On Frank Golley’s International and Interdisciplinary Insights for a Twenty-First Century Earth Stewardship Based on Environmental Ethics - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 426

human-driven disturbances (Gómez-Pompa et al. 1974 ; Golley et al. 1975 ; Golley
and Hadley 1981 ). Although controversial from its initial conception, the idea was
widely accepted that some lowland tropical ecosystems were relatively “fragile”
and had limited capacities to respond to large-scale disturbances. Although small-
scale disturbances appeared to be important in maintaining species diversity by
opening up patches for dispersal by regional species, large-scale disturbances often
led to establishing pastures and plantations that increased the immediate economic
value of the land. These persistent landscape-level conversions had long-term costs
derived from the cumulative losses of extensive forest cover and watershed protec-
tion as well as declines in biodiversity.
Golley explained his views on valuation of ecosystems in his presidential
address at the International Association of Ecology (INTECOL) Fifth Congress of
Ecology in 1990 at Yokohama, Japan, where he emphasized that “to solve global
issues we need new ways to value nature, environmental goods and services and
social-environmental processes which do not rest entirely on monetary currency,
and can handle non-market values, while not assuming an endless process of eco-
nomic growth to solve environmental problems.” He set out an optimistic perspec-
tive that emphasized the roles of various international associations that were
emerging to link ecology with human activities such as landscape ecology, restora-
tion ecology, agro-ecology, and ecological economics. His views reinforced a gen-
eral perspective within the International Council for Science and other organizations
that strived to integrate the natural and social sciences.
Although Golley worked to help unify ecology by integrating other natural and
social sciences, he acknowledged the inevitable creation of sub-disciplines: “these
boundaries will be fuzzy, and like those in nature, will shift with time” (Golley 1987b ).
Golley's interest in spatial dynamics resulted in his serving the new International
Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) as the fi rst editor-in-chief of the journal
Landscape Ecology from 1987 to 1997 (Barrett et al. 2014 ). Earlier, Golley and
Monica Turner, a former doctoral student, organized the fi rst annual US-IALE meet-
ing in 1986 that led to forming the US chapter.

29.6 Disturbances, Ethics and Ecosystem Processes

The current focus on the creation of novel ecosystems (Hobbs et al. 2013 ; Perring
et al. 2013 ) builds on Golley's concepts related to ethical considerations regarding
how people change their environment, for example, by introducing non-native spe-
cies for the sake of novelty and curiosity without considering all the environmental
impacts (Simberloff 2014 ). The resulting patterns of species distributions are infl u-
enced by legacies of disturbances that combine to infl uence how different species
disperse and recolonize following major disturbances. This resiliency is a major
component of ecosystems (Pickett et al. 1994 ; Cuddington and Beisner 2005 ;
Pickett 2013 ). The complexity of disturbances and species interactions over multi-
ple spatio-temporal scales creates a mosaic of patchy habitats and alters ecosystem