Approaches to managing natural resources have become more collaborative over time
Through most of the twentieth century, management of natural resources on U.S. public lands was focused on maintaining individual resources of economic value, whether timber, deer or ducks for hunting, or scenery for visitors.
This focus remained at the core of many land management policies until Congress passed the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960. By the late 1980s, natural resource agencies had gradually expanded their missions to include “multiple use,” in recognition that different people had different interests and that it was possible to manage public lands to meet diverse, and at times competing, demands. This was frequently done through spatial compartmentalization of uses, as when different blocks of land were designated as timber extraction zones, recreation zones, or wilderness areas.Since the 1980s, with our greater awareness of the necessity of preserving biodiversity, our goals for land management have shifted again. The ecosystem management approach has emerged as a way to expand the scope of management to include protection of all native species and ecosystems while focusing on the sustainability of the whole system, not just the sustainability of resources of interest.
What is ecosystem management? Most simply stated, it is “managing ecosystems so as to assure their sustainability” (Franklin 1996). A committee of the Ecological Society of America arrived at a less simple but more comprehensive consensus definition in 1996: “Ecosystem management is management driven by explicit goals, executed by policies, protocols, and practices, and made adaptable by monitoring and research based on our best understanding of the ecological interactions and processes necessary to sustain ecosystem structure and function” (Christensen et al. 1996). This definition emphasizes sustainability but also recognizes the need for setting goals and using science to evaluate and adjust management practices over time.
The conflict in the late 1980s over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest was a stimulus to ecologists, government land managers, industry, and citizens to seek a less confrontational way to make decisions. Since that time, more collaborative decision making has been combined with better incorporation of science to arrive at management plans that not only attempt to sustain both biodiversity and people's livelihoods, but also are responsive to changing conditions. The focus of ecosystem management is on particular ecoregions, delineated by natural boundaries rather than political boundaries: a watershed, a mountain range, a stretch of coastline. The full range of stakeholders—people with some interest in the project—becomes involved in decision making for the ecoregion, joined together by the common goal of maintaining its ecological integrity and economic viability.