Developing multipatch environmental ethics : the paradigm of flux and the challenge of a patch dynamic world

The paradigm of flux poses a challenge to environmental ethics: since nature is in flux, there appears to be no reference state by which to evaluate human caused change. If ecosystems are dynamic and long term climatic instability causes continued change, it is easy to view human caused changes as just another and analogous source of change. A related challenge is represented by the issue of sustainability at the landscape or multipatch scale: while a property of interest (e.g. biological diversity) has a behavior at the local or patch scale, it also has a more important behavior at a multipatch scale. Dynamic changes at the patch scale contribute to, but can be uncorrelated with, dynamic changes at the multipatch scale. This makes observations at the patch scale potentially misleading and conclusions based on small-scale, shortterm observations potentially wrong. How are ethics at larger scales thought about, particularly when individual actions at the patch scale cannot be judged on their own terms without reference to their contribution to the whole? It is possible for an action at the patch scale to be judged on its own terms –whether the intensity of disturbance at the patch scale exceeds the tolerance and response of species that respond to disturbance– but it is at the multipatch scale that this evaluation is most critical. Just as a shift from the “balance of nature” paradigm to the paradigm of flux is seen, there is a need to focus ethics on sustainability: the capacity for dynamic balance at multipatch scales. A human-landscape relationship is sought that allows a dynamic system of diverse elements to retain its capacity to adapt. Ultimately this is based on the proposition that resilience itself, in turn, depends on diversity.