Sustainability Issues

for Resource Managers

United States

Department of

Agriculture

Forest Service

Pacific Northwest

Research Station

General Technical

Report

PNW-GTR-370

November 1996

This file was created by scanning the printed publication. 

Text errors identified by the software have been corrected; 

however, some errors may remain. 
Technical Coordinators

DANIEL L. BOTTOM is a research fisheries biologist, Research and Development Section, Oregon Department of

Fish and Wildlife, 28655 Highway 34, Corvallis, OR 97333. GORDON H. REEVES is a research fisheries biologist

and MARTHA H. BROOKES is a science editor, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest

Research Station, Forestry Sciences Laboratory, 3200 SW Jefferson Way, Corvallis, OR 97331.

These papers, adapted from talks given at the 1990 meeting of the Oregon Chapter of the American Fisheries

Society, reflect the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the American Fisheries Society, the USDA

Forest Service, or the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Sustainability Issues for

Resource Managers

Daniel L. Bottom

Gordon H. Reeves

Martha H. Brookes

Technical Coordinators

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Pacific Northwest Research Station

Forest Service

General Technical Report PNW-GTR-370

November 1996

In Cooperation with:

Oregon Chapter, American Fisheries Society
Abstract

Bottom, Daniel L.; Reeves, Gordon H.; Brookes, Martha H., tech. coords. 1996. Sustainability issues for

resource managers. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-370. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest

Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 54 p.

Throughout their history, conservation science and sustainable-yield management have failed to maintain the

productivity of living resources. Repeated overexploitation of economic species, loss of biological diversity, and

degradation of regional environments now call into question the economic ideas and values that have formed the

foundation of scientific management of natural resources. In particular, management efforts intended to maximize

production and ensure efficient use of economic "resources" have consistently degraded the larger support systems

upon which these and all other species ultimately depend. This series of essays examines the underlying historical,

cultural, and philosophical issues that undermine sustainability and proposes alternative approaches to conservation. These approaches emphasize the relations among populations rather than among individuals; the integrity of

whole ecosystems across longer time frames; the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative indicators of

human welfare and sustainability; and the unpredictable and interdependent interactions among "natural," scientific,

and regulatory processes.

Keywords: Environmental ethics, environmental history, fisheries management, resource conservation, resource

economics, sustainability.
Foreword

The European presence in North America brought to

the fore new systems of reckoning with the natural

world on the continent; structures of language that

embraced objectivist, instrumentalist, and reductionist

views of the material realm; and the introduction of

ideas new to the Americas about the exclusive ownership of land and water. With the emergence of the

United States as the dominant political and economic

presence on the continent—and especially during the

period of the explosive growth of industrial capitalism

following the Civil War—the conquest, mastery, and

development of the natural environment became the

driving force in American development. The stories

associated with Euro-American expansion, especially

into the western reaches of the continent, are deeply

embedded in the national mythology; collectively they

suggest an almost transcendental belief in the efficacy

of the unlimited manipulation of the natural world,

whose larger purpose and function was the benefit of

humankind.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the conceptual framework for that pragmatic, instrumentalist, and

commercial view of nature embraced Progressive

conservationism, the assumption that orderly, systematic, and engineering approaches toward the natural

world would bring greater material benefits to an everincreasing number of people As such, conservation

ideology preached virtues that were consistent with the

modernizing world of industrial capitalism: efficiency,

the elimination of waste, and the development and

scientific management of resources. During those

heady years when the lumbering, fishing, and mining

industries boomed across the American West, politicians, newspaper editorialists, and a host of publicists

extolled the material advantages to be gleaned in the

great outback. To build stable and progressive communities and to work toward a sustainable future, boosters

argued, the region required only capital, the technical

ability, and a continued influx of enterprising people to

transform nature's bounty to the benefit of its citizens.

As the long twentieth century draws to a close, however,

those once popular stories about earthly dreams being

realized in the fabled land of promise seem distant and

far removed from our contemporary world of vanishing

species and diminishing resources. For the first time

since the inception of the United States in the late

eighteenth century, a sizable public audience is beginning to question and rethink the deeper meaning of the

idea of progress. Today, those who have been the

more reflective about environmental changes tend

toward the darker view of matters. William Howarth

articulated that mood in a 1987 review essay about the

American West. "The old landscape of hope has faded,"

he remarked. "Today the western news is of dying farms

and toxic dumps, the latest detonation at Ground Zero."

The sense of crisis that increasingly infuses the stories

we tell about the natural world is centered in a questioning about larger issues: the idea of "progress"; a

market- and science-driven propensity to examine

isolated segments rather than greater ecological wholes;

fuzzy ideas about the nature of science and its relationship to the management of resources; and an inability

to fully grasp the complexities of the human condition

and its acquisitive tendencies. As Arthur McEvoy, one

of the contributors to this collection, observes:

1Howarth, William. 1987. America's dream of the wide open spaces,

Book World, p 4
All of the dualisms that underlie our traditional thinking about the world, between culture and nature and

law and markets and so on, are so deeply embedded

in our culture and our legal system that it is sometimes

hard to tell when they are at work in our thinking.

Western science and its accompanying thought world—

centered firmly in the material realm of production,

consumption, and the endless appropriation of nature—

are at the root of our contemporary dilemma and the

problems we are having with our places of habitation.

The underlying historical, cultural, and philosophical

issues brought to bear on the management of natural

resources in the United States are the centerpiece of

the papers presented here. These arguments are, in

different ways and with varying degrees of complexity,

critical of traditional forms of economic development.

The collective result of those human activities, according to Courtland Smith, is a full-scale "assault on the

environment as we know it." Conventional strategies of

economic growth and progress, these contributors make

clear, have not led us to the promised land. Instead of

achieving a material world of sustainable comfort, what

we have is a morass of continuing environmental crises

that are mostly the consequence of our cultural behavior. The writer William Kittredge, who has witnessed the

great engineering transformations that have taken place

across the western American landscape, remarked with

bitter irony about his family's agricultural enterprise on

the desert sage lands of southeastern Oregon: "We

shaped our piece of the West according to the model

provided by our mythology, and instead of a great good

place such order has given us enormous power over

nature, and a blank perfection of fields."2

Policy makers in the United States—resource managers,

politicians, administrators, scientists, and their larger

public audiences—have never been charged with

"Thinking Like a Mountain," Aldo Leopold's famous pronouncement about the connectedness of human and

natural systems. Instead, the western world and the

United States in particular have pursued market imperatives, predicated on maximizing the productions of

nature. Over the years, federal agencies and private

organizations have sought to protect the erosion of that

"natural wealth" through a variety of engineering adjustment mechanisms to sustain acceptable levels of those

resources. The scientists, politicians, vested interests,

and bureaucrats who supported those positions must

now reckon with a new reality—that their fondest hopes

and dreams have largely turned to disaster.

The engineering and production-driven imperatives that

were the guiding force behind resource-management

decisions have been based on a belief that landscapes

could be made perfectible; that scientific and technical

expertise could be employed to improve the material

and social condition of humankind; and that the natural

world could be endlessly manipulated to achieve that

end. Time magazine epitomized that attitude in a 1951

article that praised the control and management of

forest lands and waterways in the Pacific Northwest for

creating a new frontier "made ready for man by spectacular engineering." Time cited the scientific work of

the Forest Service and the engineering genius of the

Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, whose combined achievements meant that the

United States could "expand almost indefinitely within

its present boundaries." The magazine gave its full

endorsement to federal agencies who were "making

rivers behave," whose dams were accomplishing their

ends through "geographical judo."3

We have some sense now that those words reflect the

pathologies of an arrogant cultural view of nature, of a

pretend scientific expertise gone wrong, of a reductionist attitude toward the natural world. In an opinion column in the Portland Oregonian early in 1995, a

commercial fisherman pointed out that salmon had

always played an important cultural and economic role

in the life of Northwestemers. "Can anyone . . . imagine

Oregon without salmon," the writer asked?4 For anyone

familiar with the growing biodiversity crisis in the region,

there is nothing surprising in the fisherman's query.

William G. Robbins

Associate Dean

College of Liberal Arts

Oregon State University

2

 Kittredge, William, Owning it all St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. 1987,

p. 62.

3

 Time, July 30, 1951, p. 48-51.

4

 Portland Oregonian, February 7,1995.
Contents

1 Introduction

Daniel L. Bottom

5 Sustainability Across Generations: Economics or Ethics

Bryan G. Norton

13 Is Sustainability Attainable?

Courtland L. Smith

21 Sustainable Redevelopment of Regional Ecosystems Degraded by Exploitive Development

Henry A. Regier and Gordon L. Baskerville

45 Historical Interdependence Between Ecology, Production, and Management in the California Fisheries

Arthur F. McEvoy

54 Acknowledgments
Introduction

Daniel L. Bottom

DANIEL L BOTTOM is a research fishery biologist,

Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Corvallis,

Oregon 97333.

All [of the colonists of the 'new' lands] have

arrived at what they are convinced is a virgin

land. All have found resources that have never

before been tapped and all have experienced a

short period of tremendous boom, when people

were bigger and better than before, and when

resources seemed so limitless that there was no

need to fight for them. Because there was enough

for everyone, egalitarian, carefree societies with

the leisure to achieve great things have prospered.

There was a period of optimism, when people

imagined great futures for their nations. Inevitably however, each group has found that the

resource base is not limitless. Each has experienced a period when the competition for shrinking resources becomes sharper. The struggle

between people increases, whether it be a class

struggle or a struggle between tribes. If people

survive long enough, they eventually come into

equilibrium with their newly impoverished land—

and their lifestyles are ultimately dictated by the

number of renewable resources that their ancestors have left them.

—Flannery 1994, p. 344

The Pacific Northwest—at the edge of America's continental frontier and at the close of the second millennium—is entering the latter stages in the history of

colonization of all "new" lands as described by Flannery.

Here, the entire sequence has unfolded in the course of

a few generations of European colonists: the rapid

economic expansion, the unbridled enthusiasm of

America's manifest destiny, the increased competition

for dwindling resources, the social upheaval of resource

collapse. Today, amid declining fisheries, forests, and

watersheds, North westerners are struggling to achieve

equilibrium with their no longer new land and to decide

the quantity and quality of resources they will leave

their children.

Perhaps what is unique about the history of European

settlement in this region is that it coincided with America's

industrial revolution. The shape of today's Northwest

landscape is not the inadvertent outcome of a long

history of unconscious decisions. It is, by and large, the

product of much deliberate planning and technological

design. Moreover, unlike the 250 years of landscape

change that led to the decline of native species and

ecosystems in nineteenth-century New England

(Cronon 1983, Merchant 1989), the stunning collapse

of Northwestern fisheries and forests during this century

occurred in the presence of a complex regulatory and

management system established, in part, to prevent it.

This system was founded on the principles of scientific

management, which provided information and technologies to control production, minimize waste, and ensure

the equitable distribution of economic resources for all

people. Despite decades of planning and modeling for

sustainable resource use, management results in the

Pacific Northwest nonetheless support the general claim

that "there is remarkable consistency in the history of

resource exploitation: resources are inevitably overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction"

(Ludwig et al. 1993). Today, an unprecedented number

of natural-resource professionals employed by state and

federal governments, universities, and private industries

are witnessing and documenting biotic impoverishment

first hand. More than just another example in the history
of natural resource decline, the Pacific Northwest has

become a case study in the failure of the traditional

tenets of scientific management.

Not surprisingly, the inability to sustain so-called renewable resources has sparked much debate and introspection among the various professions that were supposed

to ensure resource renewal.

Several years ago, the Oregon Chapter of the American

Fisheries Society began a series of interdisciplinary

symposia to discuss the underlying cultural and philosophical issues in the region's expanding conservation

crisis. The first symposium, held in 1989, dealt with

ethical issues in conservation and the moral responsibilities of resource managers toward ecosystems, the

public, and future generations (Reeves et al. 1992). A

second series of papers contained in this volume is

from the 1990 Oregon Chapter meeting. This collection

examines the cultural and historical roots of resource

depletion and the implications for developing more sustainable relations between nature and culture. Although

much has changed since 1990, these papers are no

less relevant today than when they were first presented.

To understand why, we need only consider the events

of recent years.

At the time of the 1990 Oregon Chapter meeting, global

and regional environmental concerns were receiving

increasing media attention. What has become common

knowledge seemed extraordinary then: an expanding

hole in the Earth's protective ozone shield, the warming

of the Earth's climate through carbon dioxide enrichment,

the unprecedented rate of global species extinction. In

the Northwest, a storm was brewing over how to manage

late-successional forests after a federal recommendation to list the northern spotted owl as a threatened

species. Wildlife biologists became embroiled in controversy as they developed conservation strategies to

ensure the viability of old-growth-dependent owls. At

the same time, aquatic biologists were becoming increasingly concerned about the fragmentation of interconnected stream systems and the cumulative threat to

many native fish species. At its annual meeting, the

Oregon Chapter passed a resolution ("Biological Diversity and Global Environmental Change") calling on

state agencies and fisheries professionals to take steps

to minimize the risks of global and regional change to

native aquatic species and ecosystems. Then, in a final

footnote on the last day of the meeting, biologist Willa

Nehlsen, without fanfare, described the widespread

decline of Pacific salmon stocks. No one fully anticipated

the impact of these findings.

One year later, Nehlsen, Jack Williams, and Jim Lichatowich published their paper, "Pacific Salmon at the

Crossroads," a catalog of endangerment that listed 214

stocks of Pacific salmon and steelhead at risk of extinction or of special concern in Washington, Oregon, Idaho,

and California (Nehlsen et al. 1991). By this time, the

Idaho and Oregon chapters of the American Fisheries

Society had already joined several environmental

organizations in calling for a status review of Snake

River sockeye and Chinook salmon stocks under the

federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). But the "Crossroads" paper made it clear that the problem was more

than just a few upper river stocks affected by the gauntlet of mainstem dams on the Columbia River. Scores

of other populations throughout the Columbia basin and

in the smaller coastal rivers of all the Pacific states

were also in trouble. Soon a rash of petitions were filed

for listing other salmonids as threatened or endangered.

A dramatic illustration of the magnitude of the problem

was the steady decline of coho salmon, once the mainstay of the Oregon troll fishery and, today, a candidate

for listing under the ESA.

Within a few years, the regional decline of wide-ranging

anadromous salmon—a cultural symbol of the great

Pacific Northwest—had shifted the political debate from

spotted owls in old-growth forests to the restoration of

whole ecosystems and their associated human economies. These ideas received a national hearing in 1993

when President Clinton convened a televised forest

conference in Portland, Oregon. This meeting was

followed by the report of the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT 1993), whose

analyses and recommendations covered numerous atrisk fish species and stocks and more than 1,000 plant

and animal species thought to be associated with latesuccessional forests. Such concerns were not confined

to the coastal rainforest region in the range of the

northern spotted owl; even before the FEMAT report

was completed, others also began to assess ecological

conditions east of the Cascade Range. An Eastside

Forests Scientific Society Panel (Henjum et al. 1994)

concluded that watersheds and landscapes of eastern

Oregon and Washington are highly degraded. The

panel's final report called for developing a "coordinated

strategy for restoring the eastside landscape and its

component ecosystems."

2
The papers in this volume are not a description of the

resource crisis in the Pacific Northwest. But they were

solicited to better understand its common roots. As a

result, this collection of papers provides a benchmark

of changing ideas in the midst of what one day may be

considered a revolution in resource conservation. Certainly the principles of "ecosystem management" now

emerging from the Northwest experience are well represented in Bryan Norton's melding of hierarchy theory

in ecology with Aldo Leopold's metaphor, "Thinking

Like a Mountain." So is Courtland Smith's critique of

the traditional indicators of economic success implicit in

many new efforts to establish ecological performance

measures in resource conservation. Surely Regier and

Baskerville's history of New Brunswick forests and

North America's Great Lakes offers guidance for a

regional economy that has not yet made the difficult

transition to "sustainable redevelopment." And clearly

Arthur McEvoy's description of the "tripartite interaction

between ecology, production, and management" in

California's fisheries underscores why many policy

makers and scientists now propose "adaptive management" as an alternative approach for conserving unpredictable natural-cultural systems.

But despite their general agreement that traditional

sustainable-yield management has failed and that

individual resource decisions must be placed in a

broader spatial and temporal context, these papers also

reveal a fundamental tension between the moral issues

of sustainability and the rational prescriptions intended

to achieve it. If the failure of people to protect other

species is a reflection of their moral disinterest, might

not all conservation plans and economic prescriptions—

the products of an intellectual detachment—prove selfdefeating? How can we prescribe a moral concern for

biological diversity or plan our way to healthy ecosystems? Becoming committed to wildness in all its unpredictable and messy complexity requires more than just

a cognitive transformation. I think David Ehrenfeld

(1989) had it right when he said, "The ultimate success

of all conservation will depend on a revision of the way

we use the world in our everyday living when we are

not thinking about conservation." Perhaps what we

colonists of the "new" lands do and do not value must

undergo the same test of survival as do all species

(including our own) whose existence is supported or

jeopardized by these values. Perhaps through the unconscious process of co-evolution between nature and

culture, people will begin making the kind of conscious

choices that will allow them to "eventually come into

equilibrium with their newly impoverished land."

References

Cronon, W. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. New York:

Hill and Wang. 231 p.

Ehrenfeld, D. 1989. Life in the next millennium: Who

will be left in the Earth's community? Orion. 8(2): 4-13.

[FEMAT] Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team. 1993. Forest ecosystem management:

an ecological, economic, and social assessment.

Portland, OR: U.S. Department of the Interior [and

others].

Flannery, T.F. 1994. The future eaters: an ecological

history of the Australasian lands and people.

Chatswood, New South Wales: Reed Books. 423 p.

Henjum, M.G.; Karr, J.R.; Bottom, D.L.; Perry, D.A.;

Bednarz, J.C.; Wright, S.G.; Beckwitt, S.A.;

Beckwitt, E. 1994. Interim protection for late-successional forests, fisheries, and watersheds: National

Forests east of the Cascade crest, Oregon and

Washington. Bethesda, MD: The Wildlife Society.

245 p.

Ludwig, D.; Hilborn, R.; Walters, C. 1993. Uncertainty,

resource exploitation, and conservation: lessons

from history. Science. 260: 17, 36.

Merchant, C. 1989. Ecological revolutions: nature,

gender, and science in New England. Chapel Hill,

NC: University of North Carolina Press. 379 p.

Nehlsen, W.; Williams, J.E.; Lichatowich, J.A. 1991.

Pacific salmon at the crossroads: stocks at risk from

California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. Fisheries.

16(2): 4-21.

Reeves, G.H.; Bottom, D.L.; Brookes, M.H. 1992.

Ethical questions for resource managers. Gen.Tech.

Rep. PNW-GTR-288. Portland, OR: U.S. Department

of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest

Research Station. 39 p.

3
Sustainability Across Generations: Economics or Ethics

Bryan G. Norton

BRYAN G. NORTON is a professor in the School of

Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,

Georgia 30332.

Aldo Leopold began his career as a forester in the arid

Southwest Territories, and ended it as a college professor and public-spirited, if much-maligned, Conservation

Commissioner in Wisconsin. It may seem a bit odd to

begin a discussion of fisheries management by citing

Leopold—whose preferred management medium was

sand, not water, and whose ethic was of the land, not

the sea—but Leopold's experiences are relevant because

he was self-conscious and philosophical about both his

successes and his failures, and he proposed some general theories and conclusions about management over

long periods of time. Some of Leopold's general conclusions about environmental management, I am convinced, are very relevant to managers of fisheries today.

Early in his career, Leopold set out, among his many

other tasks, to eradicate wolves in the Southwest Territories. By the mid-1930s, he had switched from a conscientious and efficient predator eradicator to a predator

protector (at least in remote areas). By this time, Leopold

was also committed to polishing old writings and creating

some new material for a collection of nature essays.

Leopold seems to have led two parallel lives: one as a

hard-headed resource manager, trying to make resources

available to people; the other as a romantic, sprinkling

his nature essays with empathic metaphors and speculating about our obligations to protect the natural world.

The collection of essays, eventually to be called A

Sand County Almanac (1949), was accepted for publication by Oxford University Press just a week before

Leopold's death; the book represented the highest

flowering of Leopold-the-romantic.1

The collection was to be illustrated by Albert Hochbaum,

Leopold's former student and Director of the Delta Duck

Station in Delta, Manitoba. Although Hochbaum was

unable to complete the illustrations, he remained a

sympathetic but firm critic of Leopold's efforts in the

last decade of the older man's life. In 1944, Hochbaum,

in criticism of the essays he'd seen so far, wrote: "I just

read they killed the last lobo in Montana last year. I

think you'll have to admit you've got at least a drop of

its blood on your hands." He proceeded to insist that

Leopold acknowledge that he, too, had once been a

despoiler (Meine 1988, p. 453).

