Federal Ecosystem Management

Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife

James R. Skillen

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700621279, 9780700621279
• eBook ISBN: 9780700621644
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

For the better part of the last century, “preservation” and “multi-use conservation” were the watchwords for managing federal lands and resources. But in the 1990s, amidst notable failures and overwhelming needs, policymakers, land managers, and environmental scholars were calling for a new paradigm: ecosystem management. Such an approach would integrate federal land and resource management across jurisdictional boundaries; it would protect biodiversity and economic development; and it would make federal management more collaborative and less hierarchical. That, at any rate, was the idea. Where the idea came from—why ecosystem management emerged as official policy in the 1990s—is half of the story that James Skillen tells in this timely book. The other half: Why, over the course of a mere decade, the policy fell out of favor?

This closely focused history describes an old system of preservation and multi-use conservation ill equipped to cope with the new ecological, legal, and political realities confronting federal agencies. Ecosystem management, it was assumed, would not demand choices between substantive and procedural needs. Looming even larger in the push for the new approach was a shift of emphasis in both ecology and political science—from stability and predictability to dynamism and contingency. Ecosystem management offered more modest managerial goals informed by direct public participation as well as scientific expertise. But as Skillen shows, this purported balance proved to be the policy’s undoing. Different interpretations presented conflicting emphases on scientific and democratic authority. By 2001, when both models had been tested, the Bush administration faulted federal ecosystem management for running “willy-nilly all over the west,” and shelved the policy.

In this book, Skillen gets at the truth behind these contrary interpretations and claims to clarify how federal ecosystem management worked—and didn't—and how many of the principles it embodied continue to influence federal land and resource management in the twenty-first century. How the policy’s lessons apply to our politically and environmentally fraught moment is, finally, considerably clearer with this informed and thoughtful book in hand.

I | The Roots of Federal Ecosystem Management

1 | The Intellectual Context of Ecosystem Management

Introduction

Ecosystem management emerged in the 1990s as a framework for integrating the existing preservation and multiple-use conservation paradigms, which critics said were outdated scientifically and politically. Though ecosystem management lacked a precise definition, many proponents emphasized common themes: managing along ecological rather than political boundaries, maintaining ecological processes and functions rather than resource outputs, and building adaptive and collaborative management processes. These themes reflected new scholarly and popular interpretations of land and resource management and posed direct challenges to the earlier paradigms. Indeed, they reinterpreted sources of scientific and political authority, as distinct from legal authority, to which federal agencies appealed in their planning and management activities.

To understand the political history of ecosystem management, then, it is essential first to consider reinterpretations of the scientific and political models to which federal agencies appealed. Rather than offering an encyclopedia of definitions, this chapter traces developments in the academic fields of ecology and political science during the twentieth century. Changes in both fields were critically important for the rise of ecosystem management, though they were important in different ways. Ecology shaped federal management directly, both because many land and resource managers had formal training in the natural sciences and because Congress established explicit requirements in statutes such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for agencies to incorporate the best available science in their decision making. Thus, federal agencies appealed directly to ecology and related scientific fields as sources of authority to legitimize their decisions. Political science, particularly public administration and public policy, did not have the same direct and controlling impact on federal land and resource management. It more often reflected than led substantial shifts in the public perceptions of, and confidence in, federal land and resource agencies. Federal agencies appealed to political processes, such as public participation in land and resource planning, as sources of authority to legitimize their decisions.

Ecology and political science serve as sources of authority for federal land agencies in two important respects. First, they provide theoretical and empirical explanations of how ecological and political systems work. In particular, they identify the determinative factors that make these systems potentially predictable for the express purpose of control. Second, they provide prescriptive principles for ecological and political systems, explaining how these systems ought to be organized and managed.

