 Mein Damen und Herren, my pleasure to introduce, for this afternoon's session, my colleague from the Department of Religion, Herr Dr. Paul. Danke schön, Herr De Kahn. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. This Nobel conference has fed our minds and aroused our passions, like none other in recent memory. As a scholar of religion, I recognize Professor Woodwell's lecture as an apocalypse, warning of doom and offering a small ray of hope. In Professor May's lecture, which he described as a revival, I recognize both prophecy and eschatology, teachings about the ends of things. Professor Botkin appealed to myth in both its positive and negative senses, and Professor Lovejoy's address ended with what sounded like an altar call to come forward and do your part for the biological survey. All Nobel conferences invite a philosopher, theologian, or historian to address the ethical and spiritual dimensions of the topic at hand. But in this conference, all our speakers have kept these dimensions before us from the very beginning. Brian Norton is very well prepared to offer moral reflections on the topic before us. He is a pioneer in the field of environmental philosophy. After undergraduate work at the University of Michigan in political science and graduate work at Wayne State University in Michigan in the philosophy of science, he has taught at New College of the University of South Florida and presently in the School of Public Policy of Georgia Tech. Like Professor May, it was a shift in Professor Norton's interest after his career was well underway that led him to prominence in the field of environmental studies. He has been able to bring the analytical and interpretive skills of his training in the philosophy of science to environmental philosophy. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals including Environmental Ethics and the International Journal of Applied Philosophy. He has testified before congressional committees and he serves on the EPA's Environmental Economic Advisory Committee on which he is the only non-economist. Professor Norton's publications include articles such as epistemology and environmental values, obligations to future generations, and the Rose Insecting Analogies or Why Environmentalists Hate Mainstream Economists. His most recent book, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists, analyzes how environmentalists often fail to communicate with one another as well as with the broader society as a result of their different world views, different ways of looking at the world, differences of which many environmentalists themselves are unaware. He suggests that cooperation and unity are possible in spite of these differences and urges us to concentrate on the ecological health of systems, learning to value nature from an avowedly human point of view, but with full appreciation for nature's glorious context. Professor Norton's participation in this Nobel conference is sponsored by the Florence and Raymond Spahnberg Chair in Ethics, and we gratefully acknowledge the Spahnberg's generosity in endowing this chair, which has greatly enriched the life of this college and this conference. Professor Norton's paper is titled Change, Stability and Creativity, The New Ecology and Some Old Problems. Please join me in welcoming Professor Norton to the Nobel podium. I'd like to start by saying how happy I am to be here at Gustavus Adolphus. I spent the first 17 years of my teaching career teaching at a small college, new college, as Garrett mentioned. It's a little warmer there in Florida, but we don't have the fall colors to rival yours. And thinking back on my years of teaching undergraduates, I remember the best question that I ever encountered when standing in front of a class. The best question ever thrown at me, you might say, to take a baseball analogy. We're having trouble staying away from baseball analogies living in Atlanta these days. The best question I ever fielded, or I guess I should say fumbled in this case, came at me like this. I was explaining the roots of our environmental crisis in the ancient world. I was trying to get as quickly as I could. It was the first day of class in environmental ethics. I was trying to get as quickly as I could to the modern era and our attitudes toward nature. But I wanted to go back to the Greek tradition and also to the Hebrew tradition and talk a little bit about how we got where we are in the modern world and our thoughts about nature and our role in it. And I don't have any fancy slides of tropical forests or anything, so I'm going to have to share with you some of my blackboard art. Unfortunately, it's been cleaned up a little bit here. If you look at the, this is what I had on the blackboard. As you'll see on the right, I have the Judeo or Hebrew tradition, Christian or Hebrew tradition. And we began by talking about the creation and the gift of dominion of all creatures to humans. And I was emphasizing what some people call the anthropocentric problem, the emphasis that humans place on their own welfare in treating nature. And I noted also that the creation was somewhat paradoxical in passing. I noted that the creation is somewhat paradoxical in the sense that we have a changeless, eternal God creating a world which we encounter as almost in constant change. And I switched to the Greek tradition and tried to bring that also up. And I talked about Thales and Heraclitus, Armenides and Xeno and the problems that those early philosophers had with the whole concept of change and constancy. Got down to the near the end of the lecture and I had left just a few minutes to talk about Plato and Aristotle and their problems and questions about substance and talked in particular about Plato's idea of the forms and how physical reality as we encounter it for Plato was really meaningless and confusing because in constant change and for Plato the underlying reality had to be the constant forms or ideas as they're sometimes called. And a student asked a question, just a really good question from a philosopher's point of view because it seemed to me to cut right to the heart of very difficult and deep assumptions that we make, the kinds of assumptions that color the way we see the world. The student asked why did both Plato from the Greek tradition and Moses writing in the Hebrew tradition both assume that whatever explains what happens in the world has to be constant, eternal and changing. Now that's a very good question. That's a very good question. I have to admit I fumbled it. I didn't have a very good answer but it was such a good question that I couldn't stop thinking about it and by the