Hochbaum, therefore, forced Leopold to address the

conflict between the romantic message of his essays

and his own actions as a young game manager.

Leopold-the-manager had already reversed his position, arguing in a scientific vernacular for predator

protection in remote areas:

It is probably no accident that the near-extinction

of the timber wolf and cougar was followed, in

most of the big-game states, by a plague of

excess deer and elk and the threatened extirpation of their winter browse foods.... It is all very

well, in theory, to say that guns will regulate the

deer, but no state has ever succeeded in regulating its deer herd satisfactorily by guns alone.

Open seasons are a crude instrument and usually kill either too many deer or too few. The wolf

1My account of Leopold's experiences owes much to Meine (1988)

and Flader (1974).

5
is by comparison, a precision instrument; he

regulates not only the number, but the distribution, of deer. In thickly settled counties we cannot have wolves, but in parts of the north [of

Wisconsin] we can and should.

—Meine 1988, p. 458

Leopold's argument is symptomatic of his evolution as

a resource manager Leopold attended the Yale Forest

School, which was founded with a gift from Gifford

Pinchot's family, and immediately entered Pinchot's

Forest Service in 1909. Leopold generally followed

Pinchot's utilitarian approach, which emphasized use of

resources, especially for material production (Hays

1959). Pinchot said, for example:

the first great fact about conservation is that it

stands for development... (Its} first principle is

the use of the natural resources now existing on

this continent for the benefit of the people who

live here now.

—Pinchot 1947, p. 261

Pinchot relied on economic calculations to determine

policy, and limited production only when threats of

shortages and degradation of productive systems

became obvious. It was in Pinchot's spirit that Leopold

had organized sportsmen and stockmen to eradicate

wolves and mountain lions from the Southwest Territories. In a 1920 speech before the Sixth American

Game Conference, Leopold had said:

It is going to take patience and money to catch

the last wolf or lion in New Mexico. But the last

one must be caught before the job can be called

fully successful.... [W]hen they are cleaned out,

the productiveness of our proposed refuges and

plans for regulation of kill, will be very greatly

increased.

—Meine 1988, p.181

But in 1943, goaded by Hochbaum, Leopold composed

a brief, but powerful, mea culpa on wolf eradication.

Leopold chose a metaphor, "Thinking Like a Mountain,"

to express his own journey from wolf eradicator to wolf

protector and land ethicist. Leopold told a story, perhaps

fictional, of an incident that occurred on a "reconnaissance mission" in the Forest Service's vast holdings in

the Southwest Territories.

He tells of how he and his fellow crew members shot a

she-wolf from a high rim rock; Leopold approached the

mortally wounded wolf in time to see "a fierce green fire

dying in her eyes." "I was young then, and full of the

trigger-itch," he confessed. "I thought that because

fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would

mean hunters' paradise." Leopold perceived the result:

the bones of the desired deer herd, "dead of its own

too-much," littered the mountain.

The theme of the essay is time: "Only the mountain has

lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the

wolf," he said. Thinking like a mountain is putting oneself in the frame of time of the mountain, and "a mountain lives in mortal fear of its deer." For good cause:

"while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in

two or three years, a range pulled down by too many

deer may fail of replacement in as many decades."

Leopold was here recognizing how and why his early

deer management plan had gone astray: utilitarian,

economically calculating management was management conducted from the time perspective of humans.

Consumed with human cares, we strive for "peace in

our time," and find it hard to see things from the mountain's viewpoint, a viewpoint measured in ecological

and geological time, not human time (Leopold 1949,

p. 129-133).

To help the reader understand the differing frames of

time, Leopold-the-romantic created a metaphor. The

mountain was personified: the dead sage became bones

moldering, along with the deer bones, under the highlined junipers. The mountain has not only a vegetative

skeleton; it also thinks, and feels fear. If we are to

manage nature without raising havoc, we must think

like the mountain thinks. The metaphor of the living

mountain drove Leopold's re-thinking process; organicism

aided him in thinking as the mountain thinks, in the

longer durations of ecological time.

The pattern of Leopold's thinking on wolf management

was reinforced by his more detached observation of the

Dust Bowl phenomenon. Leopold was careful to point

out that he was not an agronomist, that his observations

were only those of a nonprofessional. But he had traced

what he called "illness" in natural communities, especially

in the Southwest Territories, even before venturing a

general theory of fragility of arid systems in 1923, and

was hence moving toward an explanation of the Dust

Bowl well before it occurred (Leopold [1924] 1979). His

explanation of the Dust Bowl, by then a fait accompli,

was summarized in a succinct, but powerful passage

near the end of "Thinking Like a Mountain." Just after

summarizing the lesson he'd learned about mountains

fearing deer, Leopold made the comparison:

6
So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his

range of wolves does not realize that he is taking

over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the

range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into a sea.

—Leopold 1949, p. 132

Leopold employed ecological terms to discuss these

two cases—deer irruptions and the Dust Bowl—and he

thereby developed a paradigm of environmental management gone awry. Leopold was ready, however

tentatively, to articulate his criticisms of Pinchot-style

management and propose a broad "theory" of environmental management of his own. The new theory represented an application of Charles Elton's community

model of ecological systems. Leopold met Elton in 1931

at a conference on natural cycles, and they became

immediate friends. Already acquainted with Elton's

important 1927 book, Animal Ecology, Leopold began

in the 1930s to apply ecological theory to management

problems (Meine 1988, p. 282-284). According to

Elton's theory, species are understood functionally, in

terms of their contribution to a larger, biotic community.

Applying Elton's concepts, Leopold theorized as follows:

The failures in the two case studies resulted from

attempts to increase the output of a resource base

through more intensive management. In both cases,

initial successes were registered because productivity

increased dramatically. And in both cases, after a few

years or decades, productivity crashed. Elton's theory

provided an explanation of the salient facts: ecosystems

embody redundancy, with many species fulfilling each

function. The system changes dynamically through

time; its complexity and redundant energy pathways

sustain the system through these changes.

Elton's ecological model explained the breakdown

encountered in managed systems: complexity, which

emerged over millennia of evolution and competition,

is disrupted as pervasive human activities destroy

redundant pathways in the functions of the community,

the flows of energy through the biotic pyramid have been

simplified and reduced. The system is ill.2 Only sharp

observers can see the gradual development of the illness.

2

This essay (Leopold 1939), an extremely important one, represents

a summary ofwhat Leopold had learned about environmental

management. He applied Elton's community model, emphasizing the

role of species as vehicles carrying energy through the pyramidally

organized community.

But then, usually in response to environmental stress—

a hard winter or a prolonged drought—the system

collapses into serious illness. The theory therefore

explained large-scale failures of environmental management—the Dust Bowl and deer irruptions and famines.

Leopold developed on this basis what I will call a "contextual" approach to environmental management. Each

management problem should be considered in two

ways, first as a cell and second as a cell-in-context. At

first Leopold thought deer-wolf-hunters was a manageable cell in the system; but he learned that in the arid

conditions of the Southwest, it was not. He had also to

pay attention to "the mountain," the vegetative cover

that gives structure, complexity, and a certain type of

stability to ecological communities. Leopold, building

on Elton's theoretical conception of a community, concluded that we must always manage any species in its

context, that is, as a member of an ecological community. Management will not be considered adequate if

the activity decreases the complexity of the contextual

system (causes "illness" in the community). Under

these conditions, the larger system is in danger of

destabilization (such as on the deer-infested mountain).

Leopold's insight was to use organicism as a metaphor

to explain that cells in the mountain "organism" change

on a slower scale than do management choices of

managers when they think in terms of market forces

demanding hunting opportunities. He proposed, in effect,

that ecological theory, not economics, be embraced as

the comprehensive language of environmental management. Accordingly, he groped toward a biologically

based criterion of "ecosystem health." Such a criterion

would protect the ecological communities that provide

the context for systems (cells) that produce resources

desired by people. Leopold's criterion, much quoted

but—I am convinced—little understood, is: "A thing is

right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability,

and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it

tends otherwise" (Leopold 1949, p. 224-225). I am

suggesting that integrity is the most important aspect of

this criterion, and that Leopold had set as his goal of

management to protect the complexity of larger systems.

Leopold's elegant theory was unfortunately impossible

to apply, given the state of development of ecological

theory in his day. Although Eltonian ecology provided a

general framework for conceiving species and complexes of species as embodied in a larger, contextual

community, it lacked an adequate conception of stability

7
as applied to the dynamic system of nature. Leopold's

theory required a dynamic conception of stability, one

capable of relating a resource-producing subsystem to

its larger, dynamic context. This concern for dynamics

is what led Leopold to emphasize health and integrity

of ecological systems.

He recognized the problem clearly and argued persuasively, in 1939, that the equilibrium model was inadequate to the complexities of management. He warned

that a static conception of balance of nature cannot

successfully model natural systems:

To the ecological mind, balance of nature has

merits and also defects. Its merits are that it

conceives of a collective total, that it imputes

some utility to all species, and that it implies

oscillations when balance is disturbed. Its defects are that there is only one point at which

balance occurs, and that balance is normally

static.

—Leopold 1939, p. 727

Management must be conducted with an eye on the

larger context, which is expected to change and develop

in its own frame of time. Inadequate management of a

cell can cause destabilization of the context. As Leopold

emphasized in "Thinking Like a Mountain," these interlocking systems embody differing scales of time-the

mountain must think more slowly than the hunter or the

deer, and the environmental manager must think like

the mountain to manage deer-hunter interactions in

their larger context. Stability and health in nature must

be measured in ratios, by comparing rates of change.

Lacking a serviceable conception of dynamic stability

of larger systems in which management units are embedded, Leopold's management theory was disabled

and remained speculative.

Leopold, nevertheless, launched into a discussion of

ecological systems as energy pyramids and argued that

"each species, including ourselves, is a link in many

food chains." Leopold then notes that "the trend of

evolution is to elaborate the biota," to make it more

complex and to multiply the channels through food

chains by which energy flows to the top of the pyramid.

Contextual management conceives the context of

management cells to be the larger ecosystem in which

the cell is embedded. It remains healthy only if the

energy flows in the pyramid remain open and vigorous.

This elaborated biota, Leopold described as:

a tangle of chains so complex as to seem disorderly, but when carefully examined the tangle is

seen to be a highly organized structure. Its

functioning depends on the cooperation and

competition of all its diverse links.

—Leopold 1939, p. 727-28

Leopold, stymied in his attempt to develop positive prescriptions based on ecology, did the next best thing. He

fell back upon his governing organicist metaphor and

an analogical implication drawn from medicine: lacking

a cure for the disease, practice preventive medicine.

Caution and humility should, he concluded, guide environmental managers. If you cannot fix the complex

system emerging through time, avoid breaking it.

Human changes differ from evolutionary changes, he

said, which "are usually slow and local." Leopold therefore distinguished between management activities that

are sufficiently violent to disturb their context from those

that are not—the former interrupt the energy flows of

the community in which they are embedded, the latter

do not. He said:

The combined evidence of history and ecology

seems to support one general deduction. The

less violent the man-made changes, the greater

the probability of successful readjustment in the

pyramid.

—Leopold 1939, p. 728

Leopold was therefore struggling toward a dynamic conception of ecological stability, health, and integrity. His

tentative contextual model would emphasize complexity, the ecological processes that allow ecosystems to

perpetuate themselves, rather than diversity itself. By

returning to organicism, Leopold was proposing a new

conceptualization of the goals of contextual management: to protect the autogenic functioning—the self-determination—of the larger system. Economically motivated

management is acceptable to that point where trends in

the exploited subsystems start to accelerate changes in

the larger, slower moving system. A system that is

losing complexity rapidly as a result of pervasive and

violent changes in its subsystems is ill. But here ecology

failed Leopold. The fledgling science had provided no

quantitative measure, or even a clear qualitative conception, of autogenic functioning.3

 Little progress has

3

The most significant developments since Leopold's death have

been applications of information theory and systems theory to

ecological systems; see Margalef (1963). Also, see Ulanowicz

(1986) for an excellent explication of the self-organization of ecological systems.

8
been made, since Leopold's day, in applying dynamic

conceptions of stability and integrity to actual management practices and, until recently at least, little more

has been learned about how to relate processes that

occur in different frames of time

Recently, however, a new and highly promising theoretical approach, "hierarchy theory," has emerged within

ecology; it bears striking resemblance to Leopold's

community model and contextualist approach to management. Hierarchy theory, which shows promise to

give more precision to the concepts that plagued

Leopold's theory of environmental management, is

based on general systems theory. It focuses not so much

on the diversity of systems as on their complexity and

internal organization—what Leopold called "integrity"

(Leopold 1949, p. 224).

According to hierarchy theorists, natural systems exhibit

complexity because they embody processes occurring

at different rates of speed; generally speaking, larger

systems (such as a community) change more slowly

than the microhabitats and individual organisms that

compose them, just as an organism changes more

slowly than the organs and cells that compose it. Further,

the community survives after individuals die and, while

changes in the community affect (constrain) the activities

of the individuals that compose it, the individuals themselves are unlikely to affect the larger system because

the individual is likely to die before the slow-changing

system in which it is embedded will be significantly

altered by its activities.

This is not to say that elements have no impact on

systems that provide their context. The elements, often

called "holons" in the context of hierarchical analysis,

are "two-faced"; each holon "has dual tendency to

preserve and assert its individuality as a quasi-autonomous whole and to function as an integrated part (of an

existing or evolving) larger whole" (Koestler 1967, p. 343;

Allen and Starr 1982, p. 8-10). As a part, the holon

affects the whole, but scale is very important here—the

"choices" of one element will not significantly alter the

whole—but if that part's activities represent a trend

among its peers, then the larger, slower changing system will reflect these changes on its larger and slower

scale. One cell turning malignant will not affect an

organism significantly unless a trend toward malignancy

is thereby instituted.4 If such a trend is instituted, then

4

 Note, however, that changes in the abundance of some species—

keystone species—in an ecosystem may have a profound effect on

thelargercommunity.

the organism might eventually be destroyed by that

trend in its parts. Technology, like plows, drift nets, and

rifles, permits humans to create more violent and abrupt

trends than nature normally experiences. Natural systems, especially fragile ones, can be overwhelmed by

such trends initiated by economically motivated human

exploitation. Leopold's contextual approach to management, therefore, focused attention not on individual

actions, but on broad social trends in the activities

affecting ecological systems.

The multiscalar approach of the hierarchy theorists to

time and space in ecology is reminiscent of Leopold's

metaphorical discussion of differing scales of time and

our perception of them in "Thinking Like a Mountain."

Hierarchy theory provides a more precise conceptual

model for what Leopold called "the land," which was for

Leopold a slower changing system composed of many

faster changing parts. He explicitly commented that our

failure to see deterioration in the land community is due

to our failure to recognize that ecological and evolutionary changes take place in a slower scale of time than

the scale perceived by people. Agriculturalists and game

managers focus on the rapid-change systems that produce annual crops. The mountain, as Leopold explained

metaphorically, must look at the value of wolves in a

longer perspective (Leopold 1949, p. 133, 206).

In ecology, which emphasizes the interrelationships

among systematic elements, hierarchy theory provides

a useful tool for analyzing the multilayered complexity

of natural systems, and shows promise to model the

dynamic relations among their parts. The hierarchical

model may begin to point the direction toward a managerially useful concept of dynamic stability and ecosystem health. It can locate this concept in the interrelated

functions of fast- and slow-changing systems. Accelerating changes in normally slow-changing systems may

indicate deterioration—illness—in the land community

or, perhaps, in even larger systems, such as the global

atmosphere.

If a pervasive trend in environmental management can

be identified today, it is toward a more holistic, or at

least more contextual, management model. For example,

in the "Foreword" to its brochure on Chesapeake Bay

management, the Environmental Protection Agency

writes:

The Bay is, in many ways, like an incredibly

complex living organism. Each of its parts is

9
related to its other parts in a web of dependencies

and support systems. For us to manage the Bay

well, we must first understand how it functions.

—EPA 19825

The most acute current problem in managing the Bay,

the algal blooms resulting from too much run-off from

lawns, fields, and pastures, can then be interpreted as

rapid change in a normally slow-changing system. This

change, according to the model, results from accelerating changes in residential development patterns, agricultural production, and consumer taste. Farmers,

homebuilders, and fishermen tend to choose according

to short frames of time, seeking, as Leopold said,

"peace in [their] time."

Leopold's contextual model for environmental management, with or without the formal elaboration furnished

by hierarchy theory, helps us to understand long-term

concerns in management of natural resources, including fisheries. As an extreme example, take the "blackened redfish" case. A recipe, originated by New Orleans

chef Paul Prudhomme, gained so much popularity that

demand for redfish exploded, forcing Louisiana to ban

commercial taking of redfish from mid-January to September 1988.

Acting on economic motives and in response to a rapid

trend in public tastes, fishermen concentrated their

efforts on catching redfish, for an ever-expanding market at highest-ever prices. They acted in the rapidchange system that changes on a human scale of time.

But redfish populations were decimated by this rapid

change. Leopold's model interprets this result as an

example in which the maximization criterion of economic management must yield to limits defined in

terms of the biological abilities of the larger system to

produce redfish.

This example also explains a unique feature of Leopold's

contextual ethic—it concerns tendencies and trends,

focusing on intergenerational trends in populations,

rather than on actions that affect individuals. Leopold's

Land Ethic is systemic, not individualistic—it is not

wrong to eat redfish—it is wrong to eat them into extinction because of a runaway trend in consumer fashions.

The goal of environmental management is to protect

5

 For another example of contextual approaches to management,

one applied to protecting old growth and biodiversity over the entire

region of the Pacific Northwest, see Harris (1984).

the larger context, the system that supports the fishery,

and this requires attention to relations among populations, not individuals. Management concern on this

larger scale emphasizes protecting the intertemporal

"integrity" of environmental systems.

Distinguishing "resource management", which looks at

resource use problems in economic time, from "environmental management," which looks at them in ecological time, may thus be useful. Aggregative analyses

and productivity criteria usually guide resource management. Trends in short-cycle management patterns,

however, can overbound normal parameters of change

in their larger, ecological context, which normally fluctuates and changes gradually through intergenerational

time. On this environmental scale, the criterion is not

economics, but ecological assessments of the integrity

of larger systems.

Having argued that Leopold opted for a contextual

management model—a model that can be given more

precise formulation in terms of hierarchy theory, one

that implies ecologically formulated constraints on

economic activity—I wish now to argue that Leopold's

intergenerational model suggests also an intergenerational ethic. A contextual model would place limits on

economic activities that destroy or disrupt the larger,

normally slow-changing, environing system that perpetuates those activities through time.

Standard economic models are ill-equipped to account

for these constraints because they discount costs and

benefits across time, to express all values in present

dollars. This methodological approach to time preference reduces to negligibility any concerns for intergenerational impacts of present activities. A contextual,

hierarchical model, on the other hand, suggests that

costs and benefits will be calculated within cells of a

larger system, which might imply limitations based on

the need to maintain reasonable stability of populations

(interpreted as slower scaled changes in environing

systems) across generations.

What is needed is a "moral filter," corresponding to the

mathematical filters of hierarchy theory. John Rawls, in

his infinitely fertile treatise A Theory of Justice, suggests

such a moral filter, which he calls the "veil of ignorance"

(Rawls 1971). Imagine a rational, self-interested individual, Rick, who chooses the general rules for a just

society, knowing that he will have to live in that society

subsequently. Rick, not knowing the specifics of his

10
social standing and endowments, will design a society

fair to individuals of any standing and varied endowments. In fact, the veil of ignorance is many veils. By

varying Rick's knowledge, we can filter out individually

motivated interests based on such attributes as gender,

class, and economic status.

For our present purposes, we can place Rick behind a

veil of intergenerational ignorance—he must design a

society that he would be willing to live in without knowing the generation in which he is going to live. Now, if

he worries that species can be irretrievably decimated

by culinary fashions, he will design a society that constrains social and economic trends that tend to destabilize its larger environmental contexts.

