Resource management complexity: Then and now

Excerpt

At a Culture of Conservation workshop in January, the question was raised as to whether the soil and water conservation issues of today are more complex than they were twenty to thirty years ago. It wasn't a question that generated a lot of discussion at the time, but the personally painful realization that I was around thirty years ago has brought me back to that question a number of times since that morning.

I've thought of the question from a research perspective and how we have come to better understand products and processes. In experimental design, we work to isolate a variable. Then, by manipulating that variable or subjecting it to a measured set of influences we hope to better understand its role in a much more complex equation or environment. Thus, through repeated experimentation, review, and verification, we gain a better knowledge of issues and their complexity rather than speculate or assume a cause or effect. Science application and experimentation has helped us to better understand complex natural resource management issues over the years.

We also know that it is important to look at individual products or practices in a life-cycle framework: what does it take to produce the…