sustainability/managing.html

"Managing complex systems for sustainable health"

July 29, 2004

cross reference: complexity, ascendency, ecosystem health, natural capital, fast-slow-regulation

Outline

A. Defining sustainable health

1. complex systems result from interaction of individual agents
• at many scales
• each agent has a purpose
• self organizing system
2. sustainable systems need to include sources for future variability and selection processes that don't pervert the system (Adams)
3. healthy systems respond to disturbance with improved function (Ulanowicz)
4. disturbance is different than stress
5. limit to the amount of energy we can apply (Adams)

B. Management approach

1. need to understand the complexity of the system
2. measuring ascendency which is related to complexity
• proxies
3. manipulations of the internal processes at the level of purpose of agents

C. What do people really want?

1. healthy natural capital
2. human scale is most noticable or appreciated
3. larger scales for insurance or conservation purposes

disturbance vs. stress (article in ESR101 notes)

Proxies for ascendency

measure dissipation of heat or other energy

look at structures that are biologically maintained

how far are these from entropy/random/thermodynamic_equilibrium

this is an indication of the amount of effort required to keep the system away from equilibirum

the structures might not have an easily identifiable "purpose"

the structures are created by the interactions of purpose by the individual agents

managing by manipulating at the level of system "complexity" or agent "purposes"

example 1: Diamond Lake

current management plan

kill all the tui chub

managing with the complexity

purposes of agents - predator, decrease

complexity of system - physical complexity measures (shoreline, water year)

example 2: