating thesardine fishery. One could say that observed fluctua-tions in the harvest were caused by "environmental"

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conditions, meaning that fishing had nothing to do withthe collapse and that the collapse would have takenplace even had no fishing been done at all. Alternatively,one could take the position that observed fluctuations inthe harvest and the ultimate collapse were due to over-fishing (Croker 1954, Clark and Marr 1955).

Although some people had pointed to possible interac-tions between fishing and environmental change, theywere unable to bring that reasoning to bear on thepolitical process because neither casual synergy norpredicting the future on the basis of random-variableanalysis were meaningful concepts in the culture atlarge. By the mid-1960s they were, thanks largely to thework of Rachel Carson in popularizing the ecosystemiceffects of chemical pesticides and to the way in whichfallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing hadfamiliarized the American public with food chains. Com-puter modeling for predicting the weather, the outcomesof elections, and the public health effects of this or thatpollutant also contributed to educating the public aboutthe ecological and cybernetic concepts that underlaywhat is now generally accepted as the explanation forthe sardine failure, first published in 1966.

Also coloring the debate over the sardine collapse inthe mid-1960s was an industry campaign to open thestate's anchovy fishery to commercial harvest (McEvoy1986). The anchovy had apparently grown abundant asit filled the ecological niche left vacant by the depletedsardine (Murphy 1966). The industry argued that thestate could promote the eventual recovery of the morevaluable sardine by allowing it to fish down the anchovypopulation. At this point, one important scientist wroteto a friend in the industry that the time had come toswitch sides on the sardine issue: not only would thatopen up the anchovy fishery, but, in his words, "thesardine case is beginning to look too sound to me forus to either hide from the public or to escape the con-clusions of." This statement was only partly about thescientist's knowledge of the world; the scientific judg-ment here was primarily an assessment of the politicalconsequences of admitting the truth of one or the otherposition in a scientific debate. An end to the sardinecontroversy was made possible by some absoluteadvance in the scientific knowledge about the fishery,but the legal cognizability of that knowledge was apolitical function. In the event, the pro-developmentscientists traded a moratorium on sardine fishing for anexperimental anchovy fishery; so enthusiastic was thelegislature for this new approach to fisheries manage-

ment that it enacted similar moratoria on a number ofother depleted fisheries without any real scientific basisfor doing so.

Conclusion

Our scientific knowledge of the world, then, emergesout of a complex interaction between ecology, economicproduction, and the legal system. What "science" is,then, is a struggle among those who do research andbetween researchers and those who put their findingsto work over what will count as "reality." Lawmaking, inturn, consists of a struggle between people wanting toallocate access to resources in particular ways, whetherto commercial use, recreational use, or for "natural"uses. Production, for its part, is a complicated functionof technology, the sociology of user groups, the structureof legal entitlements to access, and the availability ofresources. Nature is, finally, at any point to no smalldegree the product of past and present human impactson it, which impacts in turn are determined in no smallway by the sociology and the legal structure of themarket.

As Muir had it, everything is connected to everythingelse. Historically, fishery managers have made troublefor themselves when they have assumed, usuallyunconsciously, that this statement is not true. Althoughtheory and technology of fisheries management haveadvanced a great deal since the late nineteenth century,some of these conceptual divisions between lawmakingand the private market, between science and politics,and so on persist, usually in ways of which scientistsand lawmakers are not even aware. Those assumptionsare, indeed, so powerful precisely because they aremade instinctively, unthinkingly. Their unseen power isall the more reason why fisheries managers should becareful to watch out for them when they ask themselvessuch questions as, "What exactly are we trying to sus-tain here?"

To conclude, one way of answering the organizingquestion for the symposium is to say that, to the extentthat fisheries managers approach their task as if theywere trying to maintain sustainable yields of guppiesfrom a well-maintained aquarium, they are doing itwrong. Coming up with a better way of thinking aboutthe problem is hard because all the dualisms that under-lie our traditional thinking about the world, betweenculture and nature and law and markets and so on, areso deeply embedded in our culture and our legal system

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that it is sometimes hard to tell when they are at work inour thinking. Some lessons, however, may be worthtaking away from this excursion into the history ofCalifornia's fisheries.

