Ecosystem Management and the Dust Bowl
Current thinking about how to manage bays and how to manage fisheries runs in the direction of “ecosystem-based management.” The idea is that you cannot just manage to look after a single species (pick your favorite: lobsters, cod, deer, Atlantic salmon, peregrine falcons, and so on). Instead, you need to manage the health of the ecosystem. The logic behind this is that lobsters, cod, deer, Atlantic salmon, peregrine falcons, and everything else are affected by food supply, predators, prey, breeding habitat, and other factors that, taken together, amount to the ecosystem. As John Muir put it, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
So, I decided that I should do more reading about ecosystem-based management. I started with a book that I first read 30 years ago, when it first came out in hardback: Nature’s Economy by Donald Worster.
It’s still a good read today, thirty years later — maybe a better one, since I have a lot more perspective of my own to bring to the history that Worster recounts.
There is a lot to say about this book, and I will probably get around to saying some of it over the coming weeks. But the thing that is at the top of my mind right now is the connection between the response to the Dust Bowl, in the 1930s, and our current situation regarding fisheries management and coastal management.
Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was the first time that conservation really began to come to terms with the complexities of ecosystems. He writes:
Up to this point, the conservation movement in America had been overwhelmingly dominated by a series of uncoordinated resource-management programs, most of them set up around the turn of the century. Forests, water, soils, wildlife were all connected only by the loosest of conceptual threads. The major reason for this single-mindedness was that conservation policies usually had been founded on purely economic grounds; at whatever points resource demand exceeded supply, there sprouted a management program. but in the 1930s, largely as a direct result of the Dust Bowl experience, conservation began to move toward a more inclusive, coordinated, ecological perspective. A concern for synthesis and for maintaining the whole community of life in stable equilibrium with its habitat emerged. [page 232, 1977 edition]
I think that it would be fair to say that groundfishing management, lobster management, and shellfish management are, today, connected only by the loosest of conceptual threads. And I think that it is fair to say that the major reason for this single-mindedness is that, when resource demands have exceeded supply, we have hatched management programs.
It’s enough to make you wonder what we have learned in 70 years.
I suggest that this is a question that we should take seriously. Just what have we learned? What can we take from the management response to the Dust Bowl — from the local efforts to teach farmers new ways of farming, from the investment in the Soil Conservation Service, from the programs to pay farmers to take land out of production — what did we learn from all of this that we can use to do a better job of ecosystem-based management this time around?
Surely, this cannot be a new idea, and a new set of questions. Others must have made this connection. Can someone point me at the work done to connect our learning from the attempt to manage soils and crops to our current efforts to manage the coasts and fisheries?
What makes me nervous is that I find myself attending workshops where the question of the day is “What is ecosystem-based fisheries management?” At these workshops moderators actually ask fishermen and other interest parties, like me, what we think ecosystem-based fisheries management should be? Should we look at something other than total allowable catch? Should we be measuring the health of the fisheries in ways that go beyond estimating the total biomass?
They are kidding, right? Surely, we learned more than that from 70 years of ecosystem management in agriculture?
A couple of closing thoughts:
- Farming is much more consolidated today than it was during the early efforts to address the problems of the Dust Bowl. There are probably many reasons for that, but, could some movement toward large corporate farms, rather than smaller, locally owned farms, be the result of the incentives and management structures that we put in place to try to manage the Dust Bowl problem?
- There sometimes seems to be an assumption that if you give fishermen control of an area, and the ability to benefit from conservation, then they will practice good conservation and take care of it. Has it worked on that way on the land? What can we learn here? Isn’t a privately owned farm always a case of area-based management? Why didn’t the farmers conserve their soil and protect their resource over time?
- The response to the Dust Bowl involved a lot of public expenditure in education, community-based management, monitoring, and incentives? What worked and what didn’t? What can we learn about how to build outreach and education programs, and about the structure of incentive programs?
I would love to hear what others thing about these things. Please respond by adding your comments and thoughts.