The Challenge of the Ecosystem Approach

As environmental degradation and change continues, decision makers and managers feel significant pressure to rectify the situation. Scientists, in turn, find themselves under pressure to set out simple and clear rules for proper ecosystem management. The response has been one of frustration. Michael Soule and Laurence Slobdokin both loudly complain that ecology is an intractable science, immature and not very helpful. Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Robert Peters reproach ecologists for not producing simple testable hypotheses.1 Meanwhile policy makers and managers clamour for a measure of ecosystem integrity whose value in different situations can be predicted by simulation models. The question on everyone's mind is "what does ecosystem science identify as the main, simple, basic, universal laws which will allow quantitative prediction of ecosystem behaviour and what are the resulting rules for ecosystem management?"