Beyond Naturalness?

Many of the sessions at this year’s George Wright Society conference (GWS) addressed the question of how to manage protected areas. Managing something presumes that you know the outcome you want to achieve. As Yogi Berra put it, "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."

Historically, the "target" for protected area management has been to keep the land in a natural state or to return it to a natural state. That sounds clear enough. To see how this works in practice, let’s look at the example of fire management.

Acadia is small and densely populated, so we don't let fires burn at Acadia. That means that, at Acadia, some parts of "natural state" won’t be operational. Oops.

An Example

Setting that aside, suppose your job is to manage a much larger forested area -- boreal forests in Alaska, for example -- where you can let fires burn in some areas, but where fire has been suppressed for years. You know that the forest is not in its natural state because you have historical records that show that there used to be frequent fires. But you also know that because these fires were frequent, they were smaller. So, one problem you will face is figuring out how to initiate a fire policy that doesn't end up being hugely destructive, going beyond the impact that fires would have had if they had been burning all along.

Things get yet more complicated when you add the consideration that climate is changing and altering the frequency and impact of fires. The effects of global warming are more pronounced near the poles; consequently your area in Alaska is experiencing noticeably warmer summers. Climate variability is also increasing, so that dry summers with high fire danger are now occurring several times a decade rather than just once or twice. All of this change raises the question of just what the "natural" fire regime should be? Can you use a historical record as a point of reference when the entire climate system has moved on to new, warmer, drier conditions that have not occurred in recorded history?

It gets worse. Does "natural" include human impacts? For many people the answer would be that a system is "natural" to the extent that it is free of human intervention. But in your Alaskan forest you know that over the past 6,000 years indigenous communities have incorporated fire as part of their subsistence culture, in some cases setting fires to open up areas to improve wildlife habitat, herd animals, and reduce fuel loads. How does this history change your understanding of "natural" and the target state of the system that you are managing?

(For more information about fire management in Alaska's boreal forest and a discussion of how the complexities associated with developing a solution, see the article by Chapin, et al. in BioScience titled "Increasing Wildfire in Alaska’s Boreal Forest: Pathways to Potential Solutions of a Wicked Problem." Access to this article requires a subscription to BioScience. The same authors have also written a freely available article on the more general problem of boreal forest sustainability titled "Policy strategies to address sustainability of Alaskan boreal forests in response to a directionally changing climate.")

Alternatives to "Naturalness"

The problem with "naturalness," as this short example illustrates, is that it isn't clear just what "natural" is. It’s not a scientifically precise concept, it does not have a well-defined point of reference, it is hard to quantify, and--to the extent that it is a historical notion--it is not easy to see how it adapts to changing conditions. Consequently, a number of scientists speaking at GWS suggested alternatives. For example, Stephen Woodley, Chief Scientist in the Ecological Integrity Branch of Parks Canada, suggested "ecological integrity," a replacement for "naturalness." The term has been given an official, legal definition in Canada, along with status as the goal of conservation.

Other speakers suggested setting a management goal of retaining (or improving) biodiversity. Biodiversity has the advantage of being more quantifiable than "naturalness." It also has the advantage of providing a quantified snapshot of a system at a point in time--much like a balance sheet does for a corporation.

The analogy between a biodiversity inventory and a balance sheet is instructive. When we look at a balance sheet we do get useful information about the health of a company at one point in time, but are also missing much of the picture. To understand more about the health of a company, we look at a sequence of balance sheets--comparing, say, the current balance sheet with one from a year earlier. Comparing balance sheets gives us a way to see how the situation has changed and some sense of the direction of change. To get an even more complete picture, we would look at a statement of cash flows so that we could understand the inputs and outflows behind the changes. There is value in looking at flows as well as at sequences of states.

In her presentation at GWS Dr. Erika Zavaleta suggested that instead of biodiversity or naturalness, we might manage living systems with the aim of improving and preserving resilience. The value of this suggestion is that it is a measure of a system’s responses to external inputs and stresses over time--it leads to consideration of flows.

Back to Nature

Jon Jarvis, Regional Director for the Pacific West Region of the NPS , acknowledged the value of putting management on a more scientific footing, but also expressed serious discomfort with wholesale movement away from naturalness as the guiding principle, if not the measurable goal, of managing protected areas. His expressed concern was that naturalness has been, over time, a useful working concept and yardstick for the more general, non-scientific public that cares about parks and conservation.

It was the next day, during a presentation on the interactions between indigenous peoples and conserved lands, that I made the connection that Director Jarvis was pointing to. Conservation is not just science; it is stewardship. Stewardship builds on facts, but also builds on spirituality. Such spirituality grows out of a connection to nature. Managing lands to retain and restore naturalness builds on that connection.

Science Education and Science Literacy

There is no conflict to resolve here; the question is not whether we should work to preserve lands in a natural state or whether we should measure our success in terms of biodiversity, resilience, ecological integrity, or something else. When we focus on the bigger picture, it is clear that we need to do all of these things. Perhaps the real question is one of knowing how to select the appropriate frame for the task at hand.

The question of how naturalness, biodiversity, resilience and other concepts fit together to support stewardship and good management is relevant to middle and secondary school science instruction. The relevance is not in the details -- after all, the scientists at GWS have been working at high levels of professional attainment for decades. Pre-college science education cannot expect to reflect the nuance of these discussions, at least not initially. Instead we should focus on what the discussions tell us about science literacy.

The discussions at GWS present a complicated picture of what science does and of how we use it. A scientifically literate person (what we are trying to create through science education) would be comfortable with the idea that "naturalness," "ecological integrity," "biodiversity," and "resilience" are all constructs--things that we invented--rather than scientific facts of some kind. (See "Students, Science, and Creativity" for what we are learning about students’ understanding of science as something we construct.) Some of these constructs are more quantifiable than others, and so are useful for portraying the state of a system or for describing the flows as a system changes state. The different constructs are useful for different things and, when used together, complement each other and provide a more complete picture. The scientifically literate person would understand that this is a discussion about UTILITY, rather than about TRUTH.

Our scientifically literate person -- emerging from our educational system -- would also be comfortable with the idea that the state of a system -- the measurements we might make about species diversity, growth rate, mortality, rates of change, and so on -- must be understood in the context of the system’s environment. Using our Alaskan boreal forest scenario as an example, there is no "right" fire regime for all times. Instead, the system must be responsive to changing climate conditions, forest populations, and so on.

This is the kind of scientific literacy that we need to support a democracy faced with resource decisions in a rapidly changing biosphere. It is the right objective for us to be focused on in science education.