A critique of ecosystem management

Goldstein [1] argues that the principles I laid out at the start of this lecture are more often honored in the breach than in the observance. Remember what those principles are:

1. To protect biological diversity the processes that produced it must be protected as well.

2. Species richness alone is not a good measure of management success.

3. Management must be planned for the long-term, possibly even for the indefinite future, i.e., ecosystem management is intended to result in both a sustainable system and a set of sustainable management activities.

More importantly, Goldstein argues that ecosystem management not only often fails to honor those principles, but also that it is largely an attempt to bypass the requirement for life-history information on all species of concern,⁸ He goes on to argue that this attempt is doomed to failure for three reasons:

1. Measures of local species richness can diminish the contribution of threatened species to priority setting.

2. Good ``indicator taxa'' don't exist, i.e., it's not possible accurately to predict community properties from the presence or absence of certain taxa.

3. Concepts like ecological integrity, ecosystem function, ecosystem resilience, ecosystem health, and naturalness don't provide concrete guidelines for management.

His objection boils down to this:

For management strategies and techniques to be successful at preserving anything other than perceived structures, functions, and processes of landscapes, they must be evaluated against the performance of populations and metapopulations in those managed landscapes, including but not limited to the most sensitive and threatened species ... ecosystem management will be successful only if ecosystem is used in a sense that can be guaged with precision and if the criteria used actually reflect the needs of natural entitites we wish to protect rather than abstracted emergent properties, functions, and processes of groups of organisms [1, p. 53].