health-beauty-life/health.html
Notes from:
Costanza, Robert, Bryan G. Norton and Benjamin D. Haskell [eds]. 1992. Ecosystem Health: New goals for environmental management. Island Press. Washington, D.C.
Introduction
Haskell, Benjamin D., Bryan G. Norton, and Robert Constanza 1992. What is ecosystem health and why should we worry about it? Introduction. In Costanza et al [eds]. pages 3 - 20.
definitions and conceptions of ecosystem health
easiest definition is the absence of disease
not just economic or productivity
healthy system system has value "beyond the benefits that can be computed ..."
Norton's 5 axioms
- dynamic
- relatedness
- hierarchy
- creativity
- differential fragility (disruption of autonomous processes)
improvement by restoring to previous condition - may be unrealistic
workshop defined ecosystem health as:
"An ecological system is healthy and free from "distress syndrome" if it is stable and sustainable - that is, if it is active and maintains its organization and autonomy over time and is resilient to stress."
organicism vs. mechanistic <!-- compare to the concept of Gaia - earth as an organism -->
prefer to describe this as dissipative structures, "complex ecosystems maintain their system and structure through interchanges of energy with their environment.
Chapter 2
Norton, Bryan G. 1992. A new paradigm for environmental management. Chapter 2 in Constanza et al. pages 23 - 41.
page 25 "Given working definitions of automomy and self-organization, we can define sustainability as follows: sustainability is a relationship between dynamic human economic systems and larger, dynamic, but normally slower-changing ecological systems, such that human life can continue indefinitely .. "
<!-- this is similar to my definition of sustainability as an emergent property and the fast-slow hypothesis -->
--stopped there --