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Courtland L. Smith & Alexey A. Voinov
The relative effectiveness of resource management regimes is widely discussed. Sustainability and ecosystem health are two dimensions upon which the effect of management is judged. Evaluating resource management requires long time spans. We look at the impact of management on fish and forest resources by taking a life cycle approach to the exploitation of natural capital. Russian ethnographer Gumilev describes the process of how human systems go through a set of phases that parallel the birth, growth, maturity, and death stages of the life cycle. The process of adaptive renewal proposed by Holling, too, has life cycle characteristics. The primary variables used to represent the phases of the renewal cycle are the amount of capital that is accumulated and the connectedness in the system. We apply the renewal cycle to a fishery and forestry example in the US Pacific Northwest to see how management regimes alter the capital stock of these systems. In these two examples 90% of the natural capital is lost or projected to be lost over a century and a half of exploitation. The management regime in both cases evolves toward greater inflexibility. Based on these two examples, resource management does not seem to lead to sustainability or ecosystem health.
Key Words: sustainability, resource management, capital,
biosocial systems, fishery, forestry