next class period I had a little bit more to say on the subject but not very much. I had to admit that I really could not give a satisfying intellectual explanation for why both of those traditions, so different in many ways, both assumed that our explanation of nature has to somehow go back to something that is unchanging and eternal. This is what I said. I said maybe the answer is more psychological than philosophical. Maybe human beings or at least human beings in the western tradition have a sort of deep commitment or need to find some kind of constancy, something eternal in nature and that's the end of it. That is that there is no real intellectual explanation. The purpose of this conference is to talk about the new ecology, an ecology that emphasizes change, disequilibriums in nature and our purpose is also to ask I think what impact that new ecology and that new thinking will have on environmental policy. The idea I think is that as we accept and we are coming to accept more and more that nature around us and the changing system that there is constant change and turnover in all respects, does that call into question our traditions of management that have often tried to save things and protect them and keep them as they are as we remember them. It seems to me that if we look at the new ecology that there are actually two somewhat different and at least initially separable arguments that new ecologists have made and it seems to me that it's important to at least separate these and to look at them as two initially different arguments or criticisms. So I've just sketched out these two arguments and I'll show them up on the screen. The first argument I call the argument from constant change. According to the argument from constant change, the basic idea of the argument from change, the old ecologists according to this argument, and I'm just going to use old ecologists and old managers as for convenience so that I can refer to the different schools of thought here, according to this argument the old ecologists were in some sense unaware that ecosystems are dynamic, that managers following the old ecologists therefore used equilibrium models and this has led to disastrous consequences as was detailed yesterday by Professor Botkin. The conclusion then is that environmental management must be reformed by adopting a more dynamic approach to ecological systems. Let me go ahead and introduce the second argument also and then I'll talk about them in turn. The second argument, the argument against grand theory has a somewhat different sound to it. Okay, the argument against grand theory goes basically that old ecologists tend to emphasize theory too much, that old ecologists tended to fill in with grand theories where they didn't have facts and scientific understanding. They tend to emphasize a whole set of theoretical principles about the structure of ecological systems and the way ecological systems are supposed to work and consequently they pay little attention to the actual facts about particular systems. And according to this argument then we will get beyond the old management when we learn how to become more empirical and spend more attention paying more attention to particular systems in local places. Now let's start by looking at the argument from change. I'll try this again here, that worked. But going back to that argument, Professor Botkin has actually done a very nice job of introducing this argument in his book Discordant Harmonies which I highly recommend. Botkin says, admitting that change is necessary seems to open a Pandora's box of problems for environmentalists. The fear is simple, he says. Once we have admitted that some kinds of change are good, then how can we then argue against any changes that is against any alteration of the environment? Now Dan goes on to explain that there are a number of answers to this quandary but his discussion is motivated by two claims which I would like to examine. The first claim is that environmentalists and environmental managers have not been aware of the dynamic nature of ecological systems and secondly that once they do become aware of this dynamism they will at least initially face a whole new set of problems in developing and defending their policies. Now in general I find a lot to agree with here. I certainly agree that environmentalists have often overlooked the importance of dynamic change and that in management environmental managers have often managed systems as if they were in some sense in equilibrium that once one perturbs the system by exploiting it or changing it in some way that it will eventually, all you have to do is remove the cause and that system will go back to its equilibrium state and everything will be fine. I agree with all of that and I think that that mindset has in fact led to disastrous consequences and so I think on all of these points Dan and I agree. But I'd like to start with make a couple of qualifications in the argument because I think it will lead to a slightly different analysis of where we're at and what the problem is. Consider the following quotation. To the ecological mind balance of nature has merits and also defects. Its merits are that it conceives of a collective good, I'm sorry of a collective total that it imputes some utility to all species that it implies oscillations when balance is disturbed and in this particular sentence its defects that is the defects of the idea of balance of nature are that there is only one point at which the balance occurs and that balance is normally static. Now that quotation incidentally is from Aldo Leopold and it was written in 1933 sorry 1939 actually. So almost 50 years ago ecologists and in particular an ecologist manager, Aldo Leopold, made that same point that we tend to think of ecological systems as constant and that if you disturb them they will go back to a single static point eventually. The question I think is not one of teaching people that or of learning that ecological systems are in constant change. I think the problem is a somewhat more complex one of figuring out how to describe that change and how to give it a conceptual interpretation so that we can make some sense of it. So that I think that we what we need to emphasize in this case is moving forward toward a new conceptualization of ecological systems so that we can achieve some kind of understanding of the balance of change and also stability as I'll say in a minute that exists there. Now a second qualification and this one is one that I'm sure that Dan agrees with and I don't mean to be criticizing him on this point I just want to clarify a clarification. Probably because