If it turns out that Rick is born into a primitive society, or

even European medieval society, the intergenerational

environmental constraints may seem to be minimal;

with hindsight and improved scientific monitoring, however, we can say that conformity to these constraints

may have protected the countryside in Greece and

China, for example, from the disastrous effects of

deforestation and erosion and the inland fisheries from

decimation by dams. Contextualism understands moral

obligations to land systems in a historical context and

emphasizes that, given our knowledge of ecological

fragility and our powerful technological capabilities to

alter those systems, a generation such as ours has

special obligations. As Rick foresees a society such as

our own, which alters nature rapidly and has available

frightening models projecting cataclysmic changes in

the environmental context, he would expect that society

to question the moral acceptability of such violent

impacts. He would choose a society that would struggle

to delineate parameters and thresholds, based on their

best models of biology, ecology, climatology, and so on.

These parameters and thresholds would, in turn, imply

constraints on trends in individual behavior that threatens to accelerate destabilizing changes in a normally

slow-changing environing system. From a moral viewpoint, these constraints would represent "fair" treatment

of future generations—the treatment a rational, selfinterested chooser would insist upon if he did not know

which generation he will inhabit.6

6

ln this way, we can understand fairness across generations without

introducing the metaphysically puzzling notion of "rights" of future

generations See Norton (1982).

When environmentalists accept an obligation to future

generations, they do not see it as an obligation to any

particular individuals; the relationship occurs at the interface of two systems—human economics, demography,

and so on, with geophysical, biotic systems. With this

view, environmentalists believe that biological and

climatological constraints exist that correspond to the

moral constraints limiting the extent to which any generation could fairly degrade the world's resources.

Believing this, it is not surprising that environmentalists

also believe that people are morally required to undertake stabilizing actions when projections show that

trends in individual behavior threaten a biological or

climatological threshold, and institute accelerating

changes in the environing systems.

These obligations are viewed holistically, organically—

they are owed to the future, just as we owe our forefathers, not individually but collectively, for our cultural

heritage; these obligations derive from a faith in the

value of the human struggle and from the conservative

idea of Edmund Burke that a society represents "a

partnership not only between those who are living, but

between those who are living, those who are dead and

those who are to be born" (Burke 1910, p. 93-94).

Environmentalists' moral intuitions that we ought not to

destroy a fish stock to cater to momentary fashions, nor

should we overheat our atmosphere by releasing, in a

few decades, all the carbon stored in fossil fuels over

millennia are not based on a balancing of future winners

and losers, however. Rather, they are based on the

belief that we ought not to destabilize the normally

slow-changing systems on which the daily activities of

many generations depend. In this sense, I conclude

that in contextual environmental management—management that is sensitive to the importance of trends in

whole populations across ecological scales of time—

economic considerations become ethical considerations.

References

Allen, T.F.H.; Starr, T.B. 1982. Hierarchy theory:

perspectives for ecological complexity. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Burke, E. 1910. Reflections on the revolution in France.

London: Dent.

Elton, Charles. 1927. Animal ecology. New York:

MacMillan.

11
Environmental Protection Agency. 1982. Chesapeake Bay: introduction to an ecosystem. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Flader, S. 1974. Thinking like a mountain: Aldo

Leopold and the evolution of an ecological attitude

toward deer, wolves, and forests. Columbia, MO:

University of Missouri Press.

Harris, L. 1984. The fragmented forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hays, S. 1959. Conservation and the gospel of efficiency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Koestler, A. 1967. The ghost in the machine. New

York: MacMillan.

Leopold, A. 1939. A biotic view of land. Journal of

Forestry. 37: 727-730.

Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County almanac. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Leopold, A. 1979. Some fundamentals of conservation

in the Southwest. Environmental Ethics. 1: 131-148.

Margalef, R. 1963. Perspectives in ecological theory.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Meine, C. 1988. Aldo Leopold: his life and work. Madison, Wl: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Norton, B.G. 1982. Environmental ethics and the

rights of future generations. Environmental Ethics.

4: 319-337.

Pinchot, G. 1947. Breaking new ground. Reprint.

Washington, DC: Island Press.

Rawls, J. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA:

The Belknap Press.

Ulanowicz, R.E. 1986. Growth and development:

ecosystem phenomenology. New York: SpringerVerlag.

12
Is Sustainability Attainable?

Courtland L. Smith

COURTLAND L SMITH is a professor, Department

of Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis,

Oregon 97331.

People adapt to a wider range of habitats than any other

animal because of culture. Culture, which includes the

values and behaviors about economic enterprise and

ecological practice, can also sow seeds of self-destruction. In Western culture, economic and ecologic values

have been increasingly at odds with one another.

One view is that economic growth is necessary to promote progress and prosperity. Those looking at altered

environments stemming from economic growth worry

that continued diminishment of resources, loss of species,

and degradation of habitats threaten the sustainability

of society. The resolution of these apparently contradictory economic and ecologic views is at the heart of

achieving sustainability. Those promoting progress argue

economic growth is needed to fulfil pressing environmental and economic needs. If prosperity requires economic

growth, then sustainability is not primary. The future

would depend on adapting to the changed environments

necessary to continue economic growth. Those promoting sustainability predict human society will not persist

without stopping thedestruction of resources and habitats.

Since the 1930s, maximum sustainable yield management of fish and forest resources gave hope for maintaining environmental quality while also producing

sustained growth (Mason and Bruce 1931, Russell

1942, Steen 1984). Subsequently, "sustainable" has

become a modifier for agriculture, development, economics, energy, environment, fisheries, forestry, futures,

growth, livelihoods, and world. Most meanings ofsustainability suggest being able to continue living in a habitat

or using a resource in the same way well into the future.

Experience of Fisheries as a Model

Fishery scientists have a half century of experience with

sustainable yield management (Larkin 1977). Maximum

sustainable yield is institutionalized in legislation establishing fishery management practices. Maximum sustainable yield is, "the largest average catch or yield that can

continuously be taken from a stock under existing environmental conditions" (Ricker 1975:4).

Sustainable yield management has been successful in

few fisheries. Most fish stocks are overfished and continue to be fished at higher rates than biologists think

can be sustained. Why after 50 years of sustainable

yield management are fish stocks in such poor condition'?

The answer lies in the culture within which sustainable

yield management is practiced. Because of the cultural

priority given to economic growth, sustainable yield

management is a continual struggle to hold off the

environmental threats posed by economic growth pressures. Fisheries, then, represent on a smaller scale the

problem society faces as a whole. If sustainable yields

cannot be achieved for fisheries, where knowledge is

usually good about what it takes to attain sustainability,

then how will sustainability be successful in much more

complex systems?

Growth, Productivity, and Distribution

Western economic values promote growth and productivity. These values propel Western cultures on a path

13
of rapid material gain, but thwart a course toward sustainability. Economic growth forces come from the basic

assumption that satisfaction increases with quantity.

Increased productivity—getting more outputs with fewer

inputs—in Western cultural beliefs is key to improving

people's well-being. The benefits from economic growth

and productivity get distributed quite inequitably. The

push for rapid growth, promotion of productivity gains,

and the resulting distributional inequalities obstruct

attaining sustainability.

Growth

Classical economics rests on a utility function that

assumes satisfaction increases with quantity. Although

satisfaction does not increase with more pollutants,

toxins, and waste products, individual and organizational

behavior typically bear out the assumption that people

prefer more, rather than less. The daily competition

between individuals, agencies, and firms to increase

their gross product shows the preference for more. Who

prefers lower compensation and less acclaim? What

state agency in the legislative process of fiscal resource

scavenging is comfortable with a declining budget?

What individual or firm is satisfied with fewer financial

resources and less influence? Western economic values

assume that the competition between individuals, agencies, and firms helps in achieving greater productivity.

Fisheries, like all renewable resources, have limits to the

quantity that can be produced. When confronted with

some physical limit, be it the size of a fish stock, water

supply, or habitat availability, the first inclination of those

who promote economic growth is to get around the

constraint and provide more. Typically, one solution for

deficient fish stocks is augmentation. For example,

increase the stock size by raising recruitment and growth

or by reducing predation and competition. Action to overcome limits captures more popular support than accepting limits. Even so, stock size eventually reaches some

constraint past which additional increase is not attainable.

If technology to increase supply does not work to raise

quantity, another alternative is substitution. People seek

to find something that is more abundant and can replace

the item in short supply. The ideal for a substitution is

that it should perform as well or better than the original

and should be of lower cost, be it hatchery for wild

salmon, plastic packaging for paper, ceramic magnets

for metal, silicon sealants for rubber, plastic ornamentation for chrome, or glitter for gold. Relative to the issue

of sustainability, substitutions mean giving up streams

protected by old growth for silviculture and salmon for

electricity. Substitutions commit some plants and animals

to extinction to pursue economic growth.

In fisheries, limited-entry programs have been a mechanism to control growth in fishing effort, but fisheries still

suffer from excess fishing capacity and fish stocks are

still in jeopardy. Several reasons explain the poor results.

First, matching the numbers who can fish to stock size

is politically very difficult. Second, productivity improvements reduce the effectiveness of limited entry programs.

Even with the same number fishing, improved catching

ability means the same number of people take more fish.

Limiting entry is an input control on the number fishing.

An alternative is output controls on the amount of fish

caught. These controls do not work any better because

of social and political pressures to raise harvest quotas

and because of errors in calculating the quotas too

high. Attempts to create property rights in fish stocks,

too, fail to solve the problem. Short-term economic

incentives favor exploitation and not long-term protection

(Krautkraemer 1988, Clark 1990). In timber, the private

lands were overcut before public lands. Attaining

sustainability has been no more successful in forestry

than in fisheries (Regier and Baskerville, this volume).

Classical economics emphasizes not just the amount of

growth in resource output but also the rate of growth.

Fast economic growth is held out as an example to

follow. Economic policy makers highlight those communities, industries, and nations with the highest economic

growth rates. The quest for growth, however, yields two

questions: How does growth improve social conditions?

and, If growth is necessary, what rate of growth is best?

That is, why is 10% better than 5%, 1%, 0.5%, or 0.05%?

Is growing as fast as possible the best rate? Experiences

with rapid asset growth in banking, sales growth in business, and program growth in government show rapid

growth is not inherently good. If economic growth is

desirable, perhaps greater concern should be given to

finding an optimal rate.

What might be the optimum growth rate? Economic

growth might be viewed like a speed limit. The rate of

economic growth depends on road conditions. As a

general rule, the larger and more complex the system,

the slower the safe growth rate. Small and simple

systems can grow rapidly because their parameters

and the interaction effects are better known.

14
With human life expectancy at 75 years, having some

idea of what could be expected in the next two generations or a person's lifetime is a reasonable time horizon

for considering the implications of growth. Let's assume

material goods double in the next 75 years. The doubling of consumption in 75 years requires a sustained

economic growth rate of 1% a year. If population grows

at 1% and people's preferences do not change, then all

the gain in material well-being merely satisfies the

increased number of people, and the average well-being

does not change. The world population growth rate

since 1850 averaged about 1.2% per year (Westing

1981). National economic growth rates from 1965 to

1988, as measured by gross national product, averaged

1.5% (World Bank 1990:179). During the same period,

however, population growth rates were about 2%

(World Bank 1990:229). When population is growing

more rapidly than the economy, aggregate well-being

decreases.

National economic systems are large and complex. They

should grow slowly. Growth having important effects on

ecosystems should be slowest of all. In ecosystems, the

feedback loops are very complex. Interactions can be

masked, and the linkages between components of ecosystems magnify some of the changes. Taking ecosystem factors into account, would reducing planned

national macroeconomic growth rates by a factor of ten

improve the probability of achieving sustainability?

Rather than trying to push national economic growth at

5%, would maintaining it at 0.5% be a more prudent

goal? Slower growth rates lengthen the doubling time.

A 0.5% versus 5% growth rate lengthens the doubling

time from about 14 years to 139 years. With growth at

a rate of 0.5%, it takes practically two lifetimes for a

doubling and allows time to adjust to the impacts of

growth. If economic growth is slowed, so too must

population growth be slowed. To improve well-being,

the population growth rate should be half or less of the

economic growth rate.

No one is clear on the mechanisms by which economic

growth helps people live better and solves environmental problems, nor do they measure the results. The

typical argument is that economic growth allows environmental degradation to be repaired and poverty to be

alleviated. By what mechanism is the gain in net product

transformed into restored habitats and enhanced wellbeing? Rather than accepting the assumption that growth

helps solve problems, proponents of economic growth

need to demonstrate how the results actualiy occur.

Gross indicators—like amount of fish caught, dollars of

catch, and more people choosing to fish or live in a

place—are used to show a healthy community. National

economic growth usually is measured with a general

measure like gross domestic or national product (GDP

or GNP). Gross indicators, especially GNP, have often

been criticized as measures of economic health. In

Daly and Cobb's (1989:62-84) critique of GNP as a

measure of economic success, they point out that

increased consumption of resources shows up on the

asset side, not as a liability. The GNP is not adjusted

for the long-term costs of stock rebuilding, habitat restoration, waste disposal, toxic waste clean-up, curing

environmental illness, or improving air and water quality.

Like the GNP, businesses refer to assets or sales

volume as gross indicators of success. Raw growth in

numbers of people, sales, or units produced may not

yield any net benefit and can even cause a loss. These

numbers are not measures of real economic success.

Daly and Cobb (1989:401-455) suggest the Index of

Sustainable Economic Welfare as a better measure of

economic well-being. This index corrects for some of

the problems in traditional GNP measurement of growth.

For the period from 1968 to 1986, U.S. per capita GNP

showed a 37% growth in constant dollars. The per capita

Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, also measured

in constant dollars, showed a 9% decline.

As a measure of growth, GNP is achieved by using up

capital resources to give the illusion of economic growth.

It is no assurance of long-term sustainability.

Productivity

Coupled with generating greater quantities through

growth to raise people's satisfaction are improvements

in productivity—generating more of something with the

same or less effort. In Western economic values, productivity equates with economic efficiency where the

benefits from an activity should exceed the costs.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris discusses the biopsychological behavior of humans. Harris sees both growth

(getting more) and productivity (getting more with less

effort) as part of the basic human makeup. In identifying

these basic assumptions about the human enterprise,

Hams (1979:62-63) says:

People need to eat and will generally choose

diets that offer more rather than fewer calories

and proteins and other nutrients.

15
People cannot be totally inactive, but when

confronted with a given task, they prefer to carry

it out by expending less rather than more energy.

Western economic values complement these drives.

Economic policy makers argue that productivity is crucial to elevating people's well-being. The Brookings

Institution (Nourse et al. 1934:3) proposed that if the

U.S. economy were modified to increase productivity to

pre-Depression rates,

. . . every citizen who cared to exert himself

could attain a material standard of living equal at

least to that of the so-called "middle class" in the

prosperous days before the collapse of 1929. . . .

The message that well-being only improves as productivity improves is a persistent economic policy theme.

Theoretically, productivity gains should create more for

society while also promoting conservation. The problem

is in knowing what choices will achieve productivity goals.

Since the 1930s, benefit-cost analysis has become

increasingly part of decision making to exploit resources,

alter habitats, and make ecological modifications. Benefit-cost analysis weighs where society gets a greater

benefit for some expenditure. Such benefits generally

equate with quantity without qualitative distinction.

Benefit-cost analysis is subject to much criticism.

Bromley (1990:97), for example, notes:

Curiously, the identification of benefit-cost analysis with efficiency via Pareto improvements has

come despite overwhelming evidence from within

economic theory of the logical fallacies inherent

therein.

Norgaard and Howarth (1990:5) point to an inherent

weakness of benefit-cost analysis as done by neoclassical economists by pointing out:

The problem is that when they undertake benefit-cost analysis, they forget their other demand

curves are constantly changing. If demand

curves are constantly changing, values are

constantly changing. And if they are changing in

ways which are neither random nor predictable,

values over the period of economic decisions

cannot be determined.

Benefit-cost analysis rests on the assumption that

current social values will persist into the future. For

example, in the 1980s, the Northwest Power Planning

Council rested its salmon recovery plan on increased

production from hatcheries. People's values changed,

and in the 1990s, protection of wild and endangered

salmon runs received priority.

Fisheries are particularly sensitive to productivity growth.

People who fish continually try to catch more fish with

the same or less effort. For a resource at its maximum

sustainable yield, this means people who fish continually

get better and place more pressure on a limited resource.

Even with limits to the number of people fishing or their

catch, those still fishing continue to improve their ability

to catch fish. Productivity improvement is one way to

gain an edge over competitors. Because the people

who fish constantly improve their productivity, fishery

managers continually fall behind in limiting fishing effort

to attain the maximum sustainable yield.

In a fishery at the maximum sustainable yield, productivity gains will improve well-being only if the number of

people fishing decreases. If the number of people fishing

stays the same and the fish resource is at the maximum

sustainable yield, the productivity gain of one person

becomes a loss for another. The implications of the

fisheries experience in a sustainable system is that the

number fishing must decline for productivity gains to

increase net well-being.

Distribution

Distribution is the third factor making the attainment of

sustainability difficult. How are the benefits from growth

and productivity improvements distributed? Who are

the beneficiaries?

Correlated with overfishing is greater inequality among

those catching fish (Smith 1990). In commercial fisheries, the number of people needed to take the catch

decreases. In 1899, the top 5% of salmon gillnetters

caught 12% of the salmon. In 1971, the top 5% caught

47% of the salmon. As the Oregon bottom trawl fishery

grew very rapidly from 1976 to 1980 and average

catches declined, the top 5% of trawlers increased their

share of the catch from 15 to 26%. As the number of

people fishing with very low catches becomes larger,

many of those with low catches have difficulty just

maintaining their current situation. Focusing on immediate needs prevents people from considering the longterm sustainability of fish stocks.

16
For resource managers, greater inequality in catches

causes several problems. First is numbers—the problem

of regulating many people with small catches. Second,

greater inequality and more regulation increase the

inclination to cheat and poach. More catch is taken

illegally, outside the purview of management. Third,

with inequality, people become driven to meet their

basic needs. Fishing becomes obsessive as more and

more fish must be captured to meet mortgage and boat

payments, satisfy basic needs, and just break even.

Finally, divisions among participants created by inequality

segregate those fishing, and they begin to prey upon

one another in the management process. Inequality

promotes environmental scavenging. Rich and poor

seek to satisfy their needs and degrade habitats without

much regard for the future.

Achieving sustainability depends on having a concept

of the future. Poverty shortens people's future orientation. The poverty facing many of the world's people

threatens to topple any attempt at sustainability. A fifth

of the world's population, mostly children and their

mothers, go to bed hungry each night (World Bank

1990). The current demands for basic survival to provide food, housing, and health care outweigh the ability

to look ahead.

When the daily task is meeting basic needs, the tree

cut down or the fish taken do not enter people's longterm calculations. The poor person's problem is surviving today, for if enough food is not found, or shelter does

not protect against the heat or cold, or if adequate health

care is not available, there is no tomorrow.

People can only contemplate tomorrow when they are

well-fed, adequately housed, and healthy; otherwise,

what is the meaning of sustainability? From the viewpoint of someone who has a future sustained by adequate food, housing, and health care, destruction of

resources is shortsighted. From the point of view of

poverty, today's survival is the top priority. The whole

issue of sustainability is beyond the time horizon of

poor people.

If economic growth solves problems of poverty, its

record is subject to question. Productivity improvement

should generate the real gains to improve people's

well-being, but poverty rates show no evidence of

having improved to any significant degree.

Micro Principles and Meta Concerns

Many have noted that ecology and economy both derive

from the same root—meaning household. Ecology is

the relation between the members of the household

and the environment of the house. Economy is household management. Economics encompasses the relations between those within the house—individuals,

firms, resource owners, nations. As commonly used,

economics is deductive, deterministic, propositional,

and particular.

Economics looks at the household from macro and

micro perspectives. Macroeconomics deals with production, prices, employment, and monetary policy of

aggregates like nations. Microeconomics focuses on

individuals, firms, and resource owners. Too often,

when resource managers consider ecological problems,

narrow concerns control considerations about the ecological system. Individuals, firms, and industry organizations pressure resource managers to relax concerns for

the ecosystem. Letting principles about maximizing

economic efficiency filter up to influence the ecosystem

fosters narrow, short-term, microeconomic perspectives

when the need is to be holistic, systemic, and synthetic

(see Norton, this volume).

Ecology needs to be long-term, holistic, and meta. The

first-order question is the suitability of the ecosystem to

support life. Ecology, as a meta concern, gets lost with

the application of the short-term economic focus on

growth and productivity.

The popular presentation of economic principles suggests that individuals and firms who are maximizing

economic efficiency will generate economic growth that

allows ecological problems to be solved. Prolonged

experience shows that maximizing economic efficiency

also depletes resources, threatens habitats, and causes

ecological problems.

