The Challenge of the Ecosystem Approach

As environmental degradation and change continues, decision makers and managers feel significant pressure to rectify the situation. Scientists, in turn, find themselves under pressure to set out simple and clear rules for proper ecosystem management. The response has been one of frustration. Michael Soule and Laurence Slobdokin both loudly complain that ecology is an intractable science, immature and not very helpful. Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Robert Peters reproach ecologists for not producing simple testable hypotheses.1 Meanwhile policy makers and managers clamour for a measure of ecosystem integrity whose value in different situations can be predicted by simulation models. The question on everyone's mind is "what does ecosystem science identify as the main, simple, basic, universal laws which will allow quantitative prediction of ecosystem behaviour and what are the resulting rules for ecosystem management?" All of these demands on ecology are predicated on a vision of science which assumes that it can provide firm knowledge, and that the only way of obtaining this knowledge is the scientific method. The standard scientific method works well with billiard balls and pendulums, and other very simple systems. However, systems theory suggests that ecosystems are inherently complex, that there may be no simple answers, and that our traditional managerial approaches, which presume a world of simple rules, are wrong-headed and likely to be dangerous. In order for the scientific method to work, an artificial situation of consistent reproducibility must be created. This requires simplification of the situation to the point where it is controllable and predictable. But the very nature of this act removes the complexity that leads to emergence of the new phenomena which makes complex systems interesting. If we are going to deal successfully with our biosphere, we are going to have to change how we do science and management. We will have to learn that we don't manage ecosystems, we manage our interaction with them. Furthermore, the search for simple rules of ecosystem behaviour is futile. Take for example the diversity-stability hypothesis.2 This is a classic