Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Guest Column: Resilience and a systems approach through another lens

Back to Leopold Letter Winter 2010

By JOE COLLETTI, Guest columnist

EDITOR’S NOTE: As part of our focus on resilience and sustainability, the Leopold Center asked Joe Colletti for comments related to his expertise in forestry, economics and agroecosystems management. He is Senior Associate Dean for the Iowa State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a member of the Leopold Center’s advisory board. A shorter version of this article appeared in our printed newsletter.

Introduction
Using my lens of agriculture and forest ecosystem management, I define sustainable agriculture as a concept in which an agroecosystem is productive (in terms of market and non-market goods and ecological services), diverse and resilient. And to be sustainable, this system must contain measurable indicators of its economic viability, social acceptance and environmental soundness. Figure 1 is one of the most familiar illustrations of this concept, with a sustainable agroecosystem occupying the area where all three spheres overlap.

Yet, concept diagrams are a long way from the real world (see Figure 2). What is missing from description to reality of sustainable agriculture is a decision model – something that allows any landowner to achieve both broadly stated goals and specific, measurable and achievable objectives.

Tracing Germanic roots
Forestry and forest land management in the United States has been largely shaped by concepts, principles and tools that originated in Germany and to a lesser extent Switzerland and France. A central concept was “sustained yield” - a calculated amount of harvested wood from a managed forest that would allow for the forest to produce that amount in perpetuity.

Of course, more was desired from the Germanic forests such as game meat and mushrooms. But almost all of the ideas that shaped German forestry centered on simplifying the rather complex aspects of a natural or planted forest and narrowing the scope of desired products to a few: wood, game meat and a few incidental foods. That is how U.S. foresters first managed our forested landscapes, which still encompasses a third of our total land mass.

Five U.S. laws
Clear public signals for expanded interests and concerns about forestry in the United States reached an apex in 1960 when Congress passed the Multiple Use- Sustained Yield Act. This law is important because it provided the guiding principles and theoretical concepts for the management of our public forests (~250 million acres) by the USDA Forest Service.

The act identified five multiple uses to be managed: timber, forage, water, recreation and wildlife. “Sustained yield” still referred to timber and the very mechanistic approaches to determine the annual harvest of timber.

The 1960s and ‘70s saw other key national policies passed, such as the

  • Wilderness Act (1964),
  • National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA – 1969),
  • Endangered Species Act (1973), and
  • National Forest Management Act -NFMA (1976).

The NFMA was very important because it solidified the concept of “forest ecosystem management.” This policy was an attempt to reconcile the old Germanic way of thinking and doing with the new ecological forestry and growing citizen desire for maintenance of untrammeled public forests, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

The NFMA also was a way to articulate the need for finding compromise between commodity outputs and ecological services. In the Act, ecological concepts such as integrity, resiliency and diversity were given new standing alongside the historic German concepts of a regulated forest and sustained harvest. Even so, it took more than a decade for a concerted research effort to begin on Forest Service lands because the 1976 policy outpaced both our scientific understanding and our capacity to adapt and integrate the concepts into established public forest decision making.

‘New forestry’
The big task of going from theory to practice to results still is being worked on today. A leading advocate of forest ecosystem management concepts, “new forestry” as he called it, was Jerry Franklin. One tension he dealt with was differentiating his science-based theory from “naturalistic ideology.” Gillis (1990) interpreted that Franklin and his co-author Swanson’s central thesis of “new forestry” was that “forests must be maintained as complex ecosystems rather than as tree factories.” 1

Swanson and Franklin (1992) later state that “new forestry” is a way to integrate ecological, science-based knowledge of natural ecosystems with other science-based knowledge and social, political and economic factors toward the development of practices that would lead to a sustainable forest ecosystem. In a mark of success for the thinking, the 1992 USDA Forest Service announced that it would “develop ecosystem management as a strategic approach for sustaining desired conditions of ecosystem diversity, productivity and resilience for the multiple uses and values of national forests and grasslands.”

Salwasser and Pfister (1994) promptly took the invitation to put “new forestry” theory into practice and created a decision-making guide for forest ecosystem managers and researchers:

  1. Work within the scope of natural processes that shape landscape and ecosystem conditions.
  2. Focus on end results – desired future ecological and social conditions.
  3. Coordinate strategies for conservation of shared resources.
  4. Get people involved.
  5. Integrate information and technology.
  6. Integrate management and research.
  7. Revitalize conservation education and interpretation.
  8. Develop, monitor and evaluate vital signs of ecosystem health.

From forest ecosystems to agroecosystems
I believe that guiding principles similar to those articulated by Salwasser are necessary for the long-term management of our agroecosystems. The principles help articulate desired future conditions, structure trade-off and other analyses needed to determine feasible management actions, and identify the economic, social and ecological indicators to assess and evaluate attainment of goals and objectives under conditions of risk and uncertainty.

What is missing from principle to description to reality of sustainable agriculture is a decision model – something that allows any landowner to achieve both broadly stated goals and specific, measurable and achievable objectives.