Resource management has become dominated by

microeconomic considerations. The linkage between

fishery biology and economics—bioeconomics—began

with the recognition that the fisheries model for population growth and harvesting is logically the same as the

economic model of capital growth and consumption

(Gordon 1954, Schaefer 1957, Crutchfield and Pontecorvo 1969, Clark 1990). Microeconomics is very good

for explaining the success and failure of fishing firms.

Maximizing net present value is an important decision17
making criterion for the individuals and firms. Maximizing economic efficiency stimulates competition and

encourages innovations.

Microeconomic priorities, however, keep resource

managers from making the hard decisions required to

sustain fish stocks. Unfortunately, the profit formula

only includes known current costs and looks at immediate benefits. Maximizing economic efficiency does not

account for long-term costs, nor does it look at the

impacts of short-term profits on the whole ecosystem;

further changes in people's tastes and preferences are

not considered.

Adapting to our ecosystem is a meta problem. It requires

a more holistic, integrative, and long-term perspective.

Microeconomic theory asserts that the logic of maximizing economic efficiency is complementary to maximum

sustainable-yield management. The practical result,

however, is ever-increasing destruction and devastation

of the ecosystem. Profits explain the success of firms,

but not the persistence of ecosystems. What is good at

the microeconomic scale is not necessarily what is

needed at the meta ecosystem scale.

The relation between macroeconomic theory about

national monetary policy and the microeconomic behavior of firms illustrates how different scales of theory

operate. During times of inflation, the monetarist wants

to hold down the growth in currency, which drives up

interest rates, increases unemployment, and causes

some firms to fail. Higher interest rates make getting

the capital necessary for expansion more difficult. Higher

unemployment hurts workers. Yet the macroeconomic

policy of the monetarist has priority over the microeconomic needs of individuals and firms because the health

of the national economy is more important. If ecosystem

sustainability is to work, ecological policy needs priority

over macro and microeconomic decision making.

Alternatives

Fisheries provide a model of how ecological and economic values interact in society as a whole. Fisheries

represent in more manageable form the problems facing

Western culture as a whole. But what can be done?

One choice is to continue as in the past; that is, accepting our addiction to economic growth, recognizing that

sustainability is not attainable, and living with constantly

changing environments. Continuing the pursuit of economic growth, as the solution to problems of economy

and ecology, means persistence of past patterns of

extinction for species that cannot survive ecosystem

modifications. Support for the durability of past practices

is found in Simon (1980,1981) and Simon and Kahn

(1984), among others.

A second choice is to change the value foundation and

develop sustainable economic and ecological paradigms;

that is, move away from economics solely concerned

with maximizing economic growth. Bioregionalism and

Gaia [Gaea] (Sale 1985, 1986; Lovelock 1979, 1988),

steady-state economics (Daly 1977, Daly and Cobb

1989), the Genesis Strategy (Schneider 1975), Buddhist

economics (Schumacher 1973), rights of future generations (Norgaard and Howarth 1990), and ecologically

centered values (Leopold 1949; Berry 1975,1981, 1989;

Devall and Sessions 1985) are possibilities. Each requires

new values upon which society bases decisions. These

values require weaning from addiction to economic

growth as the problem solver.

A third choice is to make some relatively simple

changes to the Western practice of political economy.

The World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) proposes controlling population growth,

while using improved productivity to address inequalities among peoples. This goal involves setting a speed

limit, particularly for economic growth. If growth and

productivity are deeply rooted in the human condition,

we need to acknowledge this. If growth and productivity

are fundamental human needs, new paradigms and

value changes may be quite difficult to effect. Retain

the microeconomic, market-oriented values of classical

economics, but require that growth and productivity

operate within the ecological constraints required to

achieve system sustainability. This approach requires

actually measuring whether real economic growth is

taking place, assessing what activities increase productivity, and analyzing how the benefits become distributed. Most of all, this approach requires a much longer

planning horizon, something on the order of a lifetime,

75 years.

Adopting this third approach raises distribution as the

issue of primary concern. A sustainable ecology must

make distribution the first consideration. Bromley

(1990:91) notes how the Western economic paradigm

separated production from distribution. Growth and

productivity became the sole concerns. Economists

assumed that distribution would take care of itself.

18
The inequality represented in persistent poverty kills

future orientation.

I do not presume to know which of these approaches

future human societies will take. Western economic

values are leading the assault on the environment as

we know it. Human survival requires an ecosystem

capable of supporting human life.

Acknowledgments

This paper is revised from a version given at the Annual

Meeting of the Oregon Chapterof the American Fisheries

Society, February 7, 1990. In preparing the revisions,

the comments of Dan Bottom, Jerry Moles, Richard B.

Norgaard, David W. Orr, Charles Warren, and numerous

students have been especially helpful.

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20
Sustainable Redevelopment of Regional Ecosystems Degraded

by Exploitive Development1

Henry A. Reiger and Gordon L. Baskerville

HENRY A. REGIER is a professor, Department of

Zoology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario

M55 1A1, and GORDON L BASKERVILLE is a

professor, Forest Resources Management Department,

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British

Columbia V6T 1Z4.

Introduction

Think Globally, Act Locally

Conventional economic development, which exploits

ecological and other features of a locale, is usually

undertaken with the aim, among others, that benefits

will cumulate and contribute to regional economic

growth and to "progress," with some consideration that

the people of the locale will also receive some benefit

from the exploitation. Local disbenefits, say in the form

of bad ecological consequences, also tend to cumulate

and to become apparent, eventually, as regional degradation. Whether intended or not, conventional local

actions and their consequences tend to cumulate powerfully at regional scales, and thus local actions should

be viewed in a regional context, with respect to good

and bad aspects alike.

We focus our attention on economic development

practiced during recent centuries in North America, but

especially with respect to two case studies: the New

Brunswick forests and the Great Lakes fish (see fig. 1).

1

 Adapted from. W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn, editors. 1986. Sustainable development of the biosphere. Published with permission of the

International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg,

Austria

Part of the economic development during recent decades

in the Third World may resemble, in some ways, the

process of North American development outlined here.

The resemblance may be weak with some European

countries, where renewable resources have not been

subjected to so rapid a development pressure and have

been managed differently, at least recently.

In his statement on the issues surrounding the "think

globally, act locally" philosophy, Holling (1984) uses

global in the sense of biospheric rather than, say, of

some rather arbitrary level of aggregation. As have

others, we have difficulty in demonstrating local-biospheric links, though we "know" that such links are

almost infinite in number. We deal in this chapter with

local-regional links and submit that our contribution may

be seen as a small-scale analog of the issue of links

across gaps of larger scale.

From the perspective of an interested layperson, the

conceptual link from the local to the regional may involve

a connection between relatively concrete local reality

and relatively general and somewhat imprecise regional

inferences that are comprehensible only as abstract

arithmetic summations or mathematical expressions. A

link to a biospheric scale might involve a connection to

phenomena that may appear so abstract (e.g., computer

simulations) as to be almost unreal. How do we demonstrate interactive and cumulative linkages across different scales and modes of cognition in such a way that

the new comprehension contributes to the sustainable

redevelopment of all these scales within scales? We

cannot give clear advice, but we both are involved with

regional projects in which attempts are underway to

21
Figure 1—Eastern North America showing the Canadian Province of New Brunswick and the binational Great Lakes.

forge useful links between the local and the regional, to

be operative in both directions.

Development and Redevelopment

Within the context of economic development, "to develop"

generally means to use available resources in such a

way as to achieve local or regional progress through

increased economic growth, usually measured by a

suitable regional indicator, such as total jobs created,

and net value added. Underdevelopment may mean

that some resources are not used to their full economic

potential, with the result that local or regional economic

progress is slower than it might otherwise be. Overdevelopment may mean that some important resources are

overtaxed, again to the disadvantage of regional economic progress. Misguided or improper development

may mean that mistakes have been made concerning

the use of some resources—for example, through the

once-only destructive use or sacrifice of a renewable

resource important to the sustenance of a future

economy. These and other variations on the concept of

development have rather close conceptual parallels in

the study of the harvest of renewable resources and of

the use of the natural environment.

We do not deal with the extraction of nonrenewable resources as related to economic development, except to

mention that some general parallels exist in North America between improper and excessive harvesting of renewable resources and improper and wasteful extraction of

petroleum and some mineral ores. Both of these major

processes, as conventionally practiced, severely disrupted the natural functioning of the affected ecosystem.

We personally experience no euphoria in contemplating

recent versions of what is implied in North America by

economic development, economic growth, and progress.

Nevertheless, these terms are widely used the world

over and have been accepted as central to the study of

the sustainable development of the biosphere; we can

put them to objective use without necessarily endorsing

various connotations subjectively. Perhaps we can help

to develop a set of connotations for the term sustainable

redevelopment that may be acceptable for both objective

and subjective purposes.

22
In many parts of the world, the natural environment and

its renewable resources have been misused, overused,

and abused to the point of severe degradation. Sustainability for some desirable mix of valued uses has been

vitiated in such areas through destructive abuse, overintensive use, or ill-informed practices in general. The

only reasonable option in such areas is a redevelopment

toward sustainability. Various terms or slogans have

been used that relate in some way to a reversal of the

degradation, whether ecological, anthropological, social,

economic, industrial, or urban—for example, reform,

rejuvenation, remediation, restoration, rehabilitation,

reforestation, resettlement, reindustrialization, rezoning,

renewal, recovery, revitalization. Taken together, all of

these terms that are relevant in a region might constitute

"redevelopment"; ecological rehabilitation of such areas

is obviously crucial, else sustainability is an empty or

misleading slogan.

Throughout North America in particular, major aquatic,

forest, grassland, and cultured ecosystems have been

degraded. Major, though perhaps only partial, American

initiatives toward ecosystem or regional redevelopment

include the Tennessee Valley Authority initiatives in

southern Appalachia, the Soil Conservation Service

initiatives on the Great Plains, and regional reforestation

in the Southeast. In subsequent sections, we present

two case studies of more recent initiatives toward redevelopment: the forests of New Brunswick in eastern

Canada and the Great Lakes of central North America.

Our cases are similar yet different. The New Brunswick

case represents a deliberate provincial effort to redevelop

a rural community economy based on forestry before the

natural productive base becomes too severely degraded:

opinion leaders in New Brunswick have suddenly recognized the associated problems and opportunities. The

Great Lakes case represents deliberate international

efforts, to date costing perhaps over $10 billion (1985

U.S. dollars), to rehabilitate massively degraded ecosystems, especially those of the Lower Lakes. For various reasons, the Great Lakes industrial and agricultural

heartland lost its vitality and vigor, and people recognized

that ecosystem degradation was part of the problem. It

is now widely expected that successful rehabilitation of

these lake ecosystems will have both a direct and a

catalytic role in the revitalization of this binational heartland, even though the apparent additional monetary

benefits of a rehabilitated chain of Great Lakes may be

only a small fraction of the wealth created in the Basin

(Thurowetal. 1984).

In both cases, we have greatly simplified the record to

enhance understanding. We show that integrated regional redevelopment of degraded systems must be

served by appropriate information systems, which must

explicitly link the local and regional scales of concern.

With respect to spatial and temporal scope and scale,

and to detail of resolution, a regional information system

obviously falls somewhere between biospheric and

ecosystemic information systems. Information systems

already exist in some, perhaps primitive, form for the

redevelopment initiatives mentioned here. Progress in

redevelopment will likely depend on the further creative

development and thoughtful use of such information

systems.

The Forests of New Brunswick

The setting and a historical sketch—The province of

New Brunswick is largely forested (85% of its 78,000

km2) and has been so in the 10 millennia since the last

continental glacier melted. During the past two centuries, the economic development of sparsely populated

New Brunswick has depended primarily on the exploitive

use of forests and secondarily on the exploitive use of

fisheries and agricultural soils. The province has never

served as an industrial heartland to any other region,

nor is it likely to do so in the future. It is relatively free of

the pervasive and massive pollution that attends large

industrial and urban concentrations, though the effects

of atmospherically transported acid rain and toxic fallout, and of climate warming, all resulting predominantly

from the improper and excessive combustion of fossil

fuels, will soon become as apparent there as elsewhere.

In this sketch of the history of conventional exploitive

development and of opportunities for sustainable redevelopment in New Brunswick, we focus mainly on the

forest industry. Consideration of fisheries and agriculture,

of human settlements and pollution, and of the outbreaks

of the spruce budworm would complicate the account

but would not greatly affect the inferences that can be

drawn from a simplified account of the forest industry.

The development of the New Brunswick forests has

been a long process (Tweeddale 1974, Wynn 1980). In

the early 1800s, the forests provided large white pine

trees for ship masts, which meant selecting high-value

specimens and bringing them out with considerable

care. Although this extraction generated a step in the

development of the local economy, it was at a very low

scale, and the quality of life associated with it was, in

23
the prosaic sense, hardy. But the die for future development was already cast: "For profit is the first motive of

all men," as Nicolas Denys (1908), a naturalist-cum-early

developer of the early 1700s, wrote in his diary of 1708.

Continued development (read "progress through economic growth") was temporarily arrested by the unavailability of very large, and very old, white pine trees.

Development proceeded, however, with the harvest of

white pine to less-stringent quality standards to produce

squared timbers for building, most of which were exported. This product provided considerably more local

employment than did the search for masts and resulted

in a modest improvement in the quality of life of the

pioneer communities.

One course then taken in the development sequence

was to broaden the harvest to include younger trees. If

300-year-old white pine are harvested faster than they

are recruited to that age class, the development may

be extended by a shift to younger, smaller trees. Successive steps in the development of the white pine

industry (fig. 2) began with the high minimum standard

acceptable for raw material at point A, and continued

until the white pine available were of a size characterized by point B, which then became the acceptable

minimum standard.

By the middle of the 1800s, the next major step in the

process of development began with the emergence of

a major sawmill industry that produced finished timber,

again mostly for export. The work contributed "value

added" to the product, enabling the local society to gain

some additional economic benefits from the resource,

but also the regionally based lumber industry gained.

To develop this lumber industry further, the source of

raw material was again broadened, with changing

minimum standards of acceptability, to include not only

the remaining large and small white pine trees available, but also the larger white spruce. This change is a

movement in the minimum standard acceptable for raw

material from B to C (fig. 2). The sawmill industry continued to grow (develop) in a manner that required

quality raw material faster than the forest was producing

that quality, with the result that the minimum acceptable

raw material gradually moved from C to D on the lower

curve in figure 2.

The sawmill industry reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has been

declining ever since, with the number of sawmills in the

Figure 2—The diameter of white pine and white spruce stems as

related to age of the stem. Stem size is a crucial factor in sawmill

efficiency. Early exploitation began with white pine at point A, continued using smaller stems until point B, where it was equally efficient

to switch exploitation to include large white spruce at C. Continued

exploitation mined the largest stems until current limits of acceptability were reached at D.

province today only a fraction of that in the heyday of

the industry in the late 1800s. The surviving sawmill

industry uses not only the available spruce logs (and

the small amount of white pine available) but also

balsam fir trees. Currently, the minimum acceptable

size for all these species is a fraction of the original.

Although the sawmill industry was developed largely on

the basis of individual trees, a pulp and paper industry

emerged in the province shortly after the beginning of

the twentieth century, an industry based on whole stands

of trees. The arrival of the pulp industry happened to

coincide with poor lumber markets and the relative nonavailability of large individual stems suitable for efficient

use in the kind of sawlog operation that had evolved in

the nineteenth century. Pulp mills can use smaller trees,

although harvesting of larger trees makes for a cheaper

raw material. Just as the sawmill development was based

on harvesting only the best individual stems and leaving

the poor-quality material (highgrading), so pulp and

paper development was based on harvesting the stands

of best species and lowest logging cost while bypassing

lower quality stands (also highgrading). Because of the

large wood volumes required by pulp mills, people generally harvested nearly pure stands of the usable species

(spruce and fir), leaving behind stands of species not

usable for pulp. Pulp mills marked a major development

for the local economy, capturing not only a much larger

portion of the value of the finished resource by spin-off

employment, but also by generating a better quality of

employment.

Initially, the pulp and paper industry used stands of

smaller spruce trees and, as these became less avail24
able, raw material standards were relaxed to include

stands of larger fir trees as well. Since the mid-1950s,

the industry has adapted technologically so that it can

use stands of very small trees of softwood species and

some hardwoods. To characterize the impact of the

pulp and paper industry on the resource, we examine

how these utilization standards relate to stand development—that is, to natural production in a stand. How a

particular softwood stand (that is, a population or community of trees) might develop in terms of volume per

hectare and of average tree size is shown in figure 3,

from its regenerating stages, through maturity, and

overmaturity, to breaking up in old age. Combinations

of minimum volume per hectare and maximum trees

per cubic meter determine the operability or availability

of a stand for economic harvest. At the beginning of the

development of the pulp and paper industry, only those

stands represented by the range A and A' (fig. 4) were

considered economically usable. These operable stands

had reached both the specified economic minimum

total volume per hectare and the specified economic

Figure 3—Softwood stand development as seen by the developer.

Above: The accumulation of volume over time, showing how much

wood is available at various times. Below: Average tree size as it

changes over time. Operability constraints work in two ways: (a) the

stand must have enough volume per hectare to be worth developingfor example, 100 m3

/ha, and (b) the stand must be made of individual

stems large enough to be commercially harvestable: forexample,

5 trees/m3give the points A and A', and the constraints of a minimum

50 m3/ha and a maximum of 10 trees/m3 give the points B and B'

For the first set of constraints, the stand is harvestable (operable)

between A and A' and B and B', respectively.

Figure 4—Volume development in a spruce-fir stand. The curve

shows the merchantable volume per hectare at any point The ranges

A-A' and B-B' are periods when the stand is economically operable

The point A is determined by both a minimum volume per hectare

and a minimum average tree size. The point A' is determined by the

minimum volume per hectare. The stand is operable (that is, eligible

for harvest) in the range A-A'. If the operability constraints of volume

per hectare and average tree size are relaxed, then A moves to B

and A' moves to B'. In this case, the stand is operable for the period

from B to B'. The process may continue to some ultimate state

identified here by the extremes C and C.

minimum average tree size harvestable, but they had

not yet broken up to the point where less than the minimum volume remained, below which it was not economic to harvest. Clearly, when stands of type A-A'

were harvested faster than they were recruited to this

range, a shortage of material for the mills occurred over

time, which could have forced a reduction in their output.

Analogous to the case for sawlogs from individual stems,

the answer to such a constraint was to change the

utilization limits for whole stands to the range B-B'

(fig. 4); the advent of a biomass approach suggests

extension to the range C-C.

New capital investment and technology—of both hard

and soft types—were required to effect a shift from A-A'

to B-B'. This shift then permitted further development of

the economy in that the broader utilization standards

(at B-B') gave an almost instant increase in sustainable

production. For example, a harvest of 400,000 m3/year

from a forest was not sustainable when the stand

utilization limits were set at A-A', but was sustainable,

and could even be increased to 600,000 m3/year, when

the utilization standards were set at B-B' (fig. 5). Further

industrial development was possible by harvesting

stands comprising several species, only some of which

were suitable for pulping (fig. 6). Harvesting in these

mixed stands faced similar utilization standards for total

volume and average tree size and had the additional

logistical problem of working around the trees of unusable species, but it also gave a larger growing stock

and a more sustainable harvest.

25
Figure 5—Three reasonably possible futures for the same initial

forest, but harvested subject to different operability constraints.

Curve A: With operability limits set at A-A' (from fig. 4) the total

operable growing stock increases at first, but cannot sustain a

harvest of 400,000 m3/year. The growing stock goes to extinction in

the fifth decade Curve B: With operability limits set at B-B' (fig. 4),

the total operable growing stock is larger than in A, and the larger

harvest rate of 600,000 m3/year is sustainable, although the growing

stock is driven dangerously low near the end of the forecast period.

Curve C: with operability limits at C-C (fig. 4), the total operable

growing stock is again larger and the harvest of 800,000 m3/year is

sustainable. Note that the initial increases in operable growing stock

are artifacts, in that the wood was always there in case A but was

not counted because of the operability constraints. Also note that the

apparent gains in sustainable harvest are each achieved by harvesting younger (poorerquality) raw material.

Figure 6—Volume development in a mixed stand where only the

softwood volume (lower curve) is usable. The softwood volume is

subjectto operability constraints shown in figure 3. When the softwood species are harvested, all or nearly all of the other species

are left standing.

As with the pulp and paper industry, the lumber industry

also innovated technologically to use less-valued species,

smaller trees, and stems of lower quality in the manufacture of such products as laminated beams, plywood,

and chipboard. Such innovations are capital intensive

and involve advanced technology. In effect, capital and

technology are used to mitigate reduction in the quality

of the resource.

