We have seen repeatedly in this course that among the first steps in development of any conservation plan is defining the objectives that plan is intended to accomplish. We saw this most recently and most dramatically in our discussion of ecosystem management as exemplified in the development of a comprehensive plans for conservation management in south Florida and in the interior Columbia basin. In those discussion I suggested that one important role scientists play in the development of these plans is to determine the set of endpoints that are achievable and sustainable. I also suggested that choosing among those endpoints was not, in many ways, a choice based on scientific values, but one based on a variety of societal values - ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, political.
Today I'm going to take a different tack. I want to suggest that scientific analysis can also contribute to the choice of conservation objectives by showing how our perception of certain values in a landscape are related to the history, often to the human history, associated with it. As ecology and conservation biology have matured in the last twenty-five years, scientists now realize that the ``balance of nature'' is not a good metaphor. Populations, communities, ecosystems, and landscapes are dynamic. They have a history that shapes their current character and helps to identify the set of possible endpoints. Often the character we associate with a particular landscape is associated with long and pervasive human influence. In our discussions of ecosystem management we've seen that when we begin to deal with conservation at the scale of entire ecosystems, we have to deal with human society because we are inextricably part of those ecosystems, and we often have a predominant influence on how processes operate within them. This time we'll emphasize first that what we see as desirable endpoints for conservation often include significant human influences, and even if they don't, we can't escape the need to choose some endpoint, an endpoint which often corresponds to some past state of the system. Choosing the time of that past state is an exercise in values and preferences almost as much as it is an exercised in historical ecology.
We'll begin our discussion by focusing on the landscape of rural New England both because it surrounds us, so we're reasonably familiar with it, and because it illustrates some of the ways in which our experience shapes our perception of what is ``natural'' or ``wild.''1