they've been writing, they're writing in a context in which so much has been assumed in the direction of equilibrium and constancy that is so much has been written favoring the equilibrium side of this balance it sometimes seems as if the new ecologists are emphasizing or saying that all is change and that there is no constancy in nature at all. I certainly do not believe they mean that. Think of it this way surely the new ecologists accept the standard tradition of evolutionary theory and ecological evolutionary view of the world and in that evolutionary view of the world you could not have adaptation without a significant level of constancy and pattern in nature. Species adapt to their physical environment by repetitions of births and deaths and if that environment is in some ways constant then the possibilities of adaptation would fall out and the whole idea of behind the evolutionary ecological approach to understanding the world would be called into question. So I don't think that the new ecologists should be thought of as claiming that nature is in constant change but rather they are arguing that on the continuum between change and stability we need to move significantly further toward change. Here we have a continuum which represents the basic continuum of change on the one hand or total chaos and stability and predictability on the other. At one extreme we have Heraclitus who I mentioned. Heraclitus may have been the first new ecologist. He argued that all is in flux in nature but Heraclitus picked up very few followers and most people have clustered at the other end down around parmenides or approaching parmenides so that we have a sort of correspondence between the history of philosophical thought where the emphasis has been on all change being illusory and reality being an unchanging element and in the old ecology so to speak we have an emphasis on stable climax communities and equilibrium systems. So if we can use that kind of a continuum as our basic idea what we're saying then is that the new ecology is trying to locate ecological assumptions and understandings and interpretations further down in this region of the continuum toward Heraclitus. But what I would like to propose to move this argument forward is that in fact we need to introduce something like hierarchy or scales and hierarchies of constancies and changes. In this slide we have a very simple hierarchy of living systems starting with the cell moving outward through organ, organism, population, community and environment and this hierarchy is one in which I think is one that is best understood in terms of temporal and spacial scales of change. The cell turns over rapidly within the body and is replaced quickly. The organ goes through slower changes, the organism changes yet slower still and the community and especially the environment change on a much, much slower scale. Consequently we have in the environment something that we can call relative constancy. Relative constancy of the environment or relative stability exists when you look from one point in this hierarchy, say the organism point, from the viewpoint of the organism the environment changes quite slowly on an entirely different dynamic at a much slower pace and consequently from the viewpoint of the organism the environment appears constant or relatively constant. In this sense I would say then that stability is a well founded illusion. It's an illusion because every one of those levels is dynamic but it's a well founded illusion in the sense that if you look at it from the viewpoint of an organism that larger system is going to look extremely stable. Let me give an example. Imagine if you could for a moment that you're a common housefly. I've got one buzzing around my head right here. Now houseflies go through their whole life cycle in about the time we'll spend at this conference and so from the point of view of some changes in the environment that is a very rapid change. One of the examples that Dan Botkin uses in his book of a system in nature that we thought was stable and we later found out was in change he uses the example of plate tectonics. Now from the viewpoint of our common housefly plate tectonic movement is so slow that is you would go through over a million generations of houseflies while the San Andreas Fault moves a mile. Now from the point that's a million generations from that viewpoint the plate tectonics the plates are stable enough from the point of view of a housefly. Now I could have chosen Drosophila which has an even shorter regeneration time and gotten a larger number or I could have chosen human generations and gotten a smaller number but they're all large numbers. And from that I infer that from the viewpoint of us as human beings and as environmentalists who are planning the environment has traditionally moved very slowly and consequently we have perceived it as stable and those stabilities have been important to us in many ways. The moral of this story then is that even though everything is in fact constantly changing not everything changes at the same rate. Differences in temporal rates are in fact so great that from any given perspective on our continuum here there will be environmental factors that are relatively constant constant enough to adapt to and that is exactly what species need if they are to maintain a niche including our species. So what I'm concluding then from this part of the argument is that while it's true that nature changes on every level it's also true that there are also all of these layers of relative stability. And now I think I can explain how my analysis is a little bit different from Dan Botkins. The reason I think environmental managers have not made use of Leopold's insight has been that nobody has really been able to operationalize or make clear exactly how to discuss and manage a world which is in constant change but which also has all these layers of relative stability. And when we look at the study of ecology as Stuart Pym has recently pointed out in his excellent book Balance of Nature question mark that most of the studies that ecologists do of nature take place over a few square meters or perhaps somewhat smaller larger area than that and over just two or three years. In fact if you go to NSF for your funding your limits are about three years and then you have to go back for more funding. The fact is that most of what we say about these larger scales is done by scaling is inferred from scaling up from very small systems and in fact I would say that the things that we claim to know about large systems and also about intermediate size systems is much of it is based on analogy