Societal factors

So far in this course I've largely tried to exclude human and societal influences from our thinking, except to the extent that they pose a direct threat to the species we were trying to protect or the reserves we were trying to design. One of the premises of ecosystem management, well-illustrated by the example of south Florida, is that conservation initiatives may sometimes be needed at a very broad scale, and at that very broad scale humans are almost always part of the system.⁵ That means that if the system is to be managed sustainably, attention must be given not only to the needs of non-human organisms in the system but to those of humans as well.

There are three different ways in which it is necessary to assess societal factors.

1. The human activities that lead to substantial influences on or domination of ecosystems must be identified and understood.

2. The legal, economic, institutional, political, and other societal factors that affect the frequency and scale of those activities must must identified and understood.

3. The values and preferences of relevant interest groups with an influence on the ecosystem must be characterized.

The last of these items may be the most difficult for many environmentalists to accept. The list of biologically achievable management goals is likely to include a range of options from those where large portions of the ecosystem are substantially free of human influence to those where large portions of the ecosystem are human-dominated or human-influenced.⁶