Examining the conventional saw- and pulp-mill examples

of development clearly shows that both constitute forms

of highgrading. The lumber industry was built on highgrading individual stems, and the industry declined

because of inefficiency when recruitment to these quality

standards could not match the harvest rate imposed on

the trees of that quality by the highgrading. The pulp

and paper industry was built on the principle of highgrading at the stand scale, where whole stands of particular species and size characteristics were removed

and the utilization standards lowered from time to time,

as necessary, to sustain the development (Swift 1983).

In both cases, the forest resource was clearly used to

develop the economy. In fact, the use was very effective, in that each step in the process:

• Allocated a larger proportion of the economic benefits

to the local society.

• Increased the number of jobs locally.

• Improved the quality of those jobs.

• Improved the quality of life in the local society.

At present, however, New Brunswick faces a situation

where further development is no longer possible. In

fact, sustaining the forest-based industry will be barely

possible even with major forest management efforts of

a redevelopment type (Reed 1978).

Exploitive development—Some further consideration

of the concept of exploitive development is appropriate

at this point. Clearly, without specifications of quantity,

quality, timing, and location, the notion of sustainability

is meaningless. A sawmill industry has existed for

almost 200 years, but no one would claim that product

quality was sustained for any significant period within

those 200 years. What did survive was an industry that

used poorer and poorer quality raw material and was

strongly dependent on capital-intensive technological

innovation to create a quality product out of raw materials

of low quality. A forest industry, broadly defined, was

sustained, but the productive structure of the resource

was not.

Two points to consider with respect to this resource

development are, first, development was not a single

step taken to achieve a specified goal, but rather it

involved a continuous expansion of local and regional

economic benefits, narrowly defined, that became a

goal in itself. In this context, for any resource a point in

development certainly exists beyond which sustainability

26
is no longer possible because of biological limits of the

resource system. The second point really attacks the

nub of the issue. Historically, development in resourcerich areas is driven by the clarion call of government,

industry, and enterprising people "to develop our

resources." Clearly, primarily the resource-based industries are what have been developed, secondarily the

regional economy, and tertiarily the local economies—

but the resources have not been developed at all. The

resources have been characteristically run down or

ruined by resource development—surely one of the

saddest paradoxes of human activities. Highgrading

has been degrading.

In New Brunswick, the forest-based industry may now

be characterized as overdeveloped, and the forest

resource is in urgent need of redevelopment. The existing economic structure is derived from a sequential

lowering of utilization standards and broadening of the

target species mix. The existing economy could barely

be sustained by a further lowering of utilization standards

along with a very aggressive management program,

but the limits of development in the traditional economic

sense have been reached. The key here is that resource

development has been measured throughout this process in terms of the immediate social and economic

results and not at all in terms of the productivity of the

resource that was used. The resource was used to

achieve the development, but using the resource altered

its dynamic structure. The resource structure changed

with respect to:

• The size and stature of particular species in the

stands.

• The species composition of the various stand mixes

that were available in the forest.

• The age structure of the stands in the forest as a

whole.

Instead of progressive overexploitation of the resource

to manage (read "expand") the economy, the resource

must now be managed (read "redeveloped") to maintain the economy. Put bluntly, gaining further development or even sustaining the existing rate of development

by mining the forest is no longer possible. Maintaining

the existing rate is possible with proper management,

but any expansionist development must be delayed

several decades until the results of new management

measures take effect.

Some characteristics of these limits to development

are of interest. Perhaps the most striking is that each of

the individual development steps took place at the tree

or stand scale. Local (tree and stand) actions, which

were taken out of context of the regional forest picture,

have accumulated to produce an unacceptable regional

result. The problem literally was created piece by piece

locally, and then recognized and felt regionally. Further,

the design of the solution to problems created by development must proceed at the regional scale. The stands

that have been highgraded successively for sawlogs

now support a mixture of poor-quality stems and unusable species. Harvest of only the usable species for

pulping has resulted in an increased occupancy of land

by non-economic species. Indeed, the only way left to

develop in the conventional way is by moving to a lower

grade of product, which will result in a weaker economic

position, based on the massive mechanization required

to use the very low-quality natural product.

The result of such development has been a dramatic

change in the productive structure of the forest. A

plausible age structure for the various stands of the

forest before development is shown in figure 7, along

with the age structure for the developed forest. Conventional development has transformed the productive

structure into that of a young forest. Given the present

age structure, either the pressures must be relaxed to

allow some time for recovery or massive assistance

must be given to the natural regrowth of the forest. To

achieve some recovery time requires a relaxation of

harvesting pressure, which implies a loss of some of

the development gained over the last half century. That

is not a socially acceptable alternative. Intervention in

stand and forest dynamics, to increase the rate of availability of materials, requires major expenditure in terms

of forest management. These costs are clearly chargeable to maintenance of the development. Because these

costs were not there previously, they substantially reduce

the economic value of the accumulated development in

conventional economic terms. To hold its own, the

province must give up some of its resource-based economic development to achieve resource redevelopment.

Sustainable redevelopment: design and implementation—Discovering overdevelopment is not easy, and

designing redevelopments can be downright traumatic.

Recognizing incipient overdevelopment is difficult, in

part because the necessary information is rarely available until after the event. During the process of nonsustainable development of an economy, data gathering

27
Figure 7—Age-class structures for forests before and after

development. The predevelopment forest shows stands at all

stages of development when related to the volume development curve in figure 4. The postdevelopment forest has been

harvested intensely enough to prevent stands from growing

beyond 100 years from initiation. Thus, the stands in the range

100 to 160 years, which would contain the largest individual

trees, are no longer present.

with respect to the resource is centered on such features

as the total area available for use at the time of data

collection and the total volume available for harvest at

the time of data collection. These inventories were

designed to provide a picture of what was available on

the ground at that time. They were carried out and

reported entirely in the context of the development at

issue, i.e., they had an economic (or an accounting)

base. Thus, the first unavoidable sign of overdevelopment was when one of these inventories undertaken to

justify the newest step in development showed less

resource than expected, even after the usual adjustments for lower utilization standards (Tweeddale 1974).

To discover why a conventional inventory showed less

material than could be expected on the basis of the

historical sequence requires that resource dynamics be

examined. Not surprisingly, not much information is

available on dynamics because the information gathering had concentrated on a static inventory of material

that had immediate economic value. The first approximations of forest dynamics were therefore based on

simple assumptions (Baskerville 1976, Hall 1978). The

emphasis of studies of forest dynamics was on forecasting the availability of particular quantities and qualities

of raw material in the future, rather than on what was

actually there. A major difficulty was that the problem

was perceived at the forest or regional scale, where

data on dynamics were particularly poor. So a bridge

had to be built from the relatively data-rich tree and

stand scales to the regional forest scale. This exercise

in problem definition is not simple and is resisted by a

considerable amount of rationalization. One hears that

"someone is always forecasting a timber famine and it

never comes about, and this one won't either"'; that

"forecasting with models is silly because everyone

knows that with computers it's garbage in garbage out."

The realists of the world will state incessantly that "what

counts is what is." And some people are certain that

technology will permit even lower utilization standards

or, indeed, the use of materials other than wood to

produce paper. The point here is that there is significant

resistance to the recognition of overdevelopment of the

industry and the need for resource redevelopment

because such recognition forces change in the established ways of using the resource for economic gain.

The need for redevelopment of the forest and the forestbased industries of New Brunswick eventually reached

the social and political agendas, despite all these forms

of resistance. In the end, even the most myopic recognized that the local industry was competing in world

trade and that it was inefficient with respect to that

market. The inefficiency in trade was traceable in large

part to a high cost of raw material, which in turn was the

result of the changed forest structure, which of course

was the result of development. The gains in development in terms of quality of jobs and the local economy

were, in the end, imperiled because of the inefficiency

of the resource in the processing part of the system.

Sawmills that could not adapt technologically to the

smaller tree size closed. Major technological changes

took place in pulp mills, and interest in maintaining

certain pieces of physical plant associated with past

development was reduced.

When awareness of nonsustainability finally dawned, it

was simultaneously accepted that the economy could

no longer be managed by mining the resource, so the

resource must henceforth be husbanded. This recognition (or cognition) by the decisive players in industry

and government was a relatively sudden event, occurring in an interval of about five years from 1975 to 1980.

The turning point came when the decision makers

ceased to argue about whether or not a problem existed

in maintaining the flow of quality raw material. Once

that occurred, action toward redevelopment followed

rather quickly (Fellows 1980, Ker 1981).

Acceptance of a need for change came first to the decisive players in industry and government and not to the

general public. The public did, indeed, voice an earlier

need for change; however, their desires had a definite

air of unreality, in that they demanded a continuation of

28
all (or even more) of the economic benefits of development in full measure, while corrective action was to be

taken at no cost. Tension developed because industry

and government had inadvertently obscured the evidence of the problems of development by the choice of

data collected on the resource. This incredible lack of

public understanding of the historical linkages between

the benefits and the problems persists, indeed has

intensified, five years into the redevelopment program.

For the New Brunswick industries based on the forest

resource, the program of redevelopment has involved

several closely related activities. Once the industrial

capacity clearly exceeded the ability of the forest to

sustain raw material of the desired quality, the resource

had to be reallocated to ensure even (or steady) resource use. The reallocation of access to the resource

was not just in terms of areas of domain as had been

prevalent in the economic development phases, but

rather related to access to a particular piece of the productive structure of the forest. Allocation was to a share

of the sustainable productivity of the resource, rather

than to the standing inventory on some particular piece

of ground at the moment of allocation (Hanusiak 1985).

Recognition of the need to allocate access to productivity required an entirely new approach to the acquisition

of information on the productive state of the forest. New

surveys of the forest were needed that sought to characterize the resource in terms of its dynamic structure,

rather than in terms of a static storehouse of raw material. These new surveys required major expenditure in

terms of a new form of aerial photography for the province, with special tests of methods of photointerpretation

to discover the best ways to capture information on the

stage of development for each stand. Methods for

handling this geographic information had to be developed

(Erdle and Jordan 1984). Not surprisingly, this task has

proved to be complex, and the first approximation of

data acquisition on forest dynamics is just a first step.

A major characteristic of the recognition of the need for

redevelopment is the appearance of concern with forecasting future development on the regional forest scale.

During the period of development, interest in the future

rarely extended beyond the current-year harvest, and at

best to a five-year harvest plan. Those facing the reality

of redevelopment have suddenly acquired time horizons

of 40 to 50 years. The need to forecast wood availability

by amount, quality, location, and timing has resulted in

the development of a large array of models that attempt

to mimic dynamics at the stand and forest scales. These

models were very simple at first, but are quickly developing as more information on dynamics becomes available, and as the necessity for forecasting becomes

more clear. To manage a forest, explicit forecasts must

be made of the availability of raw material in terms of

quantity, quality, location, and time for a variety of patterns of intervention (such as harvesting, planting, and

thinning). The forecasting tools were developed and

accepted at a surprising rate. Approaches that were

rejected as unnecessary, or unrealistic, five years ago

are now embraced and ardently developed to improve

their reliability.

The most traumatic element of redevelopment has

been the need to actually design and implement management interventions. During the earlier period of

development, much experimental work with silviculture

was done, along with a certain amount of what might

be termed the anecdotal practice of silviculture. All of

this effort was characterized by an approach at the

local or stand scale. The managers would examine a

stand and, based only on what they saw at the local

scale, determine the "best" silviculture action to be

taken. Through this approach, some considerable

experience had evolved with such tools as planting,

precommercial thinning, and fertilization. With acceptance of the need for redevelopment, however, these

local silviculture actions clearly had to be determined in

the context of regional forest dynamics. Given that the

harvest that can be taken is limited and that money

available for silviculture also is limited, it is crucial that

forestry actions be taken in the right places, in the right

amount, and at the right time so that the development

of the whole forest is regulated in the manner necessary

to reach a goal of true resource development (or of

economic redevelopment). Thus, the focus of intervention design has moved from the stand to the forest

scale (Hall 1981). The question is no longer what can

be done at this particular place but rather "what set of

local actions taken in what places in the whole forest,

and at what times, will cause the regional forest to

transform and grow towards a particular chosen goal?"

For a generation of managers, accustomed to making

local stand decisions out of context of any regional

forest picture, the necessity to place their actions in this

regional context is proving difficult. A major problem

here is that virtually all of the decision aids that have

been developed in past decades are aimed at the stand

or local scale, rather than at the larger scales. That is,

economic decision-analysis methods assumed that,

29
whenever management began, it would be carried out

by a series of stand-by-stand local decisions. Major

efforts are now underway to develop decision aids that

place local actions in the regional context of forest

dynamics.

Choosing a plan of management interventions for redevelopment is a complex matter. To be realistic, the plan

must recognize that implementation of redevelopment

will be local in nature (just as all of the actions of development were local in nature), but that these local interventions must be consistent with a regional pattern of

resource development (Hall 1981). Management planning becomes an orchestration of local events to achieve

a regional goal—what will be done, to what extent it will

be done, when, and where—in order that a regional

pattern of development, over time, is achieved. Moreover, management must address the real issues of who

pays for this management effort and who carries it out.

Making all this happen on the ground is crucial. Implementing the plan as it is drawn up and providing a

regular audit of performance of the forest are essential

steps. This problem is unique to the stage of redevelopment because it was not necessary during development to worry about matching management platitudes

with what was actually happening on the ground. During

redevelopment, however, it is essential, for instance,

that the actual harvest be taken in the same manner as

used in the forecasts for management design. This need

in turn requires a high degree of geographic control

(Erdle and Jordan 1984). If, in the actual on-the-ground

implementation of the harvest schedule, the "oldest

first" rule is not followed and any younger stands are

harvested because of local economic advantage, then

some older stands escape harvest and will decay and

become nonavailable for harvest. The net effect of this

deviation of the real harvest schedule from the planned

schedule is a reduction in the actual sustainable harvest. That is, in management, and particularly in management for redevelopment, the way things are done

on the ground must be the same as the way things

were done in the calculations determining sustainability.

If the on-the-ground rules as determined in the plan

cannot be implemented, then the plan must be

changed to show an appropriately lower, sustainable

rate of harvest. This requirement for making reality

match the plans is perhaps the major source of tension

in redevelopment (Hanusiak 1985).

The Fisheries of the Great Lakes

The setting and a historical sketch—The Great

Lakes lie at the southern edge of the ancient Laurentian

Shield where they straddle the Canada-US, border

(fig. 1). Lake Superior is the largest and deepest lake,

farthest upstream, and apparently created by tectonic

events. The other four lakes were formed, or at least

deepened and enlarged, by the continental glaciation of

geologically recent times. The current ecological reality

of the Great Lakes Basin is the result of some 10 millennia of the natural processes of postglacial succession

and some two centuries of the effects of people of

Western cultures.

Exploitive human uses, direct but indirect, have intensified at something like an exponential rate until about a

decade ago; today, the overall effect may no longer be

intensifying, but it remains, on balance, high. The Great

Lakes are downwind of the industrialized Ohio Valley,

from which airborne pollutants are often carried long

distances. In contrast to the size of the area from which

pollutants are transported through the atmosphere into

the Great Lakes, the watershed of the Basin is small

compared to the surface of the water, with no large

rivers flowing into these lakes from the surrounding

landscapes; hence the lakes are not rapidly flushed.

Many of the small rivers and nearshore areas of the

lakes are not as severely degraded as they were two

decades ago. (The Cuyahoga River flowing into Lake

Erie is no longer a fire hazard!)

Over 35 million people now dwell in the Basin. Most

live in large urban concentrations with imperfect sewerage and sewage treatment systems, though most are

less imperfect than they were a decade ago. Many of

the residents work in industries that pollute because of

rather obsolescent capital stock erected at a time of

great interest in the nonrenewable resources of the

Basin (iron, coal, and limestone) and of little concern

for those resources that were potentially renewable at

sustained rates. Major uses (including abuses) of the

Great Lakes have been separated into about 20 classes,

of which fishing is but one (Francis et al.1979).

By about 1930, the people of the dozen or so largest

cities in the Great Lakes Basin had turned their backs

to the lake shores and coastal waters that had become

degraded; apparently the degradation was taken to be

an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice to industrialeconomic progress. Cities that thrived had dirty air, foul

30
waters, and some urban slums. Today, however, the

situation has changed, and people and institutions in

the Great Lakes region are seriously searching for a

new basis for the regional economy. In fact, the waters

of the Great Lakes, and in particular the coastal waters,

are now seen as a great natural resource, at least if

their quality can be improved and then maintained.

Somehow, an ecologically rehabilitated aquatic ecosystem is expected to contribute directly and also catalytically to the postindustrial redevelopment of the region

(Thurow et al.1984). Rehabilitation of the fish, together

with restoration of high water quality, are beginning to

be linked by the public to the goal of sustainable redevelopment of the whole Basin's economy. It is coming

to be accepted that the state of the fish community is a

valid integrative indicator of ecosystem quality (Ryder

and Edwards 1984) and—somewhat more distantly—

of the regional quality of life for humans. Some even

suggest that the Basin provides the single best indicator of the state of biospheric husbandry as practiced in

industrialized North America. The lake trout in the

Great Lakes indicate what the white pine indicates in

New Brunswick.

The historical sequence related to highgrading in forestry

has a close counterpart in fisheries of the Great Lakes.

In fisheries, the process is sometimes termed "fishingup," whether among size of quality classes within a

stock or species (Ricker 1961), among locales within an

ecosystem or region (Regier and Loftus 1972), or among

species within an entire fish association (Regier 1973,

1979). By about 1940, the most preferred species in the

Great Lakes were exploited by the fisheries to the point

of a risk of overexploitation, if not, in fact, beyond the

point of overexploitation (see figs. 8 and 9).

Throughout the process of fishing-up (or progressive

highgrading), the enterprising fishers also progressively

added value to their products through salting, refrigeration, freezing, filleting, smoking, precooking, and so on.

An approximate parallel to the plywood and chipboard

products may be canned fish and (as yet experimental)

fish sausages. Something comparable to the pulp and

paper stage of the lumbering industry has not yet

emerged in the Great Lakes, but it has appeared elsewhere with new Japanese technology to produce surimi

products (such as artificial scallops and crab legs) from

the macerated flesh of low-valued finfish species. Serious plans have been drafted to bring this surimi technology into the Great Lakes fisheries.

Figure 8—Value to fishers (1970 U.S. prices) of a kilogram of

fish whole weight as a function of the average size of a species at

sexual maturation (log scale) (Regier 1973).

Before 1940-55, the fish association of the Great Lakes

was strongly and adversely affected ecologically by four

stresses caused by people: fishing, blocking of streams

by dams, loading of putrescible organic waters into

streams and estuaries, and physical destruction of

wetlands. During 1940-55, these four stresses were

joined, and often superseded in local intensity, by four

additional stresses: cultural eutrophication, industrial

pollution, pesticides and other hazardous chemicals,

and expansion of low-valued or harmful exotic fish

species, such as the alewife and the sea lamprey. These

latter four stresses had appeared locally long before

1940, but it was only then that their effects came to be

regionally pervasive in many parts of the lakes. Other

stresses of various kinds were also acting (Francis

etal. 1979) and sometimes intensifying, but they must

be set aside as miscellaneous in this short account.

The year 1955 may be taken as the beginning of growing public cognition that the Great Lakes, as parts of a

system, were severely debased. In general, the lower

the lake in the drainage system, the more thoroughly it

was debased. The total binational cost of all the relevant

studies and corrective efforts between 1955 and 1985

is unaccounted, but might well exceed $10 billion (1985

U.S. dollars). Most of the scientific efforts to understand

this problem and almost all practical efforts to do something about it before 1985 were focused on locales and

have attempted to deal with the problem one factor

(even one chemical) or one species at a time.

31
Figure 9—Lake Erie fish landings, by selected taxa, in kilograms.

At about this point in our historical sketch, convention

would dictate that an account be given of the structures

and processes of the governance of these binational

Great Lakes, with a strong emphasis on the role of the

International Joint Commission (Willoughby 1979). For

a study of sustainable redevelopment of the biosphere,

we do need eventually to deal in depth with the governance institutions. Suffice it here to say that no government agency—binational, federal, provincial, or state—

has asserted or been given a mandate for leadership

with respect to an integrated program of sustainable

redevelopment that is now so necessary. No government agency has sufficient responsibility or authority to

act locally and to think regionally in an integrated, ecosystemic way. Clearly the "think regionally" part of the

aphorism is made more difficult to achieve in this

multicity, multijurisdiction, binational situation; however,

intergovernmental and broader networks are evolving

that are beginning to serve this function. Within the (as

yet) piecemeal efforts to correct the causes of the

degradation of the Great Lakes are many detailed differences in the politics and practices of different jurisdictional, governmental, and intergovernmental entities. But

these differences do not obscure the basic unity within

the sequence of exploitive development of the two

centuries of domination of the Great Lakes by Europeans

32
and their descendants. Time lags may occur between

jurisdictions, different priorities, internal inconsistencies,

and so on, that can be very annoying, but the historical

degradative trends and current corrective efforts are

sufficiently similar that they can all be subsumed under

the generalized concepts of exploitive development and

sustainable redevelopment.