In practice, the vast majority of agroecosystem acres are privately owned. To manage across modest to large watersheds and across ecosystem scales increases the social, economic, political and ecological complexities, perhaps exponentially. Decision-makers need many more skills, abilities and knowledge than in the past, so a decision model must incorporate:

  • multiple goals and objectives of a typical Iowa or Minnesota farm,
  • resilience thinking of ecological processes and functions and thresholds,
  • social acceptability and economic viability, and
  • treating the land as a socio-economic-ecosystem.

A practical decision model would have various guiding principles and a production function or functions(s) that can estimate output and inputs, various resource, market and policy constraints, and known and unknown risks and uncertainties. If all of these elements come together than there should exist a farm - an agroecosystem - that is productive, diverse and resilient. Yet, my experience and training lead me to believe that most decision-makers will seek simplifications of these complexities in making their decisions.

Can we draw upon the science of systems analysis and forestry to design a robust and practical decision model? Ideally, it would provide the user a process for thinking and doing that is linked to principles of cause and attainment of sustainable agriculture (or resilience thinking) frameworks. Uniquely, such a model would have non-linear steps (allowing the user to ‘jump back’ and re-evaluate management options when risk/uncertainty/change intervenes with the original plan). It would be based on guiding principles necessary for the long-term management of our agroecosystems.

Additionally, I would propose a decision model that can be applied to whatever agroecosystem is being managed by any landowner in the agroecosystem. Walker and Salt (2006) describe this as, [design] for the “phase of the adaptive cycle that the system is moving through”. (Walker and Salt do a very good job of describing what they refer to as resilience thinking. They provide a conceptual framework of what they call a social-ecological system under spatial and temporal change, but they observe that their framework does not provide a decision making model.)

Given these considerations, a possible agroecosystem decision model could start with the Salwasser guiding principles and then describe a series of non-linear steps, as explored below. I use ‘non-linear’ to mean that the steps may be revised multiple times, mostly due to jumping back up a step after analyzing or evaluating possible management actions or recognizing unforeseen change (i.e., uncertainty).

  • Goals and objectives: Identify and develop the issues, concerns and opportunities into broadly stated goals and then into specific, measurable, and attainable objectives.
  • Criteria: Develop appropriate decision criteria for the set of objectives. The decision criteria must consider social, ecological and economic aspects.
  • Modeling: Collect, generate, and model (as in predictive or simulations) data and information.
  • AgroEcosystem assessment:
  1. Articulate and assess the current condition of the agroecosystem and its desired future condition. The desired future condition should be congruent with stated goals and be anchored in guiding principles. Determine if gaps exist between the current and desired future condition and what actions would close the gap.
  2. Apply the guiding principles act as a filter to keep out of consideration management actions that significantly violate one or more guiding principles. A vital tool used at this step is trade-off analysis. See Castoldi and Bechini, 2010 for a sustainability assessment and integrating sustainability index. Also see Mouysset et. al., 2010 for a bio-economic tradeoff analysis involving wildlife, agricultural revenue and farmer adaptability to public incentives.
  • Management alternatives:
  1. Develop bundles of feasible management actions from step 4.
  2. Determine their social, economic and environmental effects.
  3. State (quantify) the production, diversity and resiliency of alternative. Guideline: Think of an alternative as a way to express different levels of attainment of an assumed set of multiple goals.
  4. Apply multiple analyses such as trade-off analysis; economic models (undiscounted and discounted cash flow analysis); growth and yield models; biogeochemical process models; and social impact analysis.
  • Implementation: Select the best alternative and implement. Guideline: This process often involves adding priorities and weights to the objectives and judgment of the decision maker(s). If the agroecosystem is a watershed, public involvement is need and a consensus building approach is recommended.
  • Feedback incorporation: Monitor and assess/evaluate actual effects. Re-adjust in response to exogenous shocks, risk and uncertainty.

In summary, agroecosystem management and the concept of sustainable agriculture are not rocket science − they are much more complicated than rocket science! The beauty of the concept and the decision-making model are that they cause the decision-maker to “think like a mountain” (to borrow a Native American saying) and focus on people and the environment.

References

Castoldi, N. and L. Bechini. 2010. Integrated Sustainability Assessment of Cropping Systems with Agro-ecological and Economic Indicators in Northern Italy. European Journal of Agronomy 32:59-72.

Gillis, A. M. 1990. The New Forestry. BioScience 40(8):558-562.

Mouysset, L., L. Doyen, F. Jiguet, G. Allaire, and F. Leger. 2010. Innovation Rigidity and Ecological-economic Reconciliation in Agriculture. Innovation and Sustainable Development in Agriculture and Food. Montpellier, France, 10pp.

Salwasser, H. and R. D. Pfister. 1994. Ecosystem Management: from Theory to Practice. In: Sustainable Ecological Systems: Implementing an Ecological Approach to Land Management. USDA Forest Service General Technical Report RM-247.

Swanson, F. J. and J. F. Franklin. 1192. New Forestry Principles from Ecosystem Analysis of Pacific Northwest Forests. Ecological Applications 2(3):262-274.

Walker, B. and D. Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press. 174 pp.

Back to Leopold Letter Winter 2010