and conjecture not on hard scientific evidence. Now it's one thing to say as Leopold and Bach can both have said clearly that nature is a dynamic process and that scale is important it's quite another thing to furnish a detailed set of concepts for discussing that change and its impacts across different scales of time and space. Now I believe that a development in ecological theory called hierarchy theory at least provides a set of useful concepts for beginning to talk about these differential scales of time and space. The central idea of hierarchy theory is that the smaller subsystems their smaller and spatial scale also change more slowly I'm sorry more quickly than do the larger systems that form their environments that gives us that sense of relative stability. So while we agree that we need to be more dynamic Bach and I agree that we need to be more dynamic in our thinking about ecological systems I think that just asserting that is only the first step we must move very rapidly I think shift our emphasis to the development of new concepts I think hierarchy theory is a very promising direction to go although I don't hear it discussed very much in ecology and hardly at all in environmental management but I think if we do that we may be able to go back to a key idea that was introduced by Aldo Leopold his idea of the integrity or health of an ecological system so we can go back to his powerful metaphor of thinking like a mountain which is really thinking not only on our own scale but also on the scale of the mountain or the ecological system that we live within but we still are faced with the question if Leopold had a viable idea of thinking about protecting the integrity of ecological systems why has that not been operationalized why has that not been brought into our management plans well I think there's an answer for that and I think we can get at that answer by going back to the second argument of the new ecologist that argument being the argument against grand theory the argument against grand theory essentially says this argument the grand theorizing has tended to move ecologists away from looking at particular habitats particular environments particular relationships between species and their environment and I think this argument is a powerful one that I think really needs to be looked at and we will look at it in detail here once I think that the reason that we have had this failure of management has been better traced to the idea of organism a particular interpretation of organism as I will point out in a minute and that grand theory of ecology has been too much tied to a particular interpretation of the traditional idea of organism let me begin quotation and I really hate to use John this is a quotation from John Muir who's really one of my heroes and I will sound like I'm criticizing him here but I've learned much from him and it's not probably fair because this quotation was actually taken from the margins of a book that he read in 1914 on evolutionary theory and this is what Muir said in response to a description of the theory of evolution he actually accepted evolution but this is what he said every cell, every particle of matter in the world requires a captain, notice the capitalization to steer it into place before evolution was there was an intelligence that laid out the plan and evolution is the process, not the origin of the harmony now you have to realize that Muir was a pantheist he is here saying that all of nature and God are identical and so he was taking what we call today the biosphere and treating that as God and he was insisting that there is a direction that comes down from the top and that that direction directs evolution now I think most evolutionary theorists would not accept that interpretation today so we can say that John Muir accepted an idea of strong organism which is characterized by two claims first that nature can be personified as a being with a personal identity and secondly that change in nature is guided by an intentional plan by a personified being he called nature from a scientific viewpoint Muir's organism and pantheism are very awkward they're awkward in the sense that they seem to posit a strategy or a goal that is set up by a whole being which then directs individual events this is an idea that is still with us in ecology despite or is just now being rooted out of ecology only 15 or 20 years ago one would find articles such as the strategy of ecosystem development strategy well how can you have a strategy without a strategizer just as Muir thought that if evolution was going according to a plan that there had to be a captain who formulated that plan I think that this crippling assumption which tries to close ecological systems and treat them as closed or whole entities that are not communicating with larger and larger environments on every level has been a stumbling block to clear thinking I think in fact we've come full circle back to Moses parmenides and Plato and we have to ask the question why is it that we westerners and perhaps all humans I'm not sure must find something constant a plan even in evolutionary theory which is a theory of change we have to find some kind of plan some kind of strategy some kind of strategizer now I think that my own discipline environmental ethics if I can leave a field I know less about and go to a field I know something more about I think that my discipline environmental ethics has really contributed to this failure I think we too have been too quick to personalize nature I think we have tended to think of ecological systems as having a good of their own or something like that what some people call intrinsic or inherent value and I think that that tendency to personalize closed systems has had a negative impact on environmental ethics just as it has had a negative impact in ecology and I think that the new ecologists are moving us beyond that and I'm very much in favor of that literature of environmental ethics you will find that most of the articles in the journal environmental ethics for example have to do with what are the objects of value what has intrinsic value what should we be trying to protect and I think that bias in my field has really contributed to our inability to escape this strong version of organism in a minute I'll explain how organism has an important lesson as well but I think behind this quickness to embrace this echosentrism or the view that nature has intrinsic value is this same deep-seated bias toward things and persons and elements at the expense of open processes let me illustrate this point by reference to what I think is the most important passage