The Paradox Resolved: A Different Case Study and the Argument Summarized

From the outset, the book’s chief policy question has resolved around the problem of how to manage. As this was addressed in the preceding chapters, a new question arises: what are the implications for policies governing the meeting of the twofold management goal of restoring ecosystems while maintaining service reliability? This chapter provides our answer to that question by means of a new case study. It sums up the book’s argument and recasts ecosystem management and policy for ecologists, engineers, and other stakeholders. The best way to draw out the policy-relevant ramifications of our framework and the preceding management insights is to apply them to a different ecosystem. The case-study approach has served us well in contextualizing management recommendations without, we believe, compromising their more general application to ecosystem management. Our analysis of the major land-use planning controversy in the Netherlands underscores the wider applicability of this book’s arguments for both management and policy. What follows is put more briefly because it builds on the analysis of and recommendations for the Columbia River Basin, San Francisco Bay-Delta, and the Everglades. Why the Netherlands? There are human-dominated ecosystems substantially different from those found in the United States, many of which are more densely populated. They have nothing remotely like “wilderness,” but instead long histories of constructing and managing “nature.” The Netherlands is one such landscape. Not only is the landscape different, it is also important to note that the context for ecosystem management is set by different political, social, and cultural values. Sustainability is a much more dominant value in the European context than currently in the United States. Case-by-case management, while also appropriate for zones of conflict outside the United States, now has to deal with the fact that there is a tension between its call for case-specific indicators and the use of more general sustainability indicators in Europe. In die Netherlands, for example, sustainable housing projects are designed and assessed not only in terms of specific indicators but also in light of the “factor 20 increase in environmental efficiency” needed to achieve sustainability.

Ecosystems in Zones of Conflict: The Case for Bandwidth Management

What profession that is core to ecosystem management is described in the following passage? . . . [Their professional] representation of a . . . system can be typified as physical, holistic, empirical, and fuzzy; . . . [treating] the system more as a whole than in terms of individual pieces; ... [expecting] uncertainty rather than deterministic outcomes...; [taking] uncertainty or “fuzziness” . . . to be inevitable and, to some degree, omnipresent; [seeing] ambiguity . . . pervade the entire system, and . . . [suspecting] the unsuspected at every turn. . . . [T]he underlying notion [in their professional culture] is that no amount of rules and data can completely and reliably capture the actual complexity of the system . . . [I]t is more important . . . for [these professionals] to maintain an overview of the behavior of the whole system than to have detailed knowledge about its components. . . . [They] tend to be very wary of [the pressure to intervene], primarily because it runs counter to a basic attitude of conservatism fostered by their culture: “when in doubt, don’t touch anything.” Their reluctance to take any action unless it is clearly necessary arises from the awareness that any operation represents a potential error, with potentially severe consequences. (Von Meier 1999, pp. 104-107) . . . We suspect that many readers would see ecologists (writ large again) as the professional group whose views are being described. Ecologists, as we have seen, frequently describe the ecosystem in just such terms: it responds to external disturbances, the whole system is more than the sum of its parts, it displays nondeterministic behavior, its complexity can never be fully captured and, therefore, management is extremely challenging, with managers always reluctant to intervene—at least in major ways—in ecosystems they do not know, because this potentially creates more problems than it solves. However, ecologists are not the group being described, and here is the surprise. Though the quoted phrases are almost textbook ecology material, the professional culture discussed here is in fact that of line operators in high reliability organizations (HROs).

The Paradox of the Rising Demand for Both a Better Environment and More Reliable Services

