Counsel for Getting There - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 160

that one would favor actions having the greatest potential to be fixed when
broken, as opposed to those with little or no potential. The important char-
acteristic of ecosystem resiliency depends on the ability to repair a process,
and this can be ascertained by monitoring results, followed by appropriate
(common sense) modifying actions and policies.
Lesson 5: Stop Perceiving Loss as a Threat to Survival
We interpret the perceived loss of choice over our personal destinies as a
threat to our survival. This sense of material loss usually translates into a
lifelong fear of loss, which fans the flames of overexploitation through unbri-
dled competition in the money chase and top-down, command-and-control
management of natural resources.
As the human population grows, with a corresponding decline in the avail-
ability of natural resources, the pressure grows to increase top-down, com-
mand-and-control management of those resources. The fallacy of attempting
to control ecosystems through management is that we humans are not in
control to begin with—and never will be. We are, therefore, destined to fail
whenever we attempt to enclose nature in a designer straightjacket: witness
tornados, hurricanes, and forest fires.
Nevertheless, our socioeconomic institutions are inclined to respond to
nature's erratic or surprising behavior by attempting to exert more direct con-
trol. Command and control, however, usually results in unforeseen conse-
quences, both for ecosystems and for human welfare, in the form of collapsing
resources, social and economic strife, and the continuing loss of biological diver-
sity—along with the ecosystem services such diversity provides. Moreover, if the
potential variability in an ecosystem's behavior is reduced through command-
and-control management, as it often is in practice (such as damming and chan-
neling river systems and replacing forests with monoculture tree farms), the
system becomes less resilient than it was to perturbations, and the outcome can
easily become an unwanted, biophysical disaster. Channeling the Mississippi
River, for example, has resulted in more severe damage to human interests due
to floods.7 7
People with the command-and-control ideology tend to think that any
resource not converted into some sort of immediate profit is an economic
waste, because that is the surest way to justify their existence to the growth-
oriented general culture. They therefore view such activities as salvage log-
ging and preemptive thinning as the only viable alternative to a biophysical
disturbance, like a hurricane or a beetle infestation. Similarly, harvesting
potential host trees in advance of insect infestations or disease or preemp-
tively thinning or cutting forests in an attempt to control forest fires and
thereby improve their resilience to potential stress and future disturbances
may fill coffers in the short-term, but at the long-term, ecological expense of
lost biological capital in the soil bank, among other things. 8