Exploitive development—We now examine some of

the main ecological phenomena related to exploitive

development of the Great Lakes, and thus also related

to sustainable redevelopment. Francis et al. (1979)

have sketched some of the main effects on the fish

association (and on other highly valued, sensitive ecological subsystems) of the many stresses operating in

the Great Lakes. This approach has been fine tuned to

the very degraded Green Bay (Harris et al. 1982) and

to the relatively well-conserved Long Point with its bays

(Francis et al. 1985). The disheartening realization has

emerged that most, if not all, of these stresses, acting

singly or jointly and to excess, entrain an ecological

syndrome of degradation or debasement (Rapport et a!.

1985).

Some features of this syndrome, as it relates especially

to fish, have been sketched as follows (Paloheimo and

Regier 1982, Regier and Grima 1984):

• The major ecological stresses associated with human

uses as conventionally practiced often act synergistically within the ecosystem so as to exacerbate each

other's adverse ecological effects; they seldom act

antagonistically so as to cancel out adverse effects.

• The stresses separately and jointly act to alter the

fish association from one that is dominated by large

fish, usually associated with the lake bottom and lake

edge, to one characterized by small, short-lived, midwater species. A similar change happens with respect

to vegetation; firm-rooted aquatic plants originally

nearshore are supplanted by dense suspensions of

open-water (pelagic) plankton algae. Further, the

association of relatively large benthic invertebrates on

the bottom (such as mussels and crayfish) is supplanted by small burrowing insects and worms (such

as midge larvae and sludge worms). Broadly similar

changes occur in the flora and fauna of the wetlands

and near-shore areas bordering these waters.

• With the above changes, an increased variability in

abundance of particular species occurs from year to

year, but especially in landings of different fish species

by anglers and commercial fishers. Fluctuations are

also more pronounced in the species associations of

wetland, benthic, and pelagic areas.

• The shift from large organisms to small organisms is

not accompanied by a major increase in the total

standing biomass of living material, but it is accompanied by a reduction in the production of the most

preferred species.

• In the offshore pelagic region, a new fish association—

mostly of exotic species—may be created in which

the small fish, such as alewife and smelt, may serve

as a food resource to large predatory fish, such as

salmon, which, however, must be maintained through

the capital-intensive technology of fish hatcheries.

• Market and sport value per unit of biomass are generally much lower with small mid-water fish species

than with large bottom species, and processing costs

are higher. Similarly, the aesthetic value to recreationists of the rooted plants nearshore is higher than a

turbid mixture of suspended algae and pollutants.

• The effect on fisheries, in the absence of the put,

grow, and take stocking of hatchery-reared predators,

is that nearshore, labor-intensive specialized fisheries

(sport and commercial) tend to disappear, though

highly mechanized, capital-intensive offshore enterprises may persist, if the combined stresses do not

become excessive and if the fish are not so contaminated as to become a health threat for those who eat

them. Yachts may quickly sail from polluted marinas

through the foul coastal water to the less-offensive

offshore waters. Beaches are posted as hazardous to

health.

• The combined effect is one of debasement and destabilization of the system of the natural environment

and its indigenous renewable resources with respect

to the features of greatest value to people.

Rapport et al. (1981) have termed the above list a

"general stress syndrome" and have inferred that such

a syndrome may be observed in terrestrial as well as

aquatic ecosystems that are subjected to the stresses

typical of conventional exploitive development (Rapport

et al. 1985). Indeed, we see analogs for each of the

above symptoms in the New Brunswick forest example.

Discovery of this syndrome has rendered obsolete any

general policy of managing human uses of ecosystems

as though they were ecologically independent. Recall

the point made in the preceding section about forests:

conventional development acted destructively on the

33
underlying natural processes that had generated highvalue resources. Some stress and consequent disturbance of the natural generative processes are inevitable

when humans intervene, but the extreme, combined

destructiveness of the various abuses related to exploitive development was a result of deeply misguided

policies and practices, which may have made contemporary sense, but which often involved self-imposed

ignorance. Sustainable redevelopment must seek to

cooperate more closely with the natural processes that

yield resources of high value.

Sustainable redevelopment: design and implementation—Attempts to arrest and reverse the degradation

of parts of the Great Lakes ecosystem, including its

fisheries, were begun over a century ago. Gross pollution with organic matter such as sawdust and offal was

contained, in part. Destructive fishery practices were

outlawed, such as dynamiting or setting nets across

streams used for spawning. Fishways were made

mandatory for dams, but the fishways were seldom

effective. With the advent of steam and electrical power,

many of the small dams across tributaries of the Great

Lakes fell into disuse and were washed away. In large

rivers, in this region and elsewhere, bigger and better

dams were constructed, often without functional fishways.

Several factors were responsible for the escalation of

the degradative practices—an escalation that remained

uncontained until very recently. These factors, which

must be reformed in a design for redevelopment, were:

• An unstated policy, shared binationally, that degradative abuses be addressed only after some particularly abused groups of the public raised a great clamor.

Thus, time lags were common, seldom less than a

decade, between the experts' and abused people's

awareness of degradation and some beginnings of

corrective action, almost always initiated slowly by

the government. This problem was not as severe with

the New Brunswick forests, perhaps because of the

lower population density and the smaller number of

nonconsumptive users. Also in New Brunswick, a

more direct feedback imperiled the economic structure, which may have attracted the attention of business and bureaucracy sooner than in areas where

the links are less direct, as with dirty water in the

Great Lakes.

• Such corrective actions as were taken were designed

so as not to impede exploitive development to a

serious degree, as was also true in New Brunswick.

Corrective actions were seldom fully effective, sometimes hardly effective at all, and sometimes they

redirected the problem to other parts of the ecosystem.

• An unbroken tempo appeared in the advent of new

user groups with direct and indirect demands on

these ecosystems. The feasibility (or likelihood) that

new users were likely to exacerbate the environmental impacts of existing users was generally ignored.

• The spatial and temporal scales of the degradative

impact of various user groups tended to increase with

technological advances related to those uses, but

may have become progressively less apparent to the

laypersons, even the most observant—such as with

acid rain, atmospherically transported toxic contaminants, leaching from landfill sites, consumptive use of

water, and so on. The related effects are not readily

seen until researchers present generalizations and

abstractions of regional impacts.

• Corrective action usually consisted of an attempt to

reduce the extent and intensity of the abuse with little

effort at mitigation or at rehabilitative intervention

(ecosystem therapy) to foster recovery processes

consistent with the natural healing processes. A

conventional engineering approach tends to move a

problem to a different place or time. It does not appreciate that biological systems have a memory or

imprint of past actions—that just stopping an abuse

does not necessarily lead to self-correction. Corrective intervention is often required.

The lag between public awareness of a serious problem

and public perception of an improvement after corrective

action is now about a quarter of a century. The aggregated rate of ecosystemic degradation in the Great

Lakes may have peaked (or ecosystem quality may

have "bottomed out") in the early 1980s—or it may not

yet have done so. Problems with contaminants leaching

from landfill sites, from acids and toxic materials transported atmospherically, and from consumptive use of

water appear to be waxing, while those caused by acid

rain, toxic fallouts, nutrient loading, and exploitive fishing

are waning. Whether or not the aggregated rate has

peaked, the evidence does indicate that the rate of

degradation has been slowed.

The five policy factors sketched above appear to apply

to both our cases of regional fishery and regional forestry

development. As a policy, sustainable redevelopment

must establish a framework that focuses the design of

34
corrective actions on these factors. At the regional

scale, focused discussion on how to correct them, as a

systemic set, has been initiated only recently.

A mandate for a binational policy of sustainable redevelopment for the Great Lakes, with some management

responsibility at the binational scale, may be inferred

from a study of several binational agreements in the

context of what we now know about the ecological

effects of uses and their interrelations within the Great

Lakes ecosystem. These agreements include:

• The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, served by the

International Joint Commission (IJC).

• The Migratory Birds Convention (MBC) of 1917,

served by an intergovernmental committee.

• The Great Lakes Fishery Convention (GLFC) of 1954,

served by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

• The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements of 1972

and 1978, overseen by the IJC.

Crucial gaps remained in 1985 that had not been sufficiently addressed by then:

• An agreement on long-range transport of atmospheric

pollutants, with its acid rain, toxic fallout, and smogrelated aerosols.

• An agreement on consumptive use, extra-Basin

diversion of water, or both.

• An agreement with authority to take specified, local

control actions in a regional control context, i.e., on

levels and flows.

Human practices related to the following ecological

features are being managed—in a weak sense of the

word—under the four rather general agreements

sketched above: water levels, water flows, water quality, and local air quality (IJC); fish quality and quantity,

and the predaceous exotic lamprey (GLFC); and waterfowl, shorebirds, and, by implication, the wetlands (MBC).

Within an ecosystem context, uses of most of these

features obviously cannot be managed effectively in the

absence of complementary management of some other

features. For example, the interrelationships between

water quality, fish quality and quantity, the sea lamprey,

fish-eating shorebirds, and wetlands as nursery areas

for fish and birds is well documented in the scientific

literature. Those who have a responsibility for management must have the full perspective.

An ecosystem approach has been endorsed by the two

national parties to these agreements, as well as by

various other levels of government. With respect to

water quality, the ecosystem approach has been endorsed formally at the regional or Basin scale in the

1978 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and explicitly, though less formally, at both the Basin and lake

scales, as the policy of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. This ecosystem approach is beginning to be

interpreted in the sense of what we have termed Basinwide sustainable redevelopment (Research Advisory

Board and International Joint Commission 1978, International Joint Commission 1982, Lee et al. 1982). As

yet, no specific codification of the meaning of the ecosystem approach has been accepted widely. Ecosystem understanding of sublake ecosystems is quite

advanced (Harris et al.1982, Francis et al.1985) compared with that of lake ecosystems or of the entire

Basin ecosystem. In the context of "think regionally, act

locally," few people have yet learned to think regionally,

probably because it requires that personal (economic)

issues be subsumed in a larger community context.

That is, we live in and see the local context, but the

regional context must be some sort of abstraction that

cannot be seen or felt, but can only be comprehended.

Public and political commitment, such as it is, to reverse

the degradation of the Great Lakes has come at a time

of growing awareness that major parts of the old industrial base of the Great Lakes region will likely wane in

absolute terms. Examples are the steel and automobile

industries and related waterborne transportation services.

Urban growth has slackened and some local jurisdictions have experienced net reductions in human population. Concern is great that the region not be relegated

to a hinterland of the American Sun Belt (disparagingly

called the Parched Belt) to which some of the seeming

abundance of fresh water in the Great Lakes might be

diverted. How a thriving regional modern economy

might receive major benefits from the sustainable redevelopment of the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem is not

clear, though many opinion leaders believe that the

Great Lakes themselves are the key to such redevelopment. Obviously, the choice of indicators of redevelopment is crucial. "Think regionally, act locally" does not

come easily with respect to a Basin ecosystem that is

fractured into many jurisdictions and subject to many

incompatible uses. Somehow the people of the Basin

must together choose a future, and make a long-term

commitment to its realization, rather than just passively

wait for something better to come along.

35
Attempts to achieve sustainable redevelopment of the

fishery depend on the progress of reform with the fishery and also on rehabilitation of the habitat of the fish,

the environment. In a properly managed fishery in a

properly managed freshwater ecosystem (of the Great

Lakes type), the fish association is dominated by native,

self-reproducing, highly valued, bottom-oriented (benthic)

species that achieve large size and old age in the natural state. Recall that, by 1955, the fish association was

well on its way to an inversion, toward dominance by

exotic, low-valued, mid-water (pelagic) species that

remain small and die relatively young; by 1960, the

inversion or debasement was almost complete. The

main stresses responsible were excessive fishing of the

preferred species (highgrading), invasion by the sea

lamprey which prefers fish quite similar to those that

people like, invasion or introduction of small pelagic fish

that thrive in enriched waters, eutrophication through

enrichment, pollution of spawning streams, and a miscellany of additional causes.

Corrective local measures began to show promise in

the early 1960s. These local measures have generated

local responses, but as yet only limited, mostly informal

coordination has happened at the regional Basin scale.

These measures include:

• Direct control of the sea lamprey through barriers and

selective chemical lampricides, with the sterile male

technique due for field testing.

• Reform of fishing practices to permit a recovery of

preferred species; in some jurisdictions, commercial

fishing was limited in favor of sport fishing, which

exerts less intense fishing pressure on the valued

species.

• Hatchery rearing and stocking of native species, such

as the lake trout, in an attempt to reestablish selfreproducing stocks where they had been extinguished

in recent decades.

• Hatchery rearing and stocking of non-native species

on a put, grow, and take basis, especially salmonids

of various species, to suppress the vast stocks of

small pelagic species and to supply a highly valued

sport fishery.

• Environmental programs for reducing the loadings of

phosphates to reverse eutrophication and to foster

oligotrophication, which favors the valued native

species.

• Ecological rehabilitation of some streams that flow

into the Great Lakes to provide productive spawning

and nursery areas, especially for large, native and

some non-native salmonids.

• Banning some persistent pesticides, such as DDT,

which were washed into the lakes and transported

and deposited onto the lakes by atmospheric processes, and then interfered with normal development

of young fish and other creatures.

By 1984, all the lakes showed signs that the fish associations were beginning to revert to a state of dominance by large benthic species originally native to the

lakes. How quickly or how far this process will go is

largely a function of what people will do next with the

Great Lakes Basin ecosystem, and particularly depends

on how we orchestrate our more local endeavors within

the Basin context.

The fact that these preferred native species are so

dependent on a healthy aquatic ecosystem has stimulated interest in proposals to use some of them as

"indicators of ecosystem quality" (Ryder and Edwards

1984). A deep oligotrophic ecosystem should support

thriving stocks of lake trout, a shallower mesotrophic

part of the system should support walleye and yellow

perch, and a nearshore part of the system should support black bass and pike. Aquatic systems dominated

by such species are likely to provide water of a quality

suitable for domestic use after minimal treatment, to be

productive of fish species that are highly valued by

sport and commercial fishers, to be healthy for the

contact recreation so important in heavily urbanized

areas, to be attractive for recreational boating and

nature study, and to be naturally self-regulatory to an

important degree if all the uses are practiced in a manner that is well informed in the context of sustainable

redevelopment. Sustainability must be defined according to type, intensity, and frequency of use—subject to

ecosystemic maxims defined locally and regionally.

Sustainable Redevelopment of Regional Natural

Resource Systems

Degradation and recovery in general—Innis (1938),

Rea (1976), and others have exposed some far-reaching

general parallels in the way various renewable resources

were exploited in Canada and the United States during

the past two centuries for the purpose of what is now

termed economic development. Parallels can be traced

in the histories of the exploitation of the New Brunswick

36
forests and of the Great Lakes fisheries, though these

parallels may not be as close as between New Brunswick fisheries in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and New

Brunswick forests, or as between Great Lakes fisheries

and Great Lakes forests (Flader 1983).

The breakdown of ecosystems, as ecosystems, under

human influences and their recovery after relaxation or

mitigation of those influences is attracting increasing

attention (Holdgate and Woodman 1978, Francis et al.

1979, Cairns 1980, Barrett and Rosenburg 1981). With

respect to ecosystem organization in a quite general

sense, the closest biotic counterparts in ecosystems

like the Great Lakes and the dominant species of trees

in a natural forest like that of eastern Canada may be

the dominant, large, relatively sedentary species of fish

(Regier 1972). In the pristine forests of eastern Canada

two centuries ago, as in the pristine Great Lakes, much

of the total living biomass was contained within such

dominant species. Elton's energy pyramid of trophic

relations is sometimes incorrectly taken as indicative

of biomass proportions in natural biotic associations

of lakes, such as the Great Lakes. In natural lakes, the

plant species, both the macrophytes and the phytoplankton, have a quick turnover, but some individuals

of the large species of terminal consumers and predators survive for decades, such as lake trout and lake

whitefish, and some up to perhaps a century, such as

sturgeon and snapping turtles. These relative rates

(and corresponding biomass proportions) are reversed

in forests between, say, white pine and insectivorous

birds. Note that the turnover rates of the economically

most-valued components are quite slow in each case,

and hence recovery after abuse stops will also be slow

in each case.

Incidentally, in natural grasslands and wetlands the

relative biomass of producers versus consumers plus

predators may not be as strongly skewed as in forests

or lakes. Grasslands and wetlands appear to be more

at the mercy of climate and natural fire with "wipe out"

events more frequent and less localized than in either

forests or lakes. Neither the plants nor animals tend to

grow very large or old in grasslands and wetlands.

Large animal species of the forest tend to exploit grasslands and wetlands for forage, and large animal species

of the lakes tend to use wetlands for spawning and

nursery areas. Rapport et al. (1985) have shown that

the terrestrial and aquatic degradation syndromes

caused by exploitive developments of many kinds are,

in some ways, similar ecologically. The degradation

syndrome may be seen as a pathological reversal of

the usual natural developmental, successional, and

morphogenetic processes that have been characterized

by von Bertalanffy (Davidson 1983) as follows:

Bertalanffy's model of hierarchical order was

furnished by him with four related concepts: As

life ascends the ladder of complexity, there is

progressive integration in which the parts become

more dependent on the whole, and progressive

differentiation, in which the parts become more

specialized. In consequence the [system] exhibits a wider repertoire of [functional] behavior. But

this is paid for by progressive mechanization,

which is the limiting of the parts to a single function, and progressive centralization in which

there emerge leading parts that dominate the

behavior of the system.

The science of surprise and the practice of adaptive

environmental management of C.S. Holling and his

colleagues (Holling 1978, 1986; Regier 1985) may

relate in the first instance to both the normal, natural

morphogenetic sequence and the human-caused

exploitive degradative sequences, in a general systems

context. For example, forest resource degradation is a

surprise because we were not collecting data on forest

development and degradation—but if proper data had

been gathered, such a surprise would not have occurred

or would have been less serious. One of the implications

of Holling's ideas is that ecological sequences have

discontinuities that may involve emergent behavior in

the natural morphogenetic sequence and, presumably,

may involve complementary submergent behavior in

the human-caused degradation sequence. Such concepts can be helpful in comprehending the general

consequences of opportunistic exploitation and for

designing rehabilitative husbandry in a policy of sustainable redevelopment.

Mobilization of public and political support for redevelopment is hindered by a variety of incorrect myths

about natural processes and characteristics of ecosystems, such as the following:

• Large species tend to be inefficient producers of

resources and should be sacrificed in favor of smaller

species with quicker turnover rates. This approach

ignores the self-regulatory roles of large species that

favor other valued features of these ecosystems.

It also plays down the difference in per-unit value,

with economic and aesthetic values of some of the

37
dominant species high in comparison to most of the

small species. In any case, the relative productivity of

harvestable smaller species in aggregate is not likely

to achieve twice that of harvestable larger species,

and the difference in per-unit net values are likely to

be greater than twofold, in inverse proportion to the

rate of production.

• Natural succession of lakes involves eutrophication

and thus the preferred species of fish that thrive in

less fertile waters are passing phenomena anyway.

This assumption is basically incorrect in that internal

ecosystemic processes in lakes are generally oligotrophic, but eutrophication is generally caused by

external processes, such as atmospheric loading with

volcanic ash or by human loading of nutrients into the

lakes, which override the natural processes that

regulate nutrient concentrations.

• As forests age, their susceptibility to natural forest

fires, blow downs, and insect pest outbreaks increases

greatly. A natural forest tends to be a rather intricate

mosaic of somewhat different associations, all at

somewhat different stages of succession, and consequently not at all at great risk from natural causes.

General features of sustainable redevelopment—

Let us look again at the concept of sustainable redevelopment. One can argue that the pulp and paper industry

has been sustained and expanded in New Brunswick,

but such sustainability was achieved only by virtue of

drastically reducing the standards for raw material. This

change has driven up the cost of raw material because

the smaller material is more costly to harvest and handle

(fig. 10). To be meaningful, the word sustainability must

be accompanied by definitions of quantity, quality, time,

and location. Does the conventional development of a

white pine industry for 50 years before it runs out of

suitable resources constitute sustainability? Does the

existence of pulp mills for 50 years constitute sustainability? Is development still considered sustainable when it

results in depreciation of the resource? How is quality of

the resource to be specified, in that the quality of raw material determines the quality of the associated industry?

