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Further north, in the northern Negev Desert, land management agencies and
environmental NGOs have been disputing the relative impact of dryland forestry.
The managers argue that foresting the area provides crucial ES including carbon
sequestration, recreational areas, and prevention of runoff and soil erosion. Others
argue that forestry threatens local biodiversity. The public discourse is framed
(mistakenly) as a confl ict between managing for ecosystem services or for biodi-
versity. Different land management agencies with different development priorities
exacerbate this confl ict by choosing one conceptual framework over the other.
Another side to the ES-biodiversity dilemma is that biodiversity and ES can
refl ect culture. Culture may not always value diversity, as witnessed in the planner's
quote above. However, as this chapter shows, cultural diversity can have a direct
impact on biodiversity. Acacia trees in the Israeli Wadi Araba depend on large wild
herbivores for seed dispersal because local shepherds do not exist anymore on that
side of the border. On the Jordanian side, however, large herbivores are hunted and
seed dispersal depends on the local domestic herbivores. So not only is herbivore
diversity dependent on cultural diversity, ecosystem functions also depend on
cultural diversity (e.g. seed dispersal). Cultural diversity can prevent the homogeni-
zation of biodiversity or biocultural diversity (
sensu
Rozzi
2013
).
18.3.4
Who Should Make the Decisions?
Various experts often suspect that using the ES framework will lead to over-reliance
on public opinions to make decisions. Our ecologist colleague quoted above
suggests that while the public expresses particular affi nities for the outdoors, it has
little understanding of the importance of ecosystem integrity or of human reliance
on natural systems for their regulating or supporting services. Our results from
surveys and interviews indeed confi rm a public knowledge gap.
As ecologists, we hold the importance of conservation of biodiversity to be
indisputable, and yet, as socio-ecologists, we understand that (1) community
participation in natural resource and land-use decision making is crucial, and,
(2) accepting community participation means accepting that ecologists themselves
become stakeholders, and not the agents of truth and last word in decision making.
In assessing our role within the new paradigm of socio-ecology, we must consider the
balance between “expert” knowledge and “local” or “stakeholder” knowledge, each
providing a unique and complementary knowledge base. This complementarity is
represented graphically in Fig.
18.2
. In the fi gure, ecosystem services are assigned
high and low value by local stakeholders and experts, respectively (though the two
aren't mutually exclusive groups).
High priority ES, as defi ned by both experts and locals, are considered
high-priority, easy targets for management, as both groups agree about their impor-
tance (e.g. a rare, charismatic species). Where locals do not consider a given ES
important (usually they do not mention it at all), but experts do consider it important
(e.g. nitrogen cycling), there is a
knowledge gap
. Where locals give high importance
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