Defining Ecosystem Management

After almost 20 years of increasingly contentious public unhappiness with the management of national forests, the USDA Forest Service officially adopted ecosystem management as a land management paradigm (Overbay 1992). Other federal forest land management agencies such as the USDI Bureau of Land Management, the USDI National Park Service, the USDI Fish and Wildlife Service, the USDC NOAA, and the Environmental Protection Agency have also made the commitment to adopt ecosystem management principles (FEMAT 1993; GAO, 1994). Many excellent historical reviews trace the history of environmental management on forest lands in the United States (Botkin, 1990; Kimmins 1991; Kennedy and Quigley, 1993; Caldwell et al., 1994; Shands 1994).

Ecosystem management represents different things to different people. A recent report by the United States general accounting office states that ecosystem management is a popular concept partly because "there is not enough agreement on the meaning of the concept to hinder its popularity" (GAO, 1994). Indeed, there is a political advantage to keeping it vague because it allows it to be defined and redefined by the user for different audiences and situations (Davis et al. 2001, p.7). This ambiguity and other properties of ecosystem management have led to implementation difficulties and other interpretation problems. At the heart of the ecosystem management paradigm lies a shift in emphasis away from sustaining yields of products towards sustaining the ecosystems that provide these products (Thomas, 1995). Overbay (1992) provided the definition of ecosystem management that the USDA forest service uses:

"Ecosystem management is the means we use to meet the goals specified in our programs and plans. Ecosystem management is the means to an end. It is not an end itself. We do not manage ecosystems just for the sake of managing them or for some notion of intrinsic ecosystem values. We manage them for specific purposes such as producing, restoring, or sustaining certain ecological conditions; desired resource uses and products; vital environmental services; and aesthetic, cultural, or spiritual values".

In contrast, non-governmental scientists tend to define ecosystem management in terms of sustaining `intrinsic ecosystem values. For example, Grumbine (1994) identified 10 dominant themes of ecosystem management which led to his formulating the following definition:

"Ecosystem management integrates scientific knowledge of ecological relationships within a complex sociopolitical and values framework toward the general goal of protecting native ecosystem integrity over the long term."

In this view, ecosystem management is specifically not aimed at resource management, but rather on protecting ecosystem integrity and the needs of non-human life for its own sake—both `intrinsic ecosystem values (Grumbine 1994). As the ecosystem management concept evolves, debates over definitions, fundamental principles, and policy implications will probably continue and shape the new paradigm in ways not yet discernible. A strategic goal for ecosystem management on federal forests might be to find a sensible middle ground between ensuring the necessary long-term protection of the environment and protecting the right of an ever-growing population to use its natural resources to support human life (Davis et al. 2001, p.13).

The ecosystem management paradigm was adopted quickly. No formal studies were conducted to identify the consequences of the changes ushered in by this new approach nor was any well-documented, widely accepted organized methodology developed for its implementation (Thomas 1997). Today, ecosystem management remains primarily a philosophical concept for dealing with larger spatial scales, longer time frames, and the requirement that management decisions must be socially acceptable, economically feasible, and ecologically sustainable. As the definition and fundamental principles that make up the ecosystem management paradigm have not yet been resolved and widely accepted, the challenge is to build the ecosystem management philosophical concept into an explicitly defined, operationally practical methodology (Wear et al., 1996; Thomas 1997).