Where the specifications for sustainability include quantity, quality, location, and time, one need expect relatively

few resource problems with development. In the absence

of such specifications, development inevitably wanders

into trouble. Development in our society has meant quick

and short-term economic benefit, with the higher the

interest rate, the shorter the time horizon. Development

Figure 10—The relation of raw material value (pulpwood,

sawlogs) and cost of logging (pulp or logs) to the average

diameter of trees in a stand. Normally, market pressures limit

pulpwood to smaller trees, and larger trees are processed for

sawlogs. The cost of logging strongly depends on tree size but

is little influenced by the intended raw material.

does not refer to the resource, all brave words at pulp

mill or fish plant dedications to the contrary! Frequently,

plans for sustainable development include all the highest platitudes with respect to resource management that

one could hope to see, but it is rare to see any mechanism that forces implementation of these fine ideals.

Two characteristics of redevelopment need emphasis.

The first is that the transition from development to redevelopment (or from exploitation to husbandry) necessarily

produces substantial tension. Tension develops between

industry (whether forestry or fishery), government, and

the public, and the tension is heightened by a mutual

lack of trust among the players. Industry believes that

neither the government nor the public understand the

intensity of the world-scale competition in which it is engaged. Government does not trust industry to maintain

the necessary long-term horizon for a redevelopment

program, and fears that the public may not understand

that redevelopment will necessarily cost a temporary

reduction in the flow of benefits from the resource. The

public does not trust either industry or government, who

are seen to be creators of the problem and hence

unlikely candidates to design and execute a solution.

None of these players has a very good understanding

of the relation between local actions and regional goals,

and consequently they each occasionally produce rather

unrealistic action proposals. For example, the public

has been so long taught that a tree should be planted

for every one cut, or a fish stocked for each harvested,

that the focus on local action is almost exclusive. Public

outcry during the design of redevelopment has centered

on local events, with the most naive notions about what

38
the forest or lake system in the regional sense will do if

their local actions are followed and with no sense of the

orchestration of these local actions. A most counterproductive feature of this tension is the desire of some

members of all parties to demonstrate that it is some

other "they" who are to blame. In fact all three—industry,

government, and the public—applauded and shared in

the development that has caused the problem.

The second characteristic of redevelopment worth noting has to do with the geographic reality of planning the

context of acting locally while thinking regionally (or globally). Many may talk about managing a resource and,

indeed, about specific management actions, without

ever specifying the actual location of these actions or

even recognizing the need for such specification. Some

may actually plan resource management without dealing with the regional context of local actions, although

escaping the implications of context is impossible. That

is, a plan that states that 5000 ha will be planted every

year, 2000 ha precommercially thinned, and 3000 ha

harvested, implies that someone knows precisely where

each of these activity sums will be accumulated. (A

similar statement applies to stocking lake trout in the

Lakes.) When a management plan is implemented on

the ground or in the water, however, explicit geographic

reference in a regional context is inescapable and consequently few real redevelopers exist. Any plan requires

implementing a series of local actions, which together

cumulate to the desired regional effect. If the plan does

not specify the geographic pattern of these local events,

then the plan cannot be implemented. This statement is

perhaps the greatest learning experience of the redevelopment phase.

So important is geographic control to implementing

management that, in the historical absence of a technical capability for geographic control, exploitation was

all that was possible. Certainly, if relating the parts of a

geographically dispersed system in terms of both attributes and location is impossible, only the broadest form

of management control can be done. Fortunately, such

limitations are being rapidly erased by computerized

mapping systems embodying relational data bases

(Erdle and Jordan 1984). For the first time, these systems allow the planner not only to design a regional

resource redevelopment strategy, but also to identify

readily the geographic locations where particular tactical

actions must be taken to accomplish the regional strategy. In systems where broad geographic extent adds to

both the cost and complexity of resource exploitation

and to the cost and complexity of resource management,

the ability to analyze the same resource data at appropriate scales for strategic and tactical designs is a major

technological breakthrough. Characteristically, the exploitation nterests have been as aggressive as management interests in implementing these expensive systems;

this is true for the New Brunswick forestry example, but

not for Great Lakes fisheries. In resources with many

users and many managers with disparate responsibility,

authority, or both, a common geographic data base is

crucial for avoiding antagonistic strategies and permitting coherent management design.

Management has been much talked about in the past

and, indeed, a certain amount about planning as well,

but little of the discussion has come to grips with the

fact that to make a plan happen on the ground and in

the water, in the forest and lakes where it really counts,

management plans must specify where the local events

will take place to achieve a specified regional effect.

What separates real management (or husbandry) from

those highest platitudes of development is the specification of geographic control of actions in the sense of: do

this, at this time, to cause this to happen at this place in

the future, so that the whole forest or lake ecosystem

will develop along this desired pattern. Management,

then, is acting locally while thinking regionally.

Local and regional decision making—In North

America, the nature of rights to the direct use of a

renewable resource and to the indirect use of the habitat that generates the renewable resource is very complex (Regier and Grima 1984, 1985). The heuristic

schema in figure 11 may aid understanding of rights

from the perspective of how these rights are exercised

by the putative owners of them, and of how society

administers the allocation and supervises the exercise

of the rights.

A right to determine the use of a designated part of a

renewable resource, its habitat, or both may be held

exclusively by designated individuals or by duly constituted groups of individuals, or may be shared nonexclusively with others. From a complementary but orthogonal

perspective, such rights may be transferred or exchanged

between individuals or groups largely at their own initiative, or they may not be transferable (Dales 1975).

Eight different combinations of these two criteria are

shown (fig. 11). The four outer corners are rather

sharply defined, hard or formal manifestations of the

four possible combinations, and the four inner corners

39
Figure 11—A perspective, expanded from a scheme by Dales (1975), on the variety of ways in which rights to the

use of fish and similar resources are managed in North American Society. In the four inside characterizations, the

exclusivity and transferablilty of user rights are satisfied in a practical manner. User rights in these four inside

types are less sharply defined than those in the four corners. The schema may be viewed to have a soft core with

a more sharply defined hard shell or edge.

are less clearly defined, soft or informal counterparts of

the outer set. Note that exercise of an illegitimate right

has been included, in part to complete the schema, but

also to take note of the fact that such illegal actions are

not uncommon and do affect the exercise, by others, of

their legitimate rights.

Regier and Grima (1985) have suggested that the set

of four hard elements, where they are condoned in

practice by society, may become organized into a kind

of competitively interdependent complex. In contrast,

the soft elements may develop into a more mutual

interdependent complex. Where a particular complex is

dominant, the interdependent process may link with the

relevant social mores to effect a kind of positive feedback reinforcement of the dominance—for example,

free enterprise and exploitation.

In some very general way, the interdependent hard set

may be used by the forces that dominate conventional

exploitive development, especially as imposed from a

metropolis onto a hinterland. This use may happen with

40
41

Table 1—Institutional or policy mechanisms for managing aquatic ecosystems and for allocating the use of fish and their

habitats.a

Mechanism

Prohibition

Regulation

Direct government

intervention

Grants and tax incentives

Buy-back programs

Civil law

Insurance

Effluent charges

License fees

Demand management

Transferable development

rights in land-use planning

Specific property rights, as

with transferable individual

quotas

Instrument of control

Exclusion of sport fish from commercial

harvests

Specification of zero discharge of some toxics

orcontaminants.

Specification of low phosphorus

concentrations in sewage effluents.

Specification of gear and area, in fishing.

Control of non-native sea lamprey by

lampricide. dams, etc.

Development of islands and headlands with

fill and dredge spoils.

Subsidy to industry for antipollution

equipment.

Subsidy to commercial fishers to harvest

relatively undesirable species.

Government purchase and retirement of

excess harvesting capacity.

Losers enabled to sue despoilers in civil court.

Compulsory third-party insurance for claims of

damage.

Charge for waste disposal, either direct cost

of treatment or indirect cost of impacts on

ecosystem.

Tax or charge on harvester, scaled to

amount of use.

Rates involve marginal cost pricing, peak

responsibility pricing, orboth.

Limited rights to develop one area exchanged

for broader rights to develop another.

Purchase of pollution loading rights to

predetermined loadings.

Harvest rights to explicit quantities to be

purchased.

Purpose orobserved consequences

Improve recreational opportunities for anglers.

Reduce exposure of biota and humans to

poisons.

Control eutrophication which, if intense,

degrades the aquatic ecosystem.

Reduce fishing intensity to prevent

overfishing.

Foster recovery of lake trout and other

preferred species to benefit fishers.

Provide recreational facilities and spawning

areas to benefit anglers, boaters, etc.

Lower pollution rates and distribute costs

more widely.

Reduce competition from undesirable species

to benefit preferred species and their users.

Reduce excess fishing capacity and

compensate owners of the excess capacity.

Preserve ecosystem amenities for broader

public; recompense losers.

Reduce pollution loadings because insurance

premiums are scaled to loading.

Reduce pollution, allocate resources to

high-value, profitable uses, or both.

Foster efficient use of resource by

discouraging overcapitalization, recovering

fair return for the owners (public) of the

resource.

Improve overall efficiency of use and foster

conservation.

Direct the development to areas preferred by

government.

Limit pollution and foster efficient use of

resources.

Limit effective fishing effort and allocate

resources to high-value uses, profitable uses,

orboth.

a

 Items at the top are largely administrative, and those at the bottom have a prominent role for the market system (examples relate to the

Great Lakes of North America).
private capitalism where the free market is a dominant

element within the set, or with state capitalism where

the administrative element (linked to the international

market) is dominant.

Locally, in an established, healthy human community,

much of the exercise of rights occurs within the general

framework of the soft, informal set. This use is seen

most clearly with respect to sharing within a family,

whether nuclear or extended. This more informal

approach to the identification and practice of rights may

be severely distorted by cultural invasion of the more

formal approaches associated with conventional development. Also, some of the small-scale, less informal

rights enjoyed by a community may be vitiated by the

exercise of the exploitive rights of the developers.

North American societies have had great difficulty in

dealing with the injustices and inequities visited on local

communities by external developers. The wrongs have

often been rationalized by a rather simplistic utilitarian

ethic of the greatest good for the greatest number, with

some abstract logic about the desirability of Paretooptimality, if only it could be implemented. We think of

what has been done at federal and provincial scales

with the objective of maximizing the net value added,

with less consideration of how the resulting benefits are

distributed among people. Is value added a good measure of progress?

Currently, a swing to neoconservatism has brought with

it a preference for the market as an allocator of rights

to use and has brought antipathy for the administrative

function which had come to be dominant. Such a

change in preferences may be interpreted as a shift in

the center of gravity of the whole interactive complex,

now involving both the hard and soft sets (fig. 11). The

shift is toward the lower left of the figure and away from

the upper left and also away from the central soft set.

Green parties, as yet minuscule in North America,

would presumably favor some dominance by the soft

set over the hard set.

Compromise intergrades of various kinds have been

developed within the spectrum of strictly administrative

and strictly market methods (left side, fig. 11; see table 1,

page 42). Some of these compromises could also be

adapted to serve as intergrades between the hard and

soft sets. To be most effective in redevelopment, the

selection of mechanisms must be chosen and designed

to use a constructive feedback loop to make developers

42

want to manage because it is in their interests. All else

may be futile.

In the context of rehabilitative husbandry for sustainable redevelopment of regional ecosystems, the complex regime of rights should be organized so that a

well-functioning interdependent soft set of local

allocative methods should not be overridden destructively by an interdependent hard set of allocative methods serving primarily those interests defined at a

regional scale.

Acknowledgments

We thank A.P. Grima, J.P. Hrabovsky, and R.E. Munn

for helpful criticisms. J. Retel typed numerous versions

of the manuscript.

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44
Historical Interdependence Between Ecology, Production, and Management

in the California Fisheries

Arthur F. McEvoy

ARTHUR F. McEVOY is a professor, School of Law,

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.

The organizing topic of this set of papers was "the

nature of our obligation as fishery professionals to

present and future generations." Entailed in that organizing topic, so the symposium's organizers informed

the participants, were three subsidiary questions. Those

questions were, first, what is it that fishery managers

are trying to sustain and why? Second, what social,

political, or scientific problems undermine sustainable

fisheries management? Finally, how might fishery managers undertake the intensive management of commercial resources without irreversibly altering the ecosystems

upon which these and other resources depend? This

article is an effort to address those questions from the

perspective of the historical record of fisheries management in California, since it began to be actively concerned with the health of its fishery resources in the late

nineteenth century (McEvoy 1986, 1988).

Fisheries management is an object lesson in John

Muir's aphorism about Nature, to the effect that once

one begins pulling at any particular aspect of the natural world, one inevitably finds it hitched to everything

else in the universe (Teale 1973). What stands out

from the history of the fisheries in this one jurisdiction

are, first, the truth of Muirs notion that everything is

connected to everything else and, second, how richly

textured that truth is. That history suggests short answers to each of the three questions the conveners of

this symposium put forward, in reverse order. How do

we manage commercial resources without altering the

ecosystems in which they are embedded? The answer

to this one is easy: it's not possible. What social, political,

or scientific problems undermine sustainable management? The answer to this one is easy, too: all of them.

The first question—What is it that we're trying to sustain,

exactly?—is the really interesting one. Moreover, the way

in which one approaches the second and third questions

depends a lot on how one answers the first one.

Many of our problems in sustaining fisheries historically

have stemmed from the fact that managers have traditionally understood their task as one of sustaining a flow

of wealth from something they identify as a "resource"

into something they identify as "the market," both of

those things conceived of as distinct from one another

and each from their environments. The history of California fisheries management makes clear that, as a

matter of fact, everything is connected to everything

else and that people have problems when they try to

treat things as if they were not.

What a fishery is, descriptively, and what management

ought to try to sustain, prescriptively, is an interaction

between three variables: an ecosystem, a group of

people working, and the system of social control within

which the work takes place. Each of the three variables

has a good bit of its own independent dynamism, but

each varies continually in response to changes in the

other two. So it is not possible, in the nature of the

case, to manage a resource as if it could be described

and manipulated at arms' length. The best that fisheries

managers can do is to monitor and adjust the interaction

between a volatile ecology, a creative economy, and

society's understanding and control as they go along.

45
Ecology

The ongoing history of fisheries management is best

understood as an ecological one, consisting of a tripartite system of ecology, production, and management as

it has moved through time. In California, the data for

such a history are as variegated as the state's fisheries

are themselves

There are, first, a lot of useful historical data on California ecology, both on land and offshore. Army and

Weather Service records of temperature and precipitation date back to the 1840s (McAdie 1903); we know

from these records, for example, that the period between

1880 and 1920 tended to be cooler than the periods

before and after. We also know that the decades

between 1910 and 1940 were significantly drier than

average. We know, finally, that significant climatic

anomalies, probably associated with the El Nino-Southern Oscillation occurred in the mid-1950s, in the early

1920s, in the early 1880s, and the mid-1860s. All of

these anomalies were associated with serious crises in

the fishing industry, in response to which industry

pressed for some political solution (Hubbs 1948,

Radovich 1961, Cane 1983).

We also have an interesting set of geological data

developed by the Scripps Institution from fish scales

deposited in anaerobic sediment in the Santa Barbara

Channel (Soutarand Isaacs 1974). These sediments

are annulated, like tree rings, because winter sediment

from the coast is darker and thicker than summer sediment; what the people at Scripps did was to take cores

out of the sediment, date the layers, count the number

of scales from different kinds of fish in each layer, and

calibrate those measurements to modern estimates of

those stocks' populations. The end result of all that

work is a census of the major pelagic schooling species

in the system (sardine anchovy, and mackerel) that

goes back some two millennia (Smith 1978). We know

from these data that the aggregate biomass of these

schooling fishes has varied widely and continuously: it

was extremely high in the 1830s, and again at the turn

of the twentieth century, when the major industrial

fisheries of this century (for salmon, sardine, and tuna)

were first developed. We also know that since the

sardine fishery collapsed in the late 1940s, the aggregate population of such fishes has remained far below

any numbers in the geological record.

In this record, further, is an interesting relation between

populations of sardine and anchovy. These two species

are ecologically very similar, except that the anchovy

has a shorter life span and breeds at a higher rate than

the sardine does. What this knowledge does for us is to

provide an index of the relative volatility of conditions in

the system: highly unsettled conditions favor a species

like the anchovy that turns its population over more

rapidly; more stable conditions tend to favor the sardine

(Smith 1978, Smith and Lasker 1978). We thus know

that the system was both highly stable and productive

in the 1860s, the 1890s, and the 1930s. The first period

was when the sardine fishery was in its heyday. The

system was in disequilibrium in the 1880s, when government fishery management began in California, during

the World War I decade, and during the late 1940s and

early 1950s, when the sardine fishery collapsed. On the

whole, the California Current system is extremely volatile and all of the fisheries in them are vulnerable to

random environmental shock. In sum, clearly a great

deal of change takes place in the system, some of it

quite drastic, whether people are working it or not. People

who develop expectations about a fishery's productivity

in good times may be caught by surprise a few years

down the road.

Contemporary observations provide a wealth of more

traditional historical data. We know, for example, that

massive die-offs of sardine occurred off the southern

end of Baja California in 1602 and off Monterey during

the last week of May 1858, the first because the Spanish explorer Vizcaino noted it in his diary (Wagner 1928),

and the second because the Monterey newspaper

reported that a lot of Indians had come from inland to

gather the fish for drying. We know that when Richard

Henry Dana visited Santa Barbara in the 1830s, little or

no kelp grew along that stretch of coast (Dana 1841),

but in 1888 the kelp was so thick that coastal steamers

had to have channels cut for them before they could

come into port (USFC 1888). This last item tells us a lot

about the system that we can correlate with the histories

of the sea otter trade, the Chinese abalone fishery, and

the near-shore market fisheries whose staples were

yellowtail, barracuda, sea bass, and other kelp-living

species (McEvoy 1986).

Finally, more-or-less systematic observations were

taken by scientists, most of them on government payrolls, from time to time beginning in the 1860s. In all,

direct observations by scientists and lay people provide

good evidence as to what kinds of fisheries were pros46
pering at what times, and which ones were doing poorly.

It is thus possible, given current knowledge about the

dynamics of the California Current system, to compare

what modern science suggests was really going on in

the system with what people at the time thought was

going on and what they did about it. Perhaps not surprisingly, correlation between what people thought was

happening to them at the time and what the data suggest was really happening is usually rare.

Production

All of these measurements tell us something about the

ecology leg of the tripartite system. The second leg is

that of production. The most striking characteristic of

the industry's economic history is the familiar, cyclical

pattern of boom-and-bust: new resources are discovered

or come within reach of developing technology, harvests

grow exponentially for a while, they level off, and the

fishery collapses. The story, told in a single iteration, is

unremarkable. What is remarkable about it is the innumerable quantity of its historical iterations and the

seeming inability of people to do anything to prevent it.

One interesting aspect of this cycle as it has played out

in California, however, has to do with the nature of

economic development in the fisheries, both extensive

(in the sense of geographic expansion) and intensive

(in the sense of technological development). That is,

that more or less coherent agglomerations of capital

and labor tend to persist through the industry's history,

shifting to new stocks or moving to new waters for new

supplies of old stocks or changing their techniques in

the service of either strategy when they deplete their

old ones. One very interesting example of this phenomenon concerns the Sacramento River salmon fishery of

the late nineteenth century.

The Sacramento River salmon fishery was established

in the late 1860s by a couple of men from coastal Maine;

these people were refugees from a salmon fishery that

their families had worked since before the American

Revolution but had since begun to decline under the

impact of agriculture, industry, and other competing

uses of water (Dodds 1959, Merchant 1989). Once

established on the Sacramento, salmon fishing continued sporadically until the late 1870s, when the climate

suddenly changed from a hot and dry "continental"

regime to a cool and wet "marine" pattern. Suddenly,

the runs of salmon in the system were unbelievable. At

its peak, the fishery probably took 10 million pounds of

chinook salmon out of the Sacramento River each year

between 1879 and 1883. The runs were so heavy

between September 15 and 17, 1880, that fishers at

Sacramento simply threw 9,000 dead chinooks back

into the river because no one would buy them. The

boom phase of this fishery lasted exactly four years, or

one modal chinook life span.