So it is significant that both ecology and political science shifted dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century in ways that made prediction and prescription more difficult. The ecological and political sciences that supported preservation and conservation in the first half of the twentieth century promised to provide federal agencies with clear predictive and prescriptive knowledge, justifying substantial administrative autonomy. But ecologists and political scientists in the second half of the twentieth century argued that their fields had promised more than they could deliver. Scholars in both fields increasingly rejected the idea that communities/institutions are closed and stable systems (descriptive) that should be maintained in some static form (prescriptive). Instead, they described communities/institutions as open, dynamic systems that shape and are shaped by a wide range of external environmental factors (descriptive), and they advocated managing them so as to maintain their dynamism, variability, and resilience (prescriptive). The new paradigms in ecology and political science pushed the rhetoric and, to some degree, the practices of federal agencies from an emphasis on autonomous, professional bureaucracies producing optimal flows of particular natural resources to an emphasis on participatory and collaborative administration that maintained things like the “natural range of variability” within ecological and political systems.

In the 1990s, federal agencies adopted ecosystem management precisely because it acknowledged scientific and political uncertainty and promised to integrate scientific and political authority in one comprehensive framework.¹ The rhetoric of ecosystem management, in other words, redefined the very project of land and resource management in ways that were consonant with prevailing ecological and political ideas explained in this chapter.

Ecology

Early Twentieth Century

American ecology emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a way to explain changes in plant communities over time, particularly after a disturbance. It was dominated by Henry Cowles and Frederic Clements, who developed a process-oriented science referred to as “dynamic ecology.” Both botanists theorized that plant communities changed predictably through succession as a response to soil, climate, and competition, and both botanists viewed plant communities as fundamental units of study. It was within this framework that they reconciled the observed complexity of plant communities with their stability and predictability.²

Of the two men, Cowles emphasized the complexity of plant communities to a greater extent, writing in 1901 that “succession is not a straight-line process. Its stages may be slow or rapid, direct or tortuous and often they are retrogressive.” Succession is, he wrote, “a variable approaching a variable.”³ Clements, by contrast, viewed plant communities as complex organisms that go through predictable, developmental changes that lead inexorably to a stable climax community.⁴ He theorized that after a disturbance eliminated the climax community —what he called nudation or retrogression—a successional process would ultimately return the landscape to its predetermined climax community. As historian William Rowley puts it, “Few boast to have a key to the future, but Clementsian plant science could clearly make bold claims to it. A successional process once set in motion would predictably lead to an envisioned result.”⁵

It was Clements’s teleological theory that came to dominate ecology during the first half of the twentieth century. Clements published his basic succession/monoclimax theory in 1905, and in 1913 he began applying it to questions of federal range management.⁶ Later, against the devastating backdrop of the Dust Bowl, Clements argued that ecology could provide “a point of view and a plan of attack” for achieving optimal forage and crop outputs within the land’s fixed ecological limits.⁷

The value of Clementsian theory for range management was clear, and it was nothing less than the promise of control over nature. Within this theory of succession, each area of rangeland had a single climax plant community, and succession proceeded at a relatively steady pace toward that community. Grazing was viewed as a counter-successional pressure that could “be made equal and opposite to the successional tendency, producing an equilibrium in the vegetation at a set stocking rate. A sustainable yield of livestock products [could] be harvested from such an equilibrium.”⁸

Clementsian ecology was firmly embedded in range science by the 1930s and persisted largely unchallenged for several decades.⁹ Indeed, by 1950 the standard view of range health among federal range managers was that it could be measured as the degree of variation from the climax plant community. And since the climax community was the most stable but not the most productive for grazing, the goal of management was to maintain the western range in a subclimax state that produced the most valuable forage for livestock. After all, allowing range plant communities to move to the climax would be a waste of resource potential, particularly with fire and disease constantly threatening the range.¹⁰

Clements focused on range science, but silviculture also developed under a Clementsian influence in the early twentieth century. Silviculturalists accepted the basic idea that plant communities developed through a series of successional stages, leading ultimately to a climax forest. As with range science, silviculturalists determined that maximizing timber production required keeping forests from reaching the climax stage and maintaining them in the subclimax stage in which trees grew most rapidly.¹¹ This thinking contributed by the 1960s to shifts in the US Forest Service’s timber program from selective harvesting to clearcutting, since it kept the forest in a vigorous early stage of succession and allowed the agency to select a monoculture of the most desirable species.