The examples go on and on: loading fish in trucks and on barges to enable them to swim downstream; opening a water gate and drowning endangered birds in one area, or closing the gate and risk burning out habitat of the same species someplace else; spending more than $400 million a year to protect a handful of endangered species in just one region of a country; hatching endangered fish that end up too fat or stick out like neon in the water once released; releasing salmon trained to come to the surface for hatchery food when what is actually dropping from the sky are the ducks ready to eat them; keeping water in a reservoir to save the fish there, thus sacrificing other fish downstream; building a 250-foot-wide, 300-foot-high, $80 million device to better regulate the water temperature for salmon eggs in just one reservoir; controlled burning for fuel load management in the forests that harms not only air quality but also chronically bleeds pollution into adjacent aquatic ecosystems; breeding the wild properties out of endangered fish and releasing them, thereby polluting the gene pool of river fish; fighting urbanization to protect a green and open area, thereby condemning that area to monotonous, industrial agriculture and worse; closing a gate or releasing reservoir water in reaction to a sample of fish coming downstream and triggering electrical blackouts or the most severe urban water quality crisis in decades; restoring natural floodplains, erasing some of the oldest, best preserved, and greenest cultural landscapes in a country; putting in place even more massive infrastructure to keep ecosystems natural, thereby imprisoning them in intensive care units for life; and more. For some readers, these examples may appear a mix of the ridiculous and the desperate. Yet they are prime examples of a hard paradox at work: how do you reconcile the public’s demand for a better environment which requires ecosystem improvements with their concurrent demand for reliable services from that environment, including clean air, water, and power?

Ecosystems in Zones of Conflict: Partial Responses as an Emerging Management Regime

Many of the most expensive and important ecosystem management initiatives under way today are in “zones of conflict” between increasing human populations, resource utilization, and demands for environmental services. The four cases in this book—the San Francisco Bay-Delta, the Everglades, the Columbia River Basin, and the Green Heart of the western Netherlands—are no exception. Each combines the need for large-scale ecosystem restoration with the widespread provision of reliable ecosystem services. As seen in chapter 4, case-by-case management is the regime most suited for such contentious issues in zones of conflict. It is no small irony, therefore, that these ecosystem management initiatives are often presented as showcases for adaptive management (e.g., Gunderson et al. 1995; Johnson et al. 1999). This showcasing is understandable when we realize that here the paradox is at its sharpest. Consequently, the initiatives are unique in the considerable amount of resources made available to adaptive management or ecosystem management, precisely because the ecosystems are in zones on conflict. Much of the funds come not from natural resource or regulatory agencies, but from the organizations that produce and deliver services from these ecosystems, such as water-supply or power-generation companies. In southern Florida, the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) and the South Florida Water Management District (SFMWD) estimate the costs of their proposed ecosystem restoration plan to be $7.8 billion; in the Bay- Delta, the CALFED Program expects to spend about $10 billion during this implementation having already spent more than $300 million on ecosystem restoration in recent years; and in the Columbia River Basin, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) alone provides some $427 million per year for fish and wildlife measures. As a senior BPA planner remarked, “We are the largest fish and wildlife agency in the world.” Contrast these millions and billions to the funding problems often reported by “purer” forms of adaptive management for ecosystems towards the left of the gradient in figure 4.1. In short, although important services are derived from these ecosystems, the services do not override ecosystem-functions, thus raising the resource demands of ecosystem management.

Recasting the Paradox through a Framework of Ecosystem Management Regimes

We now provide a parsimonious framework for recasting the paradox so that it can be acted on. Our framework of ecosystem management regimes is used in the following chapters to resolve the impasse between ecologists and engineers. In so doing, it integrates engineering more positively into ecosystem management than is currently done. The goal of ecosystem management is a twofold recoupling: where decision makers are managing for reliable ecosystem services, they are also improving the associated ecological functions; and where they are managing for improved ecological functions, they are better ensuring the reliability of ecosystem services associated with those functions. In practice, improvements in ecosystem functions may range from preservation or restoration of self-sustaining processes to the rehabilitation of functions by reintroducing to the ecosystem something like the complexity and unpredictability they once had. The recoupling of functions and services that have been improved varies by the type of management (more formally, the management regime) relied on by decision makers, where the principal task facing the decision maker is to best match the management regime to the ecosystem in question. A “regime” can be thought of as a distinct and coherent way of perceiving, learning, and behaving in terms of variables discussed more frilly below and summarized in table 4.3 at the end of this chapter (for more on policy and ecological regimes in ecosystem management, see Norton 1995, p. 134; Berry et al. 1998; for a discussion of regime theory, see Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986). To summarize our argument, while ecosystems are internally dynamic and complex, they also vary along a gradient in terms of their human population densities, extraction, and other significant features discussed in chapter 3, such as differing models, competing organization, and multiple-use demands. In response to changes along the gradient, ecosystem management passes through thresholds (the most important being limits to learning) as decision makers move from one management regime to another. The thresholds, in fact, are best thought of as gradual transitions between modes and models of learning about ecosystems.