written in the history of conservation ecology it's Leopold's what's sometimes called Leopold's criterion Aldo Leopold said a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity stability and beauty of land community it is wrong otherwise now early interpreters and many current interpreters of Aldo Leopold's thought have taken that sentence or those two sentences to imply that Leopold thought that ecological systems or communities have some kind of integrity similar to the integrity of a human being and that we therefore have a moral obligation directly to that community Baird Callicott the deep ecologist for example have taken these to assume have taken these sentences to refer to what Leopold thought was the object of value in some kind of philosophical sense they therefore assumed that the ecosystem or community for Leopold must be an object of value independent of human values now I wonder if we really took Leopold's and Professor Botkin's statement that nature is really a set of processes embedded within processes not things get away from talking about nature as elements and think about nature more as processes I wonder whether we would ever talk about the processes of nature as having intrinsic value perhaps but I rather doubt it nevertheless whichever way you go on that point I would like to say that it seems to me that that interpretation of Leopold's criterion as stating that we should protect the integrity of the community as an object has really contributed to our static interpretation our tendency to preserve and protect what the community is now without recognizing that actually the community is a series of processes that are ongoing and that what we need to do is to protect those processes consider for the moment another interpretation of Leopold's famous remarks consider that is that the remark is really not the focus of what we should be saving but rather telling us what should be the focus of conservation management we have then a distinction between interpreting that sentence as the object of ultimate value that is what is valuable and worth saving as opposed to what I think he's talking about that is what should we be managing what should be the focus of our management efforts and I think that answer and that is what is the answer to that question or that he's answering the question what is the operative unit which managers should pay attention to I think if we were thinking of it this way that we would be much less likely to interpret the concept of integrity as something that's referring to a fixed and completed thing that is like a wilderness area or a climax community and we would start thinking about how do you take Leopold's analogy the medical analogy strip it of its assumption that the community is like a human organism get away from that don't think of the community as a human organism or a human-like or a person-like organism but think of the community as a series of processes and then think what is it about those processes that lead us to fall into as Leopold did medical analogies like protecting the health of ecological communities and protecting the health of or the integrity of ecological communities I think when we shift to that way of thinking until then be much more comfortable not falling into saying that the community has a value of its own independent of humans but we would rather think about how do you maintain those those relative constancies between the change which we as organisms perceive and the change that takes place in larger and larger systems that form our environment I think being constantly tempted to think of ecosystems as if they are persons has led both philosophers and ecologists to fail to confront another ancient philosophical problem is the problem I call the problem of parts and holes that is how can an organ have a sort of pattern of behavior as a unit and also be part of a larger organism in philosophy we can call that the problem of parts and holes in ecology I call that the problem of scale and because we pay so much attention to whole beings and whole objects it seems to me that it is very difficult for us to get beyond this problem of strong organism and start to pay attention to the importance of problems of scale and the relationship between objects and their changing environments now the problem of scale is a very difficult one as I noted earlier it's certainly excusable if it has not been at this point solved what is inexcusable I think is how little emphasis we place on that concept I need now to say a little bit in favor of organism having said so much against it in the end of course organism has a correct and important point to make perhaps two points organisms are correct when they criticize mechanistic models as unable to capture the true nature of ecological communities which is to be creative to sustain themselves through time in response to a larger changing environment and to heal themselves when a disturbance whether human or non-human descends upon them and other ecological systems have that ability to snap back if they are disturbed at least if they are disturbed in certain ways and they can regain their trajectory it's still a trajectory of change but they do have self-curative powers you might say now it seems to me that the most important idea here and the reason that organism is so important is that ecological systems the most important fact about ecological systems is that they are creative and processes that they build structure and then using that structure they go on to create new processes and to elaborate themselves and as I said earlier I believe that hierarchy theory can actually provide a scientifically respectable conception of the basic idea of organism that ecological communities can heal themselves have self-curative powers that they are creative and self-sustaining I believe that hierarchy theory should be given a chance as a means a conceptual framework for characterizing management problems now in closing I'd like to show how one might build a sort of scalar analysis based in hierarchy theory into a more responsible approach to environmental policy formation and implementation this approach starts from a moral axiom which is based in the principle of fairness across generations and I call this the sustainability principle no generation may justifiably destroy the complex and creative processes of nature I take that to be the central element of a sustainability ethic the emphasis on protecting complex and creative processes now this principle seems to me protects the particular elements of nature not what we find there today but rather genes, species and ecosystems as parts