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The adaptive cycle describes changes in ecosystems and social-ecological systems over time. It expands on older notions of ecosystems as moving from a pioneer or exploitation phase to a steady state or so-called climax or conservation phase. The adaptive cycle includes two additional phases—the release or chaotic phase after a catastrophic disturbance pushes a social-ecological system beyond a threshold, and the subsequent rebuilding or reorganization phase. Social-ecological systems resilience refers to the ability of systems to adapt or respond to small changes in the conservation (steady state) phase, and to transform once a system has crossed a critical threshold. Civic ecology practices can play a role in both adaptation and transformation. Panarchy refers to multiple adaptive cycles embedded in and impacting each other. For example, at the small-scale, a successful civic ecology practice may spur a municipal government to make policies supporting civic ecology practices in a process called “revolt.” And in a process called remembrance, a government that places restrictions on land use may limit the ability of civic ecology practices to be successful.

This chapter begins the process of distinguishing land use from land abuse and constructing an overall normative frame for understanding nature. It begins by noting how U.S. property law in the nineteenth century evolved to allow more intensive land uses and largely dropped all mention of the rights of communities. Rising ever higher was the autonomous individual, detached from nature and the social community and linked to the market to satisfy desires. The cultural path ahead needs to change this focus; to understand people as embedded in land communities and dependent for their long-term flourishing on the health and resilience of their home communities. Linked to this value should be an acceptance of the limits on our knowledge and the wisdom of acting with precaution and using nature as our measure. At the same time, we have good reasons to protect islands of wildness where we go beyond health and resilience to maintain biological diversity (integrity). The chapter ends by surveying the many reasons to value other life forms. The assessment challenges the assumption of animal-welfare advocates that we can value other species only as they resemble humans: as value-creating creatures we can create value as we see fit.

This chapter focuses on the landscape of the Menominee Nation in northern Wisconsin, which is internationally recognized for sustainable forest management grounded in both traditional ecological knowledge and scientific forestry. Tribal forester Jeff Grignon shares traditional teachings related to the mutual responsibilities of the tree nations to one another and to the people, from creation stories to contemporary use. The ecological resilience of the forest is linked to the cultural resilience of the tribe, who have endured the assaults of Federal Termination policies and land loss, yet continue to maintain deep relationships with their forested landscape as a source of economic, cultural, educational, and spiritual well-being. What may be perceived as wilderness from an outsider’s perspective is experienced by tribal members as a rich cultural landscape in which the forest and the people are engaged in a reciprocal exchange of mutual caretaking.

This chapter explores the meanings and manifestations of wildness in the context of the Driftless Area of the Upper Midwest. Untouched by the Pleistocene glaciers that scraped across most of northern North America, the Driftless Area is a geographical anomaly. Its rugged terrain, exposed sedimentary bedrock, sinuous waterways, and winding valleys provide for a varied cultural, economic, and ecological landscape. The Driftless Area is not a “pristine” wilderness; but neither is it a completely humanized place. The Driftless landscape is a complex expression of natural features and processes that are always shaping, and being shaped by, human actions that began long ago and that continue up to this instant. Over the last two centuries, those actions have included land use practices that dramatically disrupted the older ecological order, as well as revolutionary conservation measures that have restored wildness and fostered ecological resilience. The natural and cultural history of the Driftless Area defy simplistic notions of the wild and the humanized, demonstrating how humans and nature can and do exist dynamically within any landscape.

In the last chapter we reviewed the role of population in early economic development. In that ancient period, mortality was significantly affected by exogenous shocks such as famines, epidemics, floods, droughts, and various other direct or indirect environmental uncertainties, and parents’ preferences for children were by and large checked by natural constraints. Not until the last three centuries have human beings been able to make significant progress in hygiene and medical knowledge, progress which has facilitated the recent sharp increase in human population. In the twentieth century, the life expectancy of human beings in many areas of the world has more than doubled compared to the numbers two hundred years ago. Moreover, advanced radar facilities have been able to forecast extreme weather conditions, satellites are able to detect the locations of natural resources accurately, advanced agricultural technology makes barren land cultivable, and computers have also made possible many complex jobs. All these technological advances have increased the welfare of human beings and appear to have pushed back the exogenous constraints we face. As I mentioned in chapter 13, with the support of a sufficiently large population size, the division of labor becomes ever finer, and more and more labor can be devoted to the research and development sector, which in turn facilitates the various technological advances. These advanced technologies are endogenously determined by entrepreneurs, in sharp contrast to the situation in ancient times when the existing technology constituted the natural exogenous limit to population growth. As Romer (1990) pointed out, since knowledge has the nonrivalry property, the societal production technology (which embodies the available knowledge frontier) may naturally have the property of increasing returns with respect to physical resource inputs. As a result, the natural-resource carrying capacity constraint becomes relatively inessential. Then it seems that infinite economic growth can be compatible with any size of population without ever being restricted by exogenous checks. Some environmental economists have challenged the above optimistic prediction. They argue that economic development in fact has gradually damaged the environment and eventually will hurt the economy. Those challenges, however, have never been serious enough to fully counter the above-mentioned infinite-growth argument.