Sustainable treatment of resources: The genetic basis

Abstract

Any treatment of a resource is considered sustainable, if it diminishes neither this resource nor any other irreversibly. A conceptually consistent and practicable presentation of the principles of sustainable treatment of resources is given using a system-oriented approach. In this approach the resource appears as a system that is characterized by the capacity to deal to a certain degree with exogenous impacts without losing its identity and integrity. Realization of this capacity rests on the existence of mechanisms of self-regulated regeneration with their characteristic feedback relations. For a treatment of a resource to be sustainable, it is thus necessary to guard the intactness of the resource’s own mechanisms of self-regeneration as well as those of all affected systems. Many anthropogenic forms of resource treatment violate even this basic prerequisite of sustainability by disconnecting essential feedback loops. Populations are the most elementary biological resources capable of indefinite self-regeneration, and certain specified mechanisms of the genetic system realize this capacity. Special emphasis is put on the two-fold function of the environment as modifying these mechanisms and providing the conditions for their operation. On this basis it is argued that any treatment of a population can be sustainable only if it obeys the following three prerequisites: (i) intactness (operability) of the mechanisms of the genetic system, (ii)realization of the mechanisms’ external conditions for operation (operational conditions), and (iii)availability of genetic variation for alteration of these mechanisms. Indication of these prerequisites is argued to be most effective when the system analytical approach is applied. In essence, this approach consists in modeling the potentially affected mechanisms and their operational conditions, such that they fulfill prerequisites (i), (ii) and (iii). Incompatibility between the model predictions and observations then leads to rejection of the hypothesis of sustainable treatment. The advantage of this approach to indication over an approach involving mere comparative interpretation of genetic processes and indices of genetic variation is demonstrated.