Adaptive Ecosystem Assessment and Management: The Path of Last Resort?

Abstract

Scientists understand that the Upper Mississippi River floodplain ecosystem evolved over eons of time through patterns of dynamic variability shaped by drought and flood, scour and deposition, channel formation, migration, and abandonment. Our scientists know that floodplain dynamics involving connectivity, hydroperiod, and energy distribution drive the river’s ecosystems (Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, 1999). Yet basin-scale rehabilitation efforts on the Upper Mississippi River continue to focus on (1) single targets, optimizing habitat for relatively few highly valued species and (2) piecemeal environmental mitigation that shows little deference to the prime abiotic factors affecting biotic integrity: hydrodynamics and sedimentation.

Man’s attitude to the world must be radically changed [emphasis added]. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.

-Vaclav Havel (1992)

The coming together ofscience, culture and spiritual activity is necessary for the fulfillment of human needs [emphasis added]. The world is presently in a difficult period of adjustment, and we urge people to be patient in judging what the longer-term future will be like. The complexity of this adjustment renders the future’s possibilities very uncertain. But the role of science in this situation is essential for human survival.

-Ilya Prigogine (1984)