As the industry collapsed, most of its capital and labor

moved northward, more or less bodily, first to the Columbia River, then to Puget Sound, and then to Alaska,

depleting each fishery in turn. The industry behaved a

little like a group of slash-and-bum farmers, except that

enough people stayed behind at each place, making

their average cost and no more, as the economics of

the "tragedy of the commons" would predict, to make

sure that the stocks got no chance to recover (Crutchfield and Pontecorvo 1969).

One California salmon processor moved from Sacramento to Monterey at the turn of the century and did

two things: he outfitted a few motorized boats and

began trolling offshore for salmon, which boosted the

harvest but intensified the pressure on the Sacramento

stocks; and he modified his cannery and a few of his

boats and began fishing sardine. The sardine industry

spread north along the coast to British Columbia,

boomed during the twenties and thirties, and collapsed

after 1945. In the early fifties, the sardine industry

moved bodily, canneries and boats and even a few

scientists, to Peru (Paulik 1971, Clark 1977).

The economic history of this part of the California fishing industry is thus one of a more or less coherent

aggregation of labor, capital, and technology that endured nearly two centuries, from the 1770s to the

1970s. The industry had a kind of malignant ecological

unity as it moved through two centuries and into three

oceans. The same kind of story can also be told about

whales and tuna (McEvoy 1986). The point is about the

nature of technological and economic change in the

fishing industry that comes to light only when one looks

at it from an ecological and historical perspective.

Another interesting thing about fisheries in general and

those in California in particular is the remarkably high

degree of informal order under which they operate.

Until about World War I in California, the fishing business as a whole consisted of a handful of disaggregated

sectors, each made up of a different ethnic group fishing

target species with which they had been familiar in their

47
home countries. Chinese fished squid and abalone,

New Englanders fished salmon, Italians fished nearshore

market varieties, Portuguese hunted whales, and so on.

Given the relative weakness of the state's fishery management apparatus before World War I, each of these

disaggregated fisheries operated under its own law,

more or less independently of the others and certainly

from the state. The one Indian group that survived into

the twentieth century more or less intact, those people

who fished salmon in the Klamath River, likewise

retained a great deal of power to order its harvest in its

own, traditional ways.

These regimes could be quite vigorous. In the words of

the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907,

if anyone imagines that it is possible for a Chinese or member of any other nationality than an

Italian to catch crabs in this bay for the market,

let him try it. If any Italian thinks it is possible to

catch crabs for the market without joining the

Association, let him try it.

"Everything is governed by laws which the fishermen

have made for themselves," reported David Starr Jordan

some years earlier (Goode 1887).

Would-be competitors of these ethnically proprietary

fisheries certainly seldom saw anything of substance in

these arrangements except monopoly and piracy.

Modern economists usually pay little attention to them

either, as do law enforcement officials except when, as

in Indian treaty fisheries, the courts force them to. The

record suggests, however, that these tight little ethnic or

tribal associations served an ecological function by linking

the allocation of access to the resources to the long-term

welfare of the group, and that their management record,

historically speaking, in many cases looks at least as

good and sometimes a lot better than that of the bureaucratic, scientific agencies that superseded them.

Similar groups that exist today, among the Cree Indians

of James Bay, Canada, for example, or among lobster

fishers in parts of Maine, likewise close off access to

their fisheries, maintain a similarly high degree of order

in their harvest, and tend to generate more net social

income on a more sustainable basis than neighboring

groups not so highly organized (Acheson 1975, Berkes

1977, McGoodwin 1990). In California, the very cohesiveness of these groups and the relative prosperity

that they derived from that cohesiveness incited the

envy of less organized competitors, who called on the

political machinery of the state to destroy them, thus

exposing those fisheries to the market failures that

make up tragedies of the commons. The point here is a

relatively conservative one, that a systematic, ecological,

mutually reinforcing relation exists between the social

and cultural organization of harvesting groups and the

ecology of their target stocks.

Thus, a reciprocal, interactive relation exists between

the ecological processes that determine a stock's productivity and the social and cultural processes that

make fishers behave in the ways they do—that is, between the ecological and productive parts of my tripartite model of the fisheries. For a long time, of course,

people thought that no such interactive relation existed;

that is, that nature was essentially a passive store of

resources from which harvesters could always take

more and it would grow back. We know better than that

now, although the idea persists, frequently hidden deep

in the assumptions we make about what fisheries management is all about. Nowadays, the notion manifests

itself whenever people act as if nature were resilient

enough to take whatever burdens they can put on it,

that some technical way of making nature produce

more than it seems willing to will always be found, or

that what all fishers want, when they resist outside

intervention into their affairs, is to get more for themselves, beggar their neighbors.

Management

The reciprocal relations between the ecology of resources

and the economic use of the resources is relatively

easy to grasp. Fishers go where nature makes resources

available to them; nature, in turn, changes its character

whenever human use has an appreciable impact on it.

Less intuitive is the reciprocal interrelations between

management and both industry and ecology. Management, including both lawmaking and the scientific

research that (at least ostensibly) informs it, clearly has

some impact on the structure of the fishing industry and

consequently, as the industry works in a responsible

environment, on the ecology of the resources. At the

same time, however, management is itself a product of

the historical interaction between production and ecology, between fishers and fished.

Frequently, lurking deep within our assumptions about

fisheries management is an assumption not unlike the

one that postulates a sharp, hermetic distinction between ecology and production. Here, fishery managers

frequently assume that the regulatory process goes on

48
in isolation from the interaction between nature and

production that it is supposed to monitor and regulate.

This assumption about the management process, in

turn, has two aspects to it. One facet of the assumption

is the idea that lawmaking goes on in isolation, unaffected by the struggle for resources in the marketplace.

The other aspect is the common assumption that the

scientific information on the basis of which lawmakers

regulate the fisheries comes to them as objective truth,

free of political charge either in its generation or in the

manner in which lawmakers put it to use. Both of these

preliminary assumptions are wrong; both science and

law are inextricably knit into the systematic interaction

between ecology, production, and regulation that constitutes fisheries management in the real world.

The first incorrect assumption is that lawmaking somehow goes on in isolation from the struggle for resources

that leads to fishery depletion. What lawmakers are

theoretically supposed to do, whether they are regulators, legislators, or judges, is to identify market failures

that lead to "tragedies of the commons" like fisheries

depletion; once they discover these market failures,

their job is to fashion regulations to correct them

(Christy and Scott 1965, Hardin 1968, Cheung 1970).

Market failures stem from a number of readily identifiable

sources: free rider problems, jurisdictional incoherence,

overly high discounts placed on future income from

renewable resources, poor accounting of uncertain

risks to the resources, and the difficulty of translating

ethical or otherwise nonmonetary values into measures

that can be balanced against the economic costs of fish

left uncaught.

Lawmaking, however, is subject to all of the same

kinds of market failures that the unregulated economy

is. The legal system is a kind of market for legal entitlements to use resources in certain ways; inasmuch as

people struggle in that legal market for rights to use

resources, "the law" and "the market" are simply different modes of bargaining between economic actors

(Hurst 1982). It is certainly true that much of what

passes for resource management amounts to little more

than one well-organized interest group or another pressing the state to give its members access to resources

while denying it to others. Most restrictions on fishing

gear fall under this head: the controversies between

people who troll for salmon offshore, those who fish

salmon inshore for recreation, and the Indian tribes

should come immediately to mind.

California history is replete with examples of this kind of

struggle for resources displaced from the market into

the legal system. The California Fish and Game Commission spent most of the first 30 years of its history

engaged in a process whereby it commissioned one or

another scientific study of fisheries problems, noted the

near-uniform conclusion that the one-third of the state's

fishers who were Chinese were to blame for those

problems, and with little trouble urged the state legislature to burden the Chinese fisheries with season restrictions, gear restrictions, export prohibitions, and so on.

As it turns out, Chinese fishing had little or nothing to do

with any of the problems that led fishers of European

background to demand that the state take legal action

against them. In the 1880s, Chinese abalone hunters

did well and Italian market fishers did poorly, for example,

not because of any ecological link between the two, but

because the fur industry had by that time wiped the

California Current system clean of sea otters, which

allowed populations of intertidal mollusks to bloom and

thereby led to a depletion of the kelp forests that provided

habitat for the market fishers' targets. Indeed, the record

hints that, by the late 1880s, Chinese gathering had

depressed populations of abalone and sea urchin enough

that the kelp forests were reviving in those neighborhoods

where the Chinese were active (McEvoy 1986). To

contemporary observers, however, Italian trouble and

Chinese success, plus the instinctive notion that Nature

herself had only a passive role to play in the human

economy, led to a political result in which resources

management amounted to a struggle between harvesters

only, in the state capitol no less than on the water itself.

Perhaps a more dramatic example of this reciprocal

interaction between lawmaking and market struggle

comes from the sorry history of the California sardine

fishery. Here, California assembled the world's most

sophisticated research-and-regulatory apparatus to

manage what at the time was the most intensive fishery

the world had ever seen (Thompson 1919). By the late

1920s, the California Fish and Game Department had

identified all of the then-accepted signs of overfishing in

the stock and recommended a catch limit of 250,000

tons (Clark 1939). Later research indicated that this

was close to the fishery's sustainable yield at the time,

even with discounting for occasional years of reproductive failure built in (Murphy 1966, MacCall 1979).

The problem was that the state legislature had the legal

authority for regulating commercial, as opposed to

49
recreational, fisheries: what happened was that the

Fish and Game apparatus had to join the commercial

fishery and (especially) its allies in the state's poultry

industry in a political struggle over allocating access to

the fishery. As a result, the fishery went essentially

unregulated. In 1935, Oregon and Washington responded to California's inability to rein in its fishers by giving

theirs unlimited access to the stock as well. By the end

of the thirties, the sardine fishery was seriously overcapitalized and catches had leveled off; it collapsed

suddenly in 1945-46 and again in the early 1950s,

never to recover. Here was a particularly clear example

of the reciprocally constitutive interaction between

production and lawmaking: the"tragedy of the commons"

reproduced itself, more or less unchanged, in the very

regulatory processes that were supposed to correct its

evil effects in the market.

If market struggle shapes the regulatory process by

influencing the outcome of political bargaining in legislatures and administrative agencies, it also does so by

influencing the character of the scientific information

made available to lawmakers as a basis for their allocations. This in turn, takes place in two arenas, both by

determining the kinds of questions that scientists are

given to answer about a resource and by influencing

the ways in which lawmakers respond to whatever

information their scientists are able to generate for them.

In the nineteenth century, both state and federal fisheries science concentrated single-mindedly on increasing

the flow of resources from the environment into the

market. One way to do this was through prospecting for

new resources; a great deal of this kind of activity

occurred at all levels of government in the last three

decades of the century.

Another way to maintain the flow of resources into the

market was to enhance the productivity of declining

fisheries through applied science. Government scientists, then, restocked depleted waterways with exotic

species of fish and propagated particularly valuable

species like salmon and trout artificially, in government

hatcheries. As it turned out, a few successful transplants

of exotic fishes to California waters (shad and striped

bass) were at least counterbalanced by the baleful

effects of others (German carp and brown catfish, most

notoriously) (Smith 1895, Elton 1958). Observed

increases in the salmon harvest at the turn of the twentieth century, meanwhile, were almost certainly due, not

to the hatchery work, but rather to changes in climate,

changes in the distribution of the salmon's prey species,

the opening of an offshore troll fishery for immature

salmon, and the steady decline of pollution from the

mining industry inshore (Larkin 1979, McEvoy 1986).

The state, however, claimed in 1900 that "by the efforts

of this Commission, the salmon has been restored to

our state" (California Fish and Game Commission 1900).

Not only to harvesters, then, but also to the public

officials whose job it was to oversee the industry, fish

were like gold nuggets: valuable commodities to be

recovered from their state of nature and transformed

into cash for the one, a valuable source of political

capital for the other. So long as government apparently

maintained the supply and drove unwanted competitors

out of the business, further inquiry into the biology of

valuable fisheries seemed to have little point. Nature

was thoroughly plastic and could be manipulated in the

service of enterprise to the limits of human ingenuity

and political will. That observed changes in the fishing

business might have been due to the collective behavior

of the harvesters, to changes in other industries, or

even to the weather was simply not a legally meaningful

question. Inasmuch as most fishery research was paid

for through political appropriations, moreover, it was not

a scientifically meaningful one, either.

The second way in which the interaction between lawmaking and market struggle influences the role of

fisheries science in management has to do with the

effects that knowledge has on the regulatory process.

Here again, a telling example comes from the history of

the sardine industry. The sardine is very vulnerable to

environmental change in its first few days after hatching: if conditions aren't just right while fish are in the

larval stage, the whole generation will die (Smith 1985).

What happened was that conditions were good for

sardine recruitment between 1900 and 1940, while the

sardine fishery was in its growth phase, but when conditions turned bad in the 1940s, the stock could no

longer sustain such a heavy draft as the industry was

placing on it and collapsed. What extinguished the

sardine, then, was the interaction between an overcapitalized fishery and a volatile ecology (Murphy 1966,

MacCall 1979). Precisely the same thing happened in

Peru some 30 years later (Clark 1977).

Until the mid-1960s, one could take either of two positions in the political controversy over regulating the

sardine fishery. One could say that observed fluctuations in the harvest were caused by "environmental"

50
conditions, meaning that fishing had nothing to do with

the collapse and that the collapse would have taken

place even had no fishing been done at all. Alternatively,

one could take the position that observed fluctuations in

the harvest and the ultimate collapse were due to overfishing (Croker 1954, Clark and Marr 1955).

Although some people had pointed to possible interactions between fishing and environmental change, they

were unable to bring that reasoning to bear on the

political process because neither casual synergy nor

predicting the future on the basis of random-variable

analysis were meaningful concepts in the culture at

large. By the mid-1960s they were, thanks largely to the

work of Rachel Carson in popularizing the ecosystemic

effects of chemical pesticides and to the way in which

fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing had

familiarized the American public with food chains. Computer modeling for predicting the weather, the outcomes

of elections, and the public health effects of this or that

pollutant also contributed to educating the public about

the ecological and cybernetic concepts that underlay

what is now generally accepted as the explanation for

the sardine failure, first published in 1966.

Also coloring the debate over the sardine collapse in

the mid-1960s was an industry campaign to open the

state's anchovy fishery to commercial harvest (McEvoy

1986). The anchovy had apparently grown abundant as

it filled the ecological niche left vacant by the depleted

sardine (Murphy 1966). The industry argued that the

state could promote the eventual recovery of the more

valuable sardine by allowing it to fish down the anchovy

population. At this point, one important scientist wrote

to a friend in the industry that the time had come to

switch sides on the sardine issue: not only would that

open up the anchovy fishery, but, in his words, "the

sardine case is beginning to look too sound to me for

us to either hide from the public or to escape the conclusions of." This statement was only partly about the

scientist's knowledge of the world; the scientific judgment here was primarily an assessment of the political

consequences of admitting the truth of one or the other

position in a scientific debate. An end to the sardine

controversy was made possible by some absolute

advance in the scientific knowledge about the fishery,

but the legal cognizability of that knowledge was a

political function. In the event, the pro-development

scientists traded a moratorium on sardine fishing for an

experimental anchovy fishery; so enthusiastic was the

legislature for this new approach to fisheries management that it enacted similar moratoria on a number of

other depleted fisheries without any real scientific basis

for doing so.

Conclusion

Our scientific knowledge of the world, then, emerges

out of a complex interaction between ecology, economic

production, and the legal system. What "science" is,

then, is a struggle among those who do research and

between researchers and those who put their findings

to work over what will count as "reality." Lawmaking, in

turn, consists of a struggle between people wanting to

allocate access to resources in particular ways, whether

to commercial use, recreational use, or for "natural"

uses. Production, for its part, is a complicated function

of technology, the sociology of user groups, the structure

of legal entitlements to access, and the availability of

resources. Nature is, finally, at any point to no small

degree the product of past and present human impacts

on it, which impacts in turn are determined in no small

way by the sociology and the legal structure of the

market.

As Muir had it, everything is connected to everything

else. Historically, fishery managers have made trouble

for themselves when they have assumed, usually

unconsciously, that this statement is not true. Although

theory and technology of fisheries management have

advanced a great deal since the late nineteenth century,

some of these conceptual divisions between lawmaking

and the private market, between science and politics,

and so on persist, usually in ways of which scientists

and lawmakers are not even aware. Those assumptions

are, indeed, so powerful precisely because they are

made instinctively, unthinkingly. Their unseen power is

all the more reason why fisheries managers should be

careful to watch out for them when they ask themselves

such questions as, "What exactly are we trying to sustain here?"

To conclude, one way of answering the organizing

question for the symposium is to say that, to the extent

that fisheries managers approach their task as if they

were trying to maintain sustainable yields of guppies

from a well-maintained aquarium, they are doing it

wrong. Coming up with a better way of thinking about

the problem is hard because all the dualisms that underlie our traditional thinking about the world, between

culture and nature and law and markets and so on, are

so deeply embedded in our culture and our legal system

51
that it is sometimes hard to tell when they are at work in

our thinking. Some lessons, however, may be worth

taking away from this excursion into the history of

California's fisheries.

At a minimum, mathematical certainty about the state

of the resources, or about the likely effects of whatever

regulations a government might actually impose on a

fishery, is simply not attainable. This lack of certainty is

partly because of the important role that random shocks

play in the environment and should play in our thinking

about it. It is also because of the sheer complexity of

the tripartite system of ecology, production, and management, in which we are inextricably embedded; our knowledge of the system will always be imperfect because

we will change it every time we act in it.

Another thing that may be said is that traditional strategies for management, insofar as they assume any of

these dualisms, are likely as not to raise as many new

problems as old ones that they solve. Public agencies

will of course have to do a certain amount of prospecting work, and they will always have to balance competing claims for access to resources. But they should

never delude themselves into thinking that all of that,

even taken together, is "management" in the way that it

really should be approached.

Finally, what we ought to sustain when we approach

fisheries management is not the size of a particular

stock nor even the prosperity of a particular harvesting

group over the near or long term. Rather, the most

important target is the long-term health of the interaction between nature, the economy, and the legal system.

We can recognize that diversity and balance in the

system, insurance against an uncertain future, the

social cohesion of user groups, the attachment that

fishers feel for their work, even the moral unease we

feel when we contemplate the extinction of a species,

all those difficult-to-quantify things do in fact play integral roles in the tripartite interaction between ecology,

production, and management, and perhaps more significant ones than the more "objective" measures to which

we usually look for guidance. We can recognize that,

because everything is connected to everything else,

every step we take will change the system in which we

live in some way. When we make choices, then, we

can keep an eye on what kind of interactive relation we

want to maintain with the rest of Creation and make our

choices accordingly.

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53
Acknowledgments

This volume represents the collaboration of many talented and thoughtful individuals whom we most gratefully

acknowledge. Our thanks go to Judy Maule for the many hours of word processing, layout, and revision of these

articles. The papers were substantially improved by the constructive review and suggestions offered by our reviewers

—Baird Callicott, James Lichatowich, Richard Norgaard, Reed Noss, David Orr, and Charles Warren. We appreciate

the assistance of the USDA Forest Service in publishing these papers and, particularly, the support of James Sedell

of the PNW Research Station in Corvallis. Finally, we offer our warmest thanks to the authors for their patience

and continued enthusiasm despite some lengthy delays that were not of their making.

54

* U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1997 - 589-353 / 63003 REGION NO. 10
Bottom, Daniel L; Reeves, Gordon H.; Brookes, Martha H., tech coords. 1996.

Sustainability issues for resource managers. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-370.

Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest

Research Station. 54 p.

Throughout their history, conservation science and sustainable-yield management

have failed to maintain the productivity of living resources. Repeated overexploitation

of economic species, loss of biological diversity, and degradation of regional environments now call into question the economic ideas and values that have formed the foundation of scientific management of natural resources. In particular, management efforts

intended to maximize production and ensure efficient use of economic "resources" have

consistently degraded the larger support systems upon which these and all other species ultimately depend. This series of essays examines the underlying historical,

cultural, and philosophical issues that undermine sustainability and proposes alternative approaches to conservation. These approaches emphasize the relations among

populations rather than among individuals; the integrity of whole ecosystems across

longer time frames; the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative indicators of

human welfare and sustainability; and the unpredictable and interdependent interactions among "natural," scientific, and regulatory processes.

Keywords: Environmental ethics, environmental history, fisheries management,

resource conservation, resource economics, sustainability.

The Forest Service of the U.S. Department of

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use management of the Nation's forest resources

for sustained yields of wood, water, forage, wildlife,

and recreation. Through forestry research,

cooperation with the States and private forest

owners, and management of the National Forests

and National Grasslands, it strives—as directed by

Congress—to provide increasingly greater service

to a growing Nation.

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