Engineering Within Ecological Constraints (1996) / Chapter Skim
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A Scalar Approach to Ecological Constraints
A Scalar Approach to Ecological Constraints
Pages 45-64
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From page 45... ...
In particular, it examines the effect of social values on the scale at which we experience the world; conversely, it explores the role of objective determinations of scale in shaping social values. These two aspects of scale apparently represent a complex and highly interactive dynamic.
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From page 46... ...
, I propose a multiscalar analysis of social values and argue for a pluralistic approach to environmental policy. This approach recognizes multiple, irreducible values derived from nature by humans, seeks to associate particular values and classes of values with specific natural dynamics that are dominant on various scales of the environment, and organizes human values according to scale, providing multiple criteria of good management guided by multiple values.
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From page 47... ...
What is needed is a more encompassing, interdisciplinary discussion of environmental values and goals. Of course such a discussion must be based on the best science, but establishing crucial links between ecological processes and environmental policy can be understood only in conjunction with a process of articulating important social values.
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From page 48... ...
In the course of focusing on the processes affecting bay water quality, an important scalar, boundary issue was also resolved: management attention moved from the bay stem and tributaries to the widespread lands that form the watershed. The formulation of the "problem" with the Chesapeake involved important choices about what processes were crucial for defending social values, as well as scientific attempts to measure and monitor those important processes.
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From page 49... ...
. ac 1leving ecological / goals / FIGURE 1 The environmental policy process.
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From page 50... ...
Holling's work supports, both theoretically and empirically, a broadly hierarchical approach to understanding physical and ecological processes, suggesting that the human tendency to understand complex systems hierarchically (noted by Allen and Hoekstra, 1992; Allen and Starr, 1982) is not adventitious.
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From page 51... ...
Can humans, by managing their own behaviors, shaping them consciously in response to ecological information, "choose" to forbear from certain actions to protect processes crucial to ecological structure and function. Since most applications of hierarchical organizational structures emphasize that control and constraints flow down spatiotemporal systems, with the larger and slower-changing processes constraining the behavior of individuals at lower levels, hierarchical reasoning is therefore best suited to treat human choices as ejects of natural changes.
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From page 52... ...
What is unusual about my approach is the use of hierarchical thinking to inform an explicitly value-laden search for models that will help us to understand and manage natural systems to support important social values. This search requires a normative science, and I think conservation biology and restoration ecology should be understood within an activist, normative context.
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From page 53... ...
The mesoscale is therefore of crucial importance to human habitation; but it is also this scale that exhibits the crucial discontinuities identified by Holling as changes in ecosystem organization. Clearly, human choices now shape the environment in countless ways; one of the consequences of Holling's argument is that it emphasizes not just the constraints that work their way down natural hierarchies the limits on searching procedures available to specimens of an animal species of a given body size, for example but also on the impacts that work their way up the hierarchy, such as the cumulative effects of many clear-cuts by many agents on crucial variables such as regional hydrology.
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From page 54... ...
If the constitutional convention is successful, it is because the delegates have adopted a more timeless perspective. The point of the example is that we do, quite naturally, shift time scales and emphasize shifting motives as we consider different questions in different contexts.
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From page 55... ...
The goal of this examination is to think more explicitly about this interaction between values and modeling and the ways in which our representations of natural processes and environmental problems embody spatial aspects of an actionoriented model for articulating environmental policy problems (a process that is represented abstractly in Figure 1~. Since it is a goal of model building in environmental management that the models inform environmental decision making to improve communication between scientists and the public, we conclude that any model for this purpose must be fairly simple in structure.
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From page 56... ...
That approach attempts to associate a triscalar conception of human valuation with Holling's triscalar landscape, suggesting that we can sort TABLE 1 Correlation of Human Concerns and Natural System Dynamics at Different Temporal Scales Temporal Horizon Time Temporal Dynamics of Human Concern Scales in Nature Individual and economic concerns 0-5 years Human economies Community, intergenerational bequests Up to 200 years Ecological dynamics; interaction of species .
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From page 57... ...
This last section offers a practical proposal in the form of a series of devices I call them risk decision squares which purport to represent in a general and abstract way the decision space encountered by decision makers in the uncertain and discontinuously changing physical space that humans necessarily encounter when they contemplate, and alter, their multiscalar environment. If I cut one tree and plant another in its place, have I changed the natural world in a way that might be held blameworthy by some member of a future generation?
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From page 58... ...
Decisions with quickly reversible impacts and decisions affecting small scales probably do not raise questions of intergenerational moral importance. They fall in the northeast, the southeast, or the southwest quadrants of our decision space; they can be decided on normal, individualistic criteria of economic efficiency, balanced, we hope, by considerations of interpersonal equity.
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From page 59... ...
Exploiting hierarchy theory's organizing assumption that large spatial scale of a system is Degree of substitutability Zero Total s o in it Q ._ o in o ._ C' o to a' FIGURE 3 Risk decision square: economists' version. Source: Norton (199Sa)
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From page 60... ...
. correlated with relatively slower rates of change we can superimpose a hierarchical model on the decision space landscape, allowing us to locate risks on an ecologically defined decision space.
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From page 61... ...
It may be possible to conceptualize environmental decision making within such a phenomenological space and also to improve on our mental representations make them more sound, ecologically-by superimposing Holling's "natural" hierarchy on the hierarchy of human values. This description of the new focus of ecologically informed management points toward a new research program determining which social values are associated with particular ecological dynamics.
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From page 62... ...
By abstracting from individuals treating the individuals on level one as "representative" individuals and resolving their disagreements according to traditional ethical concepts- and by applying the Pareto Optimality criterion in a scalar fashion, it is possible to define a good environmental policy as one that has a positive impact on socially desired variables at some levels of the spatiotemporal hierarchy, and negative impacts on none of those socially desirable variables. This formulation of the decision criterion is equivalent, I believe, to the outcome that would occur if "representative" individuals of each community applied, from their own local perspective, the three-tiered decision space outlined in the ecologists' version of the risk decision space.
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From page 63... ...
Environmental Values 3:311-322. Norton, B
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