of processes and processes which are important now to illustrate all of this I use some device that I call a risk decision square this is a neutral version of the risk decision square according to this version what we do is we plot irreversibility of a decision against its reversibility that is you might have an easily reversible decision and if it's an easily reversible decision we would not feel that we would be harming future generations if we take that decision because they can change it future generations can change that decision if they're unhappy with it in opposition to that down the other axis range from trivial to very severe and perhaps in the upper corner catastrophic outcomes now it's my feeling that a rational approach to environmental policy would notice the importance of this area over here the reversible area the trivial area down here and also the area that is both reversible and trivial as an area where individual decisions are in a bold sway that is we could use economic analysis in other words and supplement that where necessary with a criterion of interpersonal justice or fairness so that basically individual criteria work in this area as we move closer and closer to the what we might call the northwest corner of our decision square we move more into the area where we're facing irreversible and is in this area that I think the sustainability principle comes in so that what we get out of this kind of a square this is undoubtedly a fuzzy line here and one that we would have to talk about exactly how we would draw that distinction but as we move in this direction we move more in the area where we have to appeal to sustainability and the rights of future generations this gives us what we can call a two-tier approach to environmental policy one where we pay much attention to economics and another area where we tend to move into moral considerations the ecologist version of this simply takes hierarchy theory as I laid it out here and superimposes it on that decision square so that we would think then of the reversible irreversible of access as measuring the time of recovery if we institute a disturbance in the environment so that if the time of recovery of one of our decisions the impacts of one of our decisions is very short we keep it out here in this region where economic analysis applies similarly we can use this scale over here to represent spatial scale from local changes impacts that would have a local emphasis would only impact parts of ecological systems and then we range up to where we are affecting whole ecosystems and perhaps in the extreme even our atmosphere with issues like global warming so what I'm suggesting is that by taking the risk decision square which gives us a two-tier approach where we've got economic decisions on one level basically at the interaction of human individuals level we've got another scale as we move up into the second tier where we're really impacting large ecological systems over long periods of time and in that area I think we need to start introducing what we might call a sustainability principle that limits human activities and where we have to be much more careful in what we do now I agree that there's much more that must be said here this is just an introduction to an approach but it seems to be to be an approach that takes the problem of scale seriously and starts to build it into a comprehensive decision procedure my central point today has been that the new ecologists justifiable emphasis on change in ecological systems must be balanced with a concerted effort to understand pace and scale of that change so that the very strong and important emphasis of the new ecology seems to me to be in the right direction but we need to move quickly to introduce concepts that will help us to deal with problems like scale and pace of change and then we can begin to understand the importance of the creative self-organizing activity of large systems and we can start to go back to Leopold's excellent suggestion that we pay attention to the N2 and protect the integrity of ecological processes thank you as before if you have questions you would like to address to either Dr. Norton or to the entire panel please write those out on cards which the ushers will collect and bring to us we do have a response from Dr. Woodwell well I find that discussion fascinating of course although troubled that I have to reject my perspective of the way nature works on the basis of units that I've called communities and embrace processes as the key I'm also troubled a bit and curious about the role of neutralism in this new analysis mutualism is established as one of the keys to the integrity of communities mutualism in communities that have been through a selective sieve repeatedly such as severe disturbance glaciation and repeatedly reorganized themselves with roughly the same species but the same species falling into different structural units communities made up of completely different groups of those same species are very loosely structured have few mutual dependencies on the other hand if we move to the tropics why we have many interdependencies long and we've established clearly the product of a very complicated evolution and if we start producing rapid change those dependencies break down and we lose species very rapidly so I look at this and wonder just what the role of what I would call mutualism is in the thinking that you apply to this twist we should think about processes we can have processes the nitrogen cycle for instance without having higher plants yes I don't think that anything that I said was intended to underestimate the importance of mutualism or what we can call structure in communities but rather to emphasize that they are a lot looser than we have in fact thought and I think paleontologists are in fact learning that as you say if you disrupt the community it's put back together again often with quite different structures and I do think that from the viewpoint of an organism the community that lives within on that level of the hierarchy is very important and the interactions with other species which are also going through processes of regeneration of birth death and regeneration those are all processes in the layered system so if you emphasize the layers and that from the viewpoint of an individual for example the interactions of other species are important to that individual but the relationships among species of change more slowly and so you still have those layers of relative constancy my emphasis here is that we should get away from thinking about any one of those layers as the whole thing that we want to preserve