The public is voicing its preference for maintaining forest ecosystems toward the natural end of the scale. In honesty, we must admit ignorance. Trees cut down are in a sense renewable, as long as their seed is saved, but a forest ecosystem destroyed by clear-cutting, windrowing, burning, scarifying, planting and spraying, is nonrenewable because we do not have a clue as to how a tract of forestland or any other ancient ecosystem can be reconstituted. Neither do we have a sure grip on the carrying capacity or assimilative capacity of ecosystems. Therefore, erring on the side of safety, we should crop semi-natural ecosystems carefully, removing from them less rather than more, so as to assure the balanced sustainability of their various resource crops.
Scale is important.
The ecosystem approach, whose goal is the sustaining of landscape ecosystems rather than increasing the yield of specific resources, is necessarily a regional concept, because local ecosystems are dependent on their regional contexts. The patchy patterns of forest stands of different compositions and ages, in regions that have not been artificialized, provide templates to guide maintenance of productive regional patterns. The ecosystem approach is a new way of sensing the world, a reevaluation of the Ecosphere and of our place in it, an ethical way of living in and with it. Were the concept more widely shared, a great many more problems than those of foresters and other resource managers co-operating would be solved. Ontario Wildlife Working Group. 1991.