By Joern Fischer
As conservationists, we frequently seek to keep something the way it is – e.g. ecosystems or sets of species living in a landscape or region. But much of the time, keeping that past just won’t work. Either there are introduced species that we just can’t get rid of (“novel ecosystems”), or there is social change which (for better or worse) brings about landscape change.
This situation is particularly evident in traditional farming landscapes. Two such landscapes that I have worked in are in Central Romania and in southwestern Ethiopia. In both cases, it is highly uncertain how the landscapes will change: but there is no doubt that fairly major changes of some sort will be inevitable. In both cases, changes are driven partly by external drivers (such as policies and the mental models underpinning them), as well as by the genuine desire of some stakeholders to improve the socio-economic prosperity of the region’s inhabitants.
What might successful conservation, or sustainable development, look like in a situation like this?
Some years ago, Adrian Manning and some of his collaborators (myself included) proposed the idea of “landscape fluidity” (also available via Research Gate, here). This term was meant to convey the idea that constant change is part of landscapes – species and structures ebb and flow through the landscape through time, re-constituting in composition and changing the overall system as a result. We argued that if such change is inevitable, perhaps it was not the specific identities of each and every species that needed to be prioritized in conservation efforts: rather, perhaps the general system characteristics or properties that are deemed valuable should be maintained. (This is not to say that we should forget about conservation for specific species!)
I think the idea of landscape fluidity could be usefully extended to social-ecological fluidity. Landscapes will change, and social systems will change. Still, traditional farming systems – which include elements deemed worthy of conservation – are not “random” amalgamations of people and nature. Rather, there are specific properties of these systems that, as a sustainability scientist, I would like to see maintained. Among these properties are things like high levels of heterogeneity, a substantial amount of near-natural vegetation, and often small patches of different types of modified land juxtaposed among large areas of semi-natural land. On the social side, there are also some typical system properties – e.g. high levels of local knowledge about ecosystem functioning, low levels of agrochemical inputs, and often community-level coordination for landscape management.
With the idea of social-ecological fluidity in mind, I would argue then that we may not need to maintain the past. Instead, we could spend more effort on finding out what it is we value about particular social-ecological systems, and then perpetuating the properties identified into the future.