because that's what has led us to this over emphasis on equilibrium we have a question which relates to Dr. Lovejoy's talk this morning which is directed to Dr. Norton please discuss your model in the context of what is happening in the Everglades as mentioned by Dr. Lovejoy this morning okay I think it is a that's a very good question I think that the what I would say about it just off the cuff and it's something that's probably worth a lifetime study at least is that what is happening in the Everglades is that humans are disturbing the large system and factors that affect that large system and causing very rapid change in the physical environment especially the water the patterns of sheet flow and that the ecological communities the particular species in the Everglades system are not reacting well I mean we see this in the decimation of wading bird populations for example the reduction of the the underwater of plant life and all the way through it seemed to me that what Tom was describing this morning is a perfect example of what happens when human activities reach too great a scale and start to change the larger systems which form the background against which the smaller population the populations and species have been adapted and when those background conditions change too rapidly further adaptation becomes impossible and you have a collapse of a whole flora and fauna so it seems to me that the Everglades would be a perfect example for a sort of case study of what a truly disastrous environmental problem is an environmental problem in the scale of human activity simply overwhelms a large system I have a question to follow up on that one that occurs to me as I thought about the environmental diagram your boxes of decision making and how we move from individual decisions which are geared largely by economic concerns to moral concerns given the magnitude of the problem in the Everglades as described by Dr. Lovejoy and as well known to many of us it would seem that we are up in the northwest corner of your diagram where we're talking about ecosystem scales and irreversible change I can easily imagine following over the last several decades of development and I can envision what kinds of economic decisions made by individuals and a vast array of other elements of society might force that trajectory how do we move into the moral decision making realm though what are the what are the institutions that will help us recognize that move toward a region of irreversible large scale change that demands moral decisions instead of just economic ones well I think there are two separable but ultimately related questions one is how do we know when we are moving into the moral realm and the second question which I think you also raise is what institutions would help us to deal with those moral questions the first one it seems to me we would need to have the best possible scientific evidence about the historic rates of change in these larger systems and rapid acceleration of change of various indicators and I believe that the ecologist which would be the most important one would tell us that when the pace and scale of change is sufficient that we have to start to worry about our obligations to future generations I certainly agree with your implication that the Everglades is one of the cases where we have very definitely moved across into a moral plane I think that we will if we do not arrest that situation get it under control that we will be held accountable by future generations for destroying a natural wonder now the institutions are both I think because I think our institutions are at present not very well set up to deal with these questions but I think that the first step is to get a clear conceptualization of what we want to accomplish and how we make these moral decisions and it is hoped that our government will be sufficiently responsive once these matters become clear to what I see in the public as a very clear commitment to sustaining biological diversity for future generations so I see the moral commitment I hope I see also the beginnings of a conceptual framework for understanding the political questions I think are going to have to wait for further developments I think that it is just a very difficult thing to say what institutions would create this except to say that I think there is a political will among the people and the democratic institutions if they are to be responsive will have to find ways to address these kinds of ecosystem level impacts we have two questions which in one way or another touch on the notion of Gaia theory first of all would you equate the Gaia theory with strong organicism and therefore would you say that the Gaia theory is hindering ecology well Gaia theory can be many different things if you mean Gaia theory as it is stated in James Lovelac's last book The Ages of Gaia which I think is an excellent explanation then the answer is yes and no in that book Lovelac very carefully lays out a system of hierarchies an explanation of creativity he insists time and again that his interpretation he is not talking about a teleologically based system where some intelligence is directing things he says all those things and then unfortunately he falls back into the traditional idea of a personalized Gaia just by using that name to call to interpret the whole system what he calls the biosphere as a goddess encourages us his disclaimers on almost every page it encourages us to fall back into strong organism in fact it's very clear that Lovelac does not intend that but I think in order for the idea to get as much public attention as it has it needed the goddess idea and unfortunately the goddess idea carries us right back to personalism kind of closed system approach in fact of course the biosphere is one more layer of a whole system which includes the whole universe if you leave out the sun you don't have much of a biosphere so in fact you really should not think of I mean Gaia theory as a scientific hypothesis I think is interesting that it's led to some interesting speculation to some interesting hypotheses and I'm a great supporter of that scientific work I think it's unfortunate that Gaia has been that the theory has been saddled with a personalistic interpretation because of the name it was given since the notion of Gaia affects ecology and ecological science in both pure and applied aspects in so many ways are there any responses in general and what it may say about our attempts to understand the workings of more complicated systems especially at the global scale about the Gaia hypothesis or about Dr. Norton's response the Gaia hypothesis really makes three