Adaptive Management in a High Reliability Context: Hard Problems, Partial Responses

The examples found at the beginning of this book are, to our minds, neither instances of a lack of societal commitment to saving the environment nor evidence of unreasonable demands for highly reliable services. If they were that, the obvious answer would then be to bite the bullet and take either the environment or the services more seriously. In our view, the examples really express the hard paradox of having to improve the environment while ensuring reliable services at the same time. Beyond specific examples, the strongest expressions of the paradox being taken seriously in terms of the budgets and stakes involved are those large-scale adaptive management initiatives proposed and undertaken in regions where they seem most difficult to implement; that is, where the reliable provision of services is a priority. Just what “reliability” is for the kinds of organizations we study is detailed in chapter 4. Here, we take a closer look at our case studies to see how the issues are articulated empirically. The paradox is even enshrined in law. The mandate of the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act of 1980, for example, is to “protect, mitigate and enhance fish and wildlife affected by the development, operation, and management of [power generation] facilities while assuring the Pacific Northwest an adequate, efficient, economical, and reliable water supply.” But how to do this? Or, as one ecologist, Lance Gunderson (1999b, p. 27), phrased the paradox, “So how does one assess the unpredictable in order to manage the unmanageable?” The answer usually given by ecologists and others is to “undertake adaptive management” (chapter 2). The decision maker learns by experimenting with the system or its elements, systematically and step-by-step, in order to develop greater insight into what is known and not known for managing ecosystem functions and services. Learning more on the ground about the system to be managed is imperative, especially given imprecisely defined terms such as “restore,” “enhance,” and “reliable.” As the senior biologist planner at the Northwest Power Planning Council told us, the last clause of the Power Act “AERPS” (adequate, efficient, economical, and reliable power supply) “never has been quantified, so it is not very clear what it actually means.” He is not alone.

The Paradox Introduced: Concepts and Cases

To recapitulate, the hard paradox is this: how do you improve ecological functions and related human services at the same time, if not everywhere then at least over the ecosystem and landscape as a whole? How do decision makers meet the twofold recoupling goal: (1) where they are managing for reliable ecosystem services, they would also be improving the associated ecosystem functions, and/or (2) where they are managing for improved ecosystem functions, they would also be better ensuring the reliability of the ecosystem services associated with those functions. In short, how do decision makers recouple ecosystem functions and services that over time have been decoupled to their detriment? A set of terms have just been introduced that require explanation. The terms “recoupling,” “decoupling,” and, by implication, “coupling” are central to the arguments of our book and are formalized more fully in later chapters. (The controversial terms, “functions” and “services,” are discussed in the next section.) Basically, the literature uses the former terms to refer to biophysical connections, organizational connections, or both. An example of the first is Ausubel (1996, pp. 1, 7, 8), who notes that agricultural modernization has meant “food decoupled from acreage” through the production of more crops on less land. Advances in science and technology “increasingly decouple our goods and services from the demands on planetary resources.” Ausubel adds that we can expect “further decoupling [of] food from land. For more green occupations, today’s farmers might become tomorrow’s park rangers and ecosystem guardians. In any case, the rising yields, spatial contraction of agriculture, and sparing of land are a powerful antidote to the current losses of biodiversity and related environmental ills.” Opschoor (1995) speaks of a similar technological phenomenon, “delinking,” where rising incomes are decoupled over time from intensive material use. Also, the third Dutch national environmental policy plan seeks as one of its goals the decoupling of economic growth from environmental pollution (Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment 1998). These uses of “decoupling” all refer to the relation between services and environmental degradation. We, on the other hand, are talking about the relation between services and environmental assets, that is, ecosystem functions.