Chapter Synthesis

Ecosystem management, like management at any biological level, should be undertaken with care, caution, and humility. It is sobering to remember the findings of ecologist C. S. Holling, who determined, after an examination of 23 managed ecosystems, that it was management activities that led to the collapse of the systems (Holling 1995). Ecosystem management must have a scientific basis that can identify what kinds of questions to ask, what data to collect and how to collect them, how to model the system to be managed, and how to create adaptive management mechanisms that are responsive to changing ecosystem needs and human concerns.

The concept of ecosystem management represents a genuine paradigm shift in our conception of management. Ecosystem management has, indeed, become necessary, inescapable, and urgent because of the failure of the resource management paradigm to address current conservation problems, the causes and sources of regional environmental degradation, and the nationalization of environmental values. Species management approaches too quickly exhaust limited human and financial resources as the number of threatened and endangered species continues to rise, and they overlook species that are small, difficult to classify, or not appealing to public sentiment or consciousness.

Ecosystem management has yet to prove technically feasible or politically acceptable in most contexts. To make progress toward meaningful ecosystem management, conservationists must develop a common, accepted, and operational definition of the concept, devise practical ways to implement it in varying contexts, and create political support and legislative mandates to translate ecosystem management concepts into enforced policy directives. Progress toward ecosystem management will necessitate conflict and clarification of values. Individual agency jurisdictions must be replaced with permanent working groups or boards with independent budgets, regional authority, and legal mandates. Without these, ecosystem management will remain a compelling theoretical concept, but a frustrating and unfulfilled practice.

Progress toward ecosystem management is most impeded by the lack of a transagency definition of what ecosystem management is and by a coherent vision of exactly what ecosystem management would look like if it were actually working. Articulating that definition and developing that vision are essential prerequisites to moving toward functional ecosystem management. The alternatives—default visions of species management, habitat management, site management, or commodity (resource) management—are unsustainable, but we cannot break away from these perspectives until conservation biologists have made ecosystem management a more credible and desirable alternative. Defining ecosystem management and forming a compelling vision of its functions will be one of the great conservation challenges in the coming decade.

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