statements the first statement is that life has changed the earth has got a global level and has done so for billions of years and that seems now well supported by evidence the second statement is that these changes have benefited life that's a much more speculative assertion benefit life the second assertion of the Gaia hypothesis when you read Jim Woodlock's book is that the changes have always been favorable for life the example he uses is that the sun warmed up that's a more speculative and less substantiated statement which is still very interesting the third statement which as Brian just said you can read in or not read in and when you talk to Jim Woodlock it is there and it isn't there is the idea that life did it on purpose and that's not a scientific statement and that's the one you wanted the first one I think is very well accepted now very important the second statement there is loose in the land the idea that the Gaia theory offers hope for solving immediate human problems that the world will straighten itself out no matter what we do I think that's totally wrong that that application of the theory is completely inconsistent with the theory as just summarized by Dan and Jim Woodlock as written by Woodlock it has contacts only in geological time not in the time that we're dealing with years to decades in life period of human life we encounter that view that distorted view regularly I'm about to make a comment that is probably feminist comment and since I don't consider myself a feminist I'm a little horrified at what I'm about to do it will come back to the Gaia question but it starts really with a very good question that Brian raised about the central question not only of his talk but of his conference which is what should be the focus of the management effort what should the operative unit of management be how can we manage the word management has come up in this conference I have had a visceral negative reaction and it's something new to me and I think it's because my question is why is management the right relationship here I think that I'm not going to call it a feminine masculine dichotomy but I'll call it a Yin-Yang dichotomy because I think it's in all of us I think the masculine excuse me Yang question is how to manage and I think that the Yin question is how to serve or how to dance with or how to be in relationship with or how to love can you change the question to what is the right focus of our love effort or our relationship effort on what's the right scale and can we love and be in relationship with processes beauty and stability and I think that it's the essence as I understand love I think it's the essence love and service to I think it's actually obvious for example if you love a child you love a changing developing dynamic unpredictable chaotic thing and it's not hard to love that nor serve it and sometimes it's hard to manage it but anyway I think we come to the and I know that that is the relationship that a lot of people have that they know well and that's a stewardship relationship it's not a management relationship and I think it absolutely encompasses if you know the true meaning of love honoring the instability the evolutionary possibilities the turbulence the inconstancy of that which you love in fact that's what you love about it now then we come to Wendell Berry who says you can't love a planet you can love a piece of a planet you can love a little community any more than you can love the whole human race you can love particular humans you can love a family or a community that you can't love a planet that ever since he said it he calls all that global owning and I think that the Gaia hypothesis which I see as a systems analyst again a not so new hypothesis that the system as a whole including life is co-evolutionary has come forth and is continuing to come forth and evolve and is magnificent as magnificent in many of the same ways as any child that you love and I think you can love that and honor it, respect it steward it be in relationship with it and dance with it I don't think there's a chance in the world of managing it with everything that you've said Dana in fact I would applaud all of those things the word management is an unfortunate one I agree I don't know of another one but think of it this way as the way that I have been able to use that word because it is in such common parlance I can't avoid it and that is that sometimes management is managing ourselves sometimes is managing managing our impacts reducing our impacts recognizing that we cannot manipulate those larger systems that those larger systems we are dependent on them they are not dependent on us and yet management is not an unreasonable term if you think of it as having two aspects one is we do uncertain circumstances especially when systems have already been been damaged and to get them back to a place where they are more self sufficient and secondly we manage ourselves and I think that managing ourselves means reducing population growth managing ourselves means choosing economic policies that are consonant with protection of nature and so on so that the unfortunate ring of the word management was not intended to be anything I said Dr. Botkin is this first I want to just respond to what Dana Minnis said I think everything you said strikes a very nice chord in everybody first of all it goes back to the ancient questions that people always have asked and if you don't want to use the word management you can go back to them and ask those questions what is the character of nature and what is the effect of nature on us and what is our effect and it's the last one which perhaps you would rather be talking about what is our effect on nature and what should it be but to say that we haven't a chance of having an effect that's suitable to us and to nature which I take your last statement to mean is certainly the most pessimistic statement I've heard here and I think you don't really mean it and I think that we can point to cases where we have actually improved things are cases where we've talked about that I just had one small point for I agree very much with all the things that you've said I just wanted to clear one small point when you made a point that organisms need some kind of constancy in order to have something to adapt to and actually what they need to predictability I think that's a confusion that's always made adaptation of fire adaptation of some level of predictability thank you for your questions from the audience and we thank you to this panel for discussing Dr. Norton's lecture thank you for joining us today if you have tickets for this evening's Nobel banquet