You will immediately see the connections among concepts in this chapter (and some others of this book) and Chap. 15 of the Knight and Bates book. So we won’t have to belabor some of the concepts. But a few new ones are key to rest of this class:

The comparisons of Traditional and Ecosystems management in Table 2.1 are familiar, but let’s be critical students and ask whether the prescriptions of EM can truly be implemented.

Command and control: this is a useful catch phrase for traditional resource management: the manager was presumed to have both jurisdiction over and ability to manipulate ecosystems to achieve specified outcomes.

The text then discusses three cases in which this did not work: Deer on the Kaibab Plateau; Salmon in the Pacific NW; and the fight against agricultural pest.

This leads them to define:

The Pathology of Natural Resources Management: By attempting to control ecosystems, especially by limiting the range of natural variation, we often make the system less resilient in the face of future stressors. The eventual result is undesirable ecological and human outcomes. The unanswered question here, though, is whether the eventual undesirable outcomes, on the whole, outweigh the positive outcomes achieved thru command and control.

Three components of the pathology:

1. human-imposed control

2. institutional evolution to focus on the control

Increased economic and social dependence on the controlled system; and overcapitalization based on its controlled parameters.

They offer as a prescription to fix this pathology, the "golden rule:"