For both range science and silviculture, then, Clementsian ecological theory supported a simple model of sustained yield. By focusing primarily on two variables—vegetative growth rates and vegetation removal through logging or livestock grazing—agencies could promise to deliver the maximum, perpetual supply of resources. The model of ecological balance or equilibrium also supported a policy of forest protection that included little to no room for natural disturbances. Fires, insects, diseases, etc., were all exogenous threats to the forest that would waste timber resources prior to harvest, and the Forest Service in particular set out to eliminate these forces to the extent practicable.

This is not to say that Clementsian ecology went unchallenged. The British botanist Arthur Tansley supported Clements’s holistic perspective, but he rejected the teleological assumptions embedded in his organism metaphor. In particular, he rejected Clements’s assertion that each climatic region had a single climax plant community or association (monoclimax theory), and he rejected the notion that succession could only occur in a single direction toward that climax. However, Tansley shared a broader conviction with Clements, namely that a climax community was “a permanent or apparently permanent condition reached when the vegetation is in equilibrium with all the incident factors.”¹² Tansley offered his own alternative concept for understanding succession in 1935: an “ecosystem.” This concept was, for Tansley, more expansive than the organism concept in that it emphasized the totality of biotic and abiotic relationships: “In an ecosystem the organisms and the inorganic factors alike are components which are in relatively stable dynamic equilibrium. Succession and development are instances of the universal processes tending towards creation of such equilibrated systems.”¹³

The more fundamental challenge to Clementsian theory came from American botanist Henry Gleason. Gleason had started with a Clementsian view of plant communities, but his field research and rudimentary statistical analysis did not support Clements’s holistic view. He simply could not find any empirical evidence or statistical analysis to support the idea that plant communities developed in a predetermined and self-organizing fashion. Variation in plant associations, Gleason argued, was determined by environmental factors at a specific site and the plant species available after disturbance. Plant communities were essentially artifacts of history, not of biological predestination.¹⁴ They were, he argued, governed by the laws of probability, not by some metaphorical genes encoded in a particular association of plants. When he published his critiques in 1917, 1926, and 1939, plant taxonomists who worked with an individualistic lens were sympathetic, but ecologists rejected it outright.¹⁵

1950s and 1960s

In the 1950s, ecologists took a second look at both Tansley’s ecosystem concept and Gleason’s individualistic perspective, and Clements’s organismic theory, though not his ecological holism, faded with a few prominent exceptions.¹⁶ Ecosystem ecology integrated Tansley’s work with other areas of systems thinking, affirming Tansley’s insight that ecosystems were fundamental units of study. Whereas Clements had studied plant communities as organisms, ecologists such as George Hutchinson, Eugene Odum, and Thomas Odum studied ecosystems as machines with complex circuitry that provided feedback mechanisms and self-correction over time. Whereas Clements had looked to individual organisms for his models, the new systems ecologists looked to guided missiles and early computers for inspiration.¹⁷ Population ecologists, by contrast, focused on dynamic population levels and were rooted more directly in evolutionary theory. They confirmed Gleason’s conclusion that populations were governed as much by the contingencies and probabilities of history as by genetics and other predictable factors.

While these two streams of ecology—ecosystem and population—differed significantly in their models, they shared a number of common traits, most notably a growing emphasis on mathematical rigor, which they viewed as the key to carrying ecology beyond its descriptive roots in natural history to a more powerful, predictive science. “Mathematization,” one ecologist wrote in 1940, “is to be regarded as a normal phenomenon in the course of the development of any science.”¹⁸ More specifically, mathematics provided a bridge between the individualistic perspective of Gleason and the holistic perspective of Clements and Tansley. By representing individuals or individual relationships mathematically, ecologists could start with an individualistic emphasis yet still explain how whole populations or ecosystems were greater than the sum of their parts.

Ecosystem ecology emerged in the 1950s out of systems thinking, including cybernetics. George Hutchinson at Yale University led this movement in the late 1940s, but the rise of ecosystem ecology is most often associated with Eugene and Thomas Odum. Indeed, the textbook that Eugene Odum published in 1953 and that the two brothers coauthored through numerous editions, Fundamentals in Ecology, trained a generation of ecosystem ecologists.

As Eugene Odum described it, ecosystem ecology of the 1950s and 1960s was revolutiona...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Roots of Federal Ecosystem Management
• Part II: Adopting Ecosystem Management
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover