Ecosystem health
[1][2] Ecosystem condition can vary as a result of fire, flooding, drought, extinctions, invasive species, climate change, mining, fishing, farming or logging, chemical spills, and a host of other reasons.
"[5] Some critics [6] worry that ecosystem health, a "value-laden construct", can be "passed off as science to unsuspecting policy makers and the public.
[11] The term "ecosystem health" has become widespread in the ecological literature, as a general metaphor meaning something good,[12] and as an environmental quality goal in field assessments of rivers,[13] lakes,[14] seas,[15] and forests.
"We have observed that when groups of stakeholders work to define ... visions, this leads to debate over whether to emphasize ecosystem health or human well-being ...
"[19] and, for example, "For some, wolves are critical to ecosystem health and an essential part of nature, for others they are a symbol of government overreach threatening their livelihoods and cultural values.
For example, a vision for ecosystem health of Lake Superior was developed by a public forum and a series of objectives were prepared for protection of habitat and maintenance of populations of some 70 indigenous fish species.
[21] A suite of 80 lake health indicators was developed for the Great Lakes Basin including monitoring native fish species, exotic species, water levels, phosphorus levels, toxic chemicals, phytoplankton, zooplankton, fish tissue contaminants, etc.
[27] “If species richness is our major normative target, then we should convert the Amazon rainforest even faster into pasture.” [28] "Resilience is not desirable per se.
[29] Ecologist Glenn Suter argues that such indices employ "nonsense units," the indices have "no meaning; they cannot be predicted, so they are not applicable to most regulatory problems; they have no diagnostic power; effects of one component are eclipsed by responses of other components, and the reason for a high or low index value is unknown.
Recent results in cell and evolutionary biology, neuroscience and computer science have great interest in the criticality hypothesis, emphasizing its role as a viable candidate general law in the realm of adaptive complex systems (see [32] and references therein).
The reliability of various health metrics has been questioned[41] and "what combination of measurements should be used to evaluate ecosystems is a matter of current scientific debate.
Their richness and abundance ensure that they play significant roles in ecosystem function but thwart focus on a few key species."
Human health has benefited by sacrificing the "health" of wild ecosystems, such as dismantling and damming of wild valleys, destruction of mosquito-bearing wetlands, diversion of water for irrigation, conversion of wilderness to farmland, timber removal, and extirpation of tigers, whales, ferrets, and wolves.
[citation needed] There has been an acrimonious schism among conservationists and resource managers[46][47] over the question of whether to "ratchet back human domination of the biosphere" or whether to embrace it.
[55] The very choice of the word "health" applied to ecology has been questioned as lacking in neutrality in a BioScience article on responsible use of scientific language: "Some conservationists fear that these terms could endorse human domination of the planet ... and could exacerbate the shifting cognitive baseline whereby humans tend to become accustomed to new and often degraded ecosystems and thus forget the nature of the past.
[68] Another alternative to the use of a health metaphor is to "express exactly and clearly the public policy and the management objective", to employ habitat descriptors and real properties of ecosystems.
(1) Societal purposes for the ecosystem are negotiated by stakeholders, (2) a functioning ecosystem is defined with emphasis on phenomena relevant to stakeholder goals, (3) benchmark reference conditions and permissible variation of the system are established, (4) measurement variables are chosen for use as indicators, and (5) the time scale and spatial scale of assessment are decided.
[75] Ecohealth is the relationship of human health to the environment, including the effect of climate change, wars, food production, urbanization, and ecosystem structure and function.
