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The (im)balance of nature: a public perception time-lag? Richard J. Ladle and Lindsey Gillson Public Understanding of Science 2009; 18; 229 originally published online Oct 1, 2008; DOI: 10.1177/0963662507082893 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/229

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PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE

Public Understand. Sci. 18 (2009) 229–242

The (im)balance of nature: a public perception time-lag? Richard J. Ladle and Lindsey Gillson

The last two decades have seen a conceptual shift within environmental and social sciences from an emphasis on ecosystem stability and balance to an acknowledgement of the importance of flux and change in the natural world. This has profound implications for conservation management and policy and has driven an (incomplete) transition from managing to maintain (bio)diversity and ecological stability at some historically derived “optimum” to managing to maintain important ecosystem and evolutionary processes such as nutrient cycles and migration. Here, we investigate whether this change from a “balance of nature” metaphor to a more dynamic perspective (“flux of nature”) is reflected in the representation of conservation and ecosystem management in the news media, the Internet, and the academic literature. We found that the media and the global Internet community still portray the aim of conservation science and of conservationists as being one of maintaining stability, harmony and balance.

1. Introduction Over the past few decades, there have been major conceptual shifts in both ecological and social sciences towards an increasing focus on flux and change in the natural world (Gillson et al., 2003; Pickett and Ostfeld, 1995; Pickett et al., 1992; Scoones, 1999). This has profound implications for the management of ecosystems and natural resources, and also for the way conservation ecology and policy is communicated to the public. The “balance of nature” (BON) metaphor is deeply engrained in the Western perception of nature (Egerton, 1973; Wu and Loucks, 1995). The BON metaphor underpins the scientific paradigm of equilibrium, as exemplified by Clements’ theory of succession, and the logistic growth equation, ideas that had, and still have, an enormous influence on ecosystem management and natural resource management. According to Clements, plant communities reach a “climatic climax” which is a stable assemblage of species, in equilibrium with (unchanging) climatic parameters (Clements, 1916). Though modified in various forms (Tansley, 1939; Whittaker, 1953) the fundamental idea of plant communities in equilibrium with stable environmental factors persists, and can be successfully used to explain biome distributions at the macro-scale, though is much less effective at smaller spatial scales.

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ISSN 0963-6625 DOI: 10.1177/0963662507082893


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Public Understanding of Science 18 (2)

Similarly, the logistic model of population growth describes how populations reach equilibrium with an environment that supplies resources at a constant rate (Pearl and Reed, 1920; Verhulst, 1838). At low population densities, resources are effectively unlimited and population growth is rapid. As population size increases, however, individuals begin to compete for resources and there is a corresponding decrease in the rate of population increase. Eventually, the population stabilizes at a level where resources are used at the same rate as they are supplied (known as the carrying capacity). These two equilibrium-based ideas influence many strands of natural resource management and conservation, from calculating the maximum sustainable yield of fisheries, deciding stocking rates in rangelands to culling elephant populations when they are perceived to have exceeded the perceived carrying capacity (Bartels and Norton, 1993; de Leeuw and Tothill, 1993; Gillson and Lindsay, 2003; Milner-Gulland and Mace, 1998). The practical result is that for much of the twentieth century, many conservation and natural resource management strategies have attempted to impose or maintain stability, even in systems that are historically variable (Landres et al., 1999). This in turn has created a perception of balance where none is present and a mismatch between management approach, conservation goals and ecosystem properties (Grumbine, 1997; Pahl-Wostl, 1995). An example of this is the suppression of fire in US forests, in order to prevent disturbance and thereby maintain a perceived balance. The result of this approach was an accumulation of biomass and severe fires which, unlike low intensity burns, caused mortality of mature trees (Holling and Meffe, 1996). The replacement of the BON metaphor with a new more dynamic vision of the natural world appears to be taking place rapidly in academic communities. The replacement of the BON metaphor, with a “flux of nature” (FON) metaphor has caused a paradigm shift in ecological sciences, as theoreticians have created new conceptual frameworks describing the dynamics of ecosystems that are not at equilibrium (Wu and Loucks, 1995). This paradigm shift (sensu Kuhn, 1962) has had profound implications for conservation management and policy; if nature is dynamic, changing and complex, then conservation and management goals need to be responsive to this (Grumbine, 1997). Maintaining diversity and stability at a historically derived “optimum” may no longer be considered as ecologically realistic (Fiedler et al., 1997; Pickett and Ostfeld, 1995; Pickett et al., 1992; Wu and Loucks, 1995). For example, European old growth forests over 250 years old recruited in the cooler climate of the Little Ice Age. Since recruitment is temperature sensitive, it may be that these forests won’t maintain the same complement of species in today’s warmer climate, presenting a challenge for conservationists, responsible for maintaining these much-loved forests in their current form (Millar and Woolfenden, 1999). The academically driven paradigm shift towards adoption of a more dynamic understanding of ecology has been mirrored by a more incomplete transition in conservