Problems with Ecosystem Management

The lengthy and ongoing struggle to manage federal forests over the last 20 years has taught managers many characteristics of the ecosystem management problem (Rauscher 1999).

• First, societal goals, preferences, and values are numerous, ambiguous, and often in conflict.
• Second, legal mandates are complex, unclear, and at times self-contradictory.
• Third, policy direction is missing, ambiguous, or incomplete with a tendency to rapidly shift in response to political pressure.
• Fourth, no well-defined and widely accepted decision-making process exists. Decisions and the decision-making process are usually based on trial-and-error methods and local, pragmatic inventions of necessity.
• Fifth, participating decision makers and stakeholders vary in the amount of time and effort they contribute to any one decision while engaging only sporadically in the decision-making process.
• Sixth, no widely accepted method is available for producing concensus among often contentious stakeholders. Individuals or small minorities have the power to block decisions at any time through judicial challenges resulting in managerial gridlock.
• Seventh, decisions must be made about actions and their consequences based on missing and uncertain data, and often inaccessible scientific knowledge about ecosystems.
• Finally, the ecosystem management problem is not as much about science as it is about politics (Rittel 1972; Grumbine 1994). The ecosystem management debate is a competitive, conflict-laden social process that determines how power flows in resource management (Grumbine 1994; Chase, 1995; Rauscher 1999).

Clearly ecosystem management is a `wicked or unstructured problem as defined by Rittel and Webber (1973) and introduced to forestry by Allen and Gould (1986). `Wicked is used here in the sense of tricky, complex, and thorny. Wicked problems have no definitively correct formulations. Stake-holders can define the problem on their own terms. Any one definition can only be more or less useful depending upon the definition of useful. Wicked problems have no stopping rule to identify when they are `solved. Solutions are not true or false, but good or bad (ethical) and the only way to test the goodness or badness of solutions is to execute them. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable or an exhaustively describable set of potential solutions. Since they tend to be important with significant consequences, decision makers have no right to be wrong, making the decision process intensely agonizing and usually frustrating (Allen and Gould 1986). Finally, we do not have a theory that tells us how to identify a socially best state, such as `the greatest good for the greatest number (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Problem-solving processes for ecosystem management and other wicked problems can be developed, but perhaps not by exclusive use of rationally based, operations research or systems analysis methods (Rittel 1972; Allen and Gould 1986; Hashim 1990). Such methods have worked well for the `tame problems of science and technology where the impact of the human dimension is eliminated or strictly controlled. Using tame problem-solving methods on wicked problems often results in failure. Barber and Rodman (1990) provide a devastatingly powerful illustration. Given that ecosystem management, like human survival and welfare, is a wicked problem, how can we tame it? We must use the same tools people have always used for handling wicked problems—knowledge, organization, judicious simplification, and inspired leadership.

Understanding the dynamics of public preferences, conflict management and resolution, and cost evaluation and containment as it relates to ecosystem management is critically important. Defining and understanding stakeholders and their preferences is an important part of ecosystem management (Garland 1997). Stakeholder and general public preferences are volatile and sensitive to manipulation through the control of information transmitted through public media (Montgomery 1993; Smith, 1997). Understanding the dynamics of social preferences and how they can be influenced over both the short- and long-term is a vital part of the ecosystem management process. Ecosystem management processes and the institutions that use them must be able to detect and accommodate rapid, and sometimes radical, changes in public preferences (Kohm and Franklin 1997). Successful social conflict management is as important as understanding stakeholder preference dynamics. Almost every aspect of natural resource and environmental work can be controversial, and most of them are.

People educated in modern universities tend to think that there are rational solutions to every conflict. The evidence for such "solutions" is lacking. The ancient-forest controversy (old growth) is not likely to be "solved." It can be brought to a state of impasse, temporary resolution, quiescence, or neglect. The controversy over old-growth forests has an almost unbelievable number of dimensions. It covers: long- and short-term goals, regional and national goals, personal and local goals, animal versus tree impacts, trees as things of beauty with metaphysical benefits versus trees as the raw material for industrial stability and personal financial well-being and employment. There are factual disputes over local financial gains from log experts, disputes over whether industrial closures and layoff have been due to technology, or industrial organization, or due to closing land to logging. There are factual debates about the ancient forest acreage available. Debate continues over the ability to log those areas left and the likely quality of harvested wood. (Giles)

Currently, the dominant means of settling public land disputes have been either litigation or quasi-judicial administrative appeals. Such contentious methods of handling disputes expend much goodwill, energy, time, and money. These methods produce winners and losers, may leave fundamental differences unresolved, and potentially please few or none of the parties (Daniels et al., 1993). Decision makers need a fundamental understanding of the nature of environmental conflicts and disputes and how to use conflict-positive dispute management techniques effectively (Daniels et al., 1993). New approaches to managing the social debate surrounding ecosystem management, such as alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques (Floyd et al., 1996), should be evaluated, taught, and used. Adaptive management techniques are as applicable to the management side of ecosystem management as they are to the ecosystem side. They could be used to suggest a series of operational experiments that study actual public participation and conflict management activities to quickly determine what works and what does not (Daniels et al., 1993; Shindler and Bruce 1997). The ability of federal land managers to avoid grid-lock is heavily dependent on stakeholder willingness to negotiate and ultimately agree on the goals for ecosystem management (Bormann et al., 1993). Unfortunately, people sometimes have preferences based on core values that are so strong and so conflicting that no solution is acceptable (Smith, 1997). To avoid societal gridlock, we must design and implement robust strategies that encourage voluntary conflict resolution among contentious stakeholders and explore other options leading toward a settlement if voluntary resolution is impossible. Such options might include binding arbitration, an agreed upon delay in order to improve our data and knowledge about the ecosystem, or various other forms of conflict resolution.

Ecosystem management cost evaluation and containment is a critical area for economists to study. As a general rule, increases in problem complexity and the degree of wickedness increase the cost of finding satisfactory solutions (Klein and Methlie 1990). Ecosystem management should accommodate limits on time, expertise, and money (Smith, 1997) because sustainable forest management is impossible if there are unsustainable social and economic costs (Craig 1996). Documentation of costs needs to be prepared and made public because few people know or appreciate the costs of efforts to solve wicked problems. For example, the USDA Forest Service has spent approximately US$ 2 billion, equal to 16% annually of the entire National Forest System budget, on planning since the National Forest Management Act was passed in 1976 (Behan 1990). The additional cost of implementing ecosystem management prescriptions and monitoring and evaluating the results has not been estimated. Are we willing or able to marshal the funding to implement ecosystem management that will ensure that federal forest managers can comply with the law and satisfy public preferences? The amount of money that could be spent on ecosystem management nationally may be extremely large and identifying clear benefits may be difficult (Oliver et al., 1993).

In the last century of federal forestland management, timber harvesting has largely paid for multiple-use management activities. Many forecast that the level of timber harvesting under ecosystem management will greatly decline while the cost of ecosystem management will greatly increase. Until managers evaluate the true cost and benefits, it will be difficult to determine whether the public is willing to pay for ecosystem management programs. In any case, a new and rational means of capital resource allocation will be required to fund the ecosystem management process adopted (Sample 1990; Kennedy and Quigley, 1993; Oliver et al., 1993). Refusing to fund ecosystem management and opting for the `do nothing alternative is likely to result in unacceptable desired future conditions. "Plant and animal species do not stop growing, dying, and burning; and floods, fires, and windstorms do not stop when all management is suspended" (Oliver et al., 1993). Nature does not appear to care—either about threatened and endangered species or about humans. People care and people must define goodness and badness. Nature will not do it for us. "Nature in the 21st century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be, intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable" (Botkin, 1990). Making the nature that we want may be expensive. A good understanding of ecological economics will help society make rational choices.