This post at Sphere, discussing an instance of the less than exciting results of the endangered species act (ESA), provides another example of the muddled attitudes we have towards environmental management, discussed at length in Mama's Rules. [via The Uneasy Chair]

We’ve learned that when we try to maximize production of a single variable from a complex system, we destabilize the system. Whether the cherished output is codfish, board feet of timber, or animal-unit-months of livestock forage, the result tends to be a system crash. In theory, an obsessive effort to maximize output of an endangered species would be no different.

The base idea of the ESA is mistaken, is harmful to the very species it seeks to preserve, because it fails to consider the complexity of natural systems, and focuses on spurious indicators of system health.

It isn't that we don't already have a body of research and practice that fully embraces these more modern ideas, it's that so many parts of the bureaucracy trudge onwards with outmoded approaches. The case noted at Sphere dealt with bog turtles.

The northern population of the bog turtle was listed as federally threatened in 1997 and several years after that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released its formal bog turtle recovery plan. Last summer I read the listing documents and the recovery plan (click here and scroll up for a pdf of the recovery plan), and made an appointment to interview the scientist who wrote the latter (I don’t know if it’s true of all species, but in this case the Fish and Wildlife Service contracted out to an expert, who devised the plan in consultation with government biologists).

The plan includes a detailed list of tasks to help the bog turtle recover. These include using existing land use and development regulations to protect turtles; protecting turtle habitat through purchase, long-term stewardship agreements and voluntary partnerships with landowners; regular population surveys and monitoring; genetic research; a reintroduction program where appropriate; and better law enforcement to reduce poaching, among other steps.

Contrast that with the work of Joy Zedler.

Zedler, a botanist by training who holds the Aldo Leopold Chair in Restoration Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, literally wrote the book on wetlands restoration. She is the editor of the Handbook for Restoring Tidal Wetlands (1), and she was a member of the National Research Council (NRC) panel that produced an influential 1992 report on wetland mitigation projects around the U.S. (2)...

Zedler began teasing apart the problems behind our current efforts and realized that we need to start thinking about restoration projects not only as engineering feats but also as scientific experiments. And therein lies her simple but powerful message...

The landscape-scale focus and experimental approach that Zedler advocates have great intuitive appeal. But are these ideas practical?

Zedler approaches this question with a characteristic calm, matter-of-fact optimism. Although the philosophical shift may be huge, she says that implementing the approach on the ground may be just a matter of a few well placed incentives and tweaks to existing programs.

There's still a whiff of planning to Zedler's work, she hasn't quite evolved to the point of recognizing the power of full suffrage in enlisting the creative genius of society. She still tilts toward persuading rather than informing the principals in watersheds. But by enlarging the scale of the work, adopting an experimental approach, advocating incentives rather than punishments and organizing gathered information she is just a step away from an information approach and might even back into it without noticing.

We don't know what we are doing but we are quite clever and quick to learn when we pay attention, when we don't assume that we already have all the answers. When we expand the scope of preservation and restoration efforts to include the whole system, including people, approaching the task as a socio-ecological challenge in the field rather than merely a scaled up laboratory experiment which can be controlled, we do even better. When we consider time as well as space, anticipating how systems variably adapt to changes depending on how abruptly they are made, and how they subsequently evolve as the changes ripple through the system and reflect back to origins, we do better. When we consider the desires of those people most affected by change, and integrate their wishes into our interventions too, we do better and the affected people are motivated to help. In general, once we abandon the steam age ideas of planning and control and our cherished illusions of being able to precisely predict system behavior, we do better.

The objective cannot be to save the bog turtle. The objective is to preserve the types of places where bog turtles thrive, which may incidently save the bog turtle too but that is and must be a secondary objective. It isn't that the loss of that species is OK somehow. It's not. It's that the way to save it, if possible, is to look at the bigger picture and save everything that we can even if that doesn't happen to include one of the species.

The ESA is the wrong approach. It doesn't help to engage in political posturing using threatened species as an excuse to enact bad policies like the ESA. It doesn't help those species or achieve the more basic objectives of environmental management. We need to mature a bit in our governance methods to better reflect our more advanced understanding of ecologies and societies. Old fashioned command and control never did work for living systems. it doesn't even work for complex non-biological systems. It's a steam age idea for watches, thermostats and locomotives misapplied to natural systems. We can do better.