At a minimum, mathematical certainty about the stateof the resources, or about the likely effects of whateverregulations a government might actually impose on afishery, is simply not attainable. This lack of certainty ispartly because of the important role that random shocksplay in the environment and should play in our thinkingabout it. It is also because of the sheer complexity ofthe tripartite system of ecology, production, and manage-ment, in which we are inextricably embedded; our knowl-edge of the system will always be imperfect becausewe will change it every time we act in it.

Another thing that may be said is that traditional strate-gies for management, insofar as they assume any ofthese dualisms, are likely as not to raise as many newproblems as old ones that they solve. Public agencieswill of course have to do a certain amount of prospect-ing work, and they will always have to balance compet-ing claims for access to resources. But they shouldnever delude themselves into thinking that all of that,even taken together, is "management" in the way that itreally should be approached.

Finally, what we ought to sustain when we approachfisheries management is not the size of a particularstock nor even the prosperity of a particular harvestinggroup over the near or long term. Rather, the mostimportant target is the long-term health of the interac-tion between nature, the economy, and the legal system.We can recognize that diversity and balance in thesystem, insurance against an uncertain future, thesocial cohesion of user groups, the attachment thatfishers feel for their work, even the moral unease wefeel when we contemplate the extinction of a species,all those difficult-to-quantify things do in fact play inte-gral roles in the tripartite interaction between ecology,production, and management, and perhaps more signif-icant ones than the more "objective" measures to whichwe usually look for guidance. We can recognize that,because everything is connected to everything else,every step we take will change the system in which welive in some way. When we make choices, then, wecan keep an eye on what kind of interactive relation wewant to maintain with the rest of Creation and make ourchoices accordingly.

References

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Acknowledgments

This volume represents the collaboration of many talented and thoughtful individuals whom we most gratefullyacknowledge. Our thanks go to Judy Maule for the many hours of word processing, layout, and revision of thesearticles. The papers were substantially improved by the constructive review and suggestions offered by our reviewers—Baird Callicott, James Lichatowich, Richard Norgaard, Reed Noss, David Orr, and Charles Warren. We appreciatethe assistance of the USDA Forest Service in publishing these papers and, particularly, the support of James Sedellof the PNW Research Station in Corvallis. Finally, we offer our warmest thanks to the authors for their patienceand continued enthusiasm despite some lengthy delays that were not of their making.

54* U.S . GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1997 - 589-353 / 63003 REGION NO. 10

Bottom, Daniel L; Reeves, Gordon H.; Brookes, Martha H., tech coords. 1996.Sustainability issues for resource managers. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-370.Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific NorthwestResearch Station. 54 p.

Throughout their history, conservation science and sustainable-yield managementhave failed to maintain the productivity of living resources. Repeated overexploitationof economic species, loss of biological diversity, and degradation of regional environ-ments now call into question the economic ideas and values that have formed the foun-dation of scientific management of natural resources. In particular, management effortsintended to maximize production and ensure efficient use of economic "resources" haveconsistently degraded the larger support systems upon which these and all other spe-cies ultimately depend. This series of essays examines the underlying historical,cultural, and philosophical issues that undermine sustainability and proposes alterna-tive approaches to conservation. These approaches emphasize the relations amongpopulations rather than among individuals; the integrity of whole ecosystems acrosslonger time frames; the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative indicators ofhuman welfare and sustainability; and the unpredictable and interdependent interac-tions among "natural," scientific, and regulatory processes.

Keywords: Environmental ethics, environmental history, fisheries management,resource conservation, resource economics, sustainability.

The Forest Service of the U.S. Department ofAgriculture is dedicated to the principle of multipleuse management of the Nation's forest resourcesfor sustained yields of wood, water, forage, wildlife,and recreation. Through forestry research,cooperation with the States and private forestowners, and management of the National Forestsand National Grasslands, it strives—as directed byCongress—to provide increasingly greater serviceto a growing Nation.

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