Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Ecological Foresters, Managers or Participants?

My lapse in posting has been due to a very busy work schedule.  Recently, I was assigned to head a rather large ecosystem management planning project in addition to the usual background busyness.  This project has me thinking again about the role of mangers and plans in the context of ecological forestry.  One of the most interesting aspects of being a practitioner of ecological forestry is the unpredictability of ecological systems.  I have found managing forests to be a humbling business, but I think that it is this aspect of forest management that also keeps it so intriguing.

In my own experience one of the most astonishing moments is coming to the realization that I'm not really "managing" anything at all in the classical sense.  Ecosystem managers interact with ecosystems and then await the systems' response.  Sometimes the response is predictable and sometimes it is not.  Ecological forestry is not picking a bunch of narrowly defined parameters for habitat and hacking away at the ecosystem until it resembles something out of a textbook.  It involves input from the manager and then feedback from the ecosystem.  It's the ecosystem that makes the changes over time and the manager's role to interact with the system in order to illicit changes with some objectives in mind.  In managing forests I often find myself interacting with the ecosystem.  I get a response from the forest based upon my choices but also find my choices being changed based upon feedback from the forest that I am managing.  So, I tend to look at ecosystem managers as participating in ecological processes more than directly "managing" them.   I wanted to throw this idea out there for whoever reads this to consider.  It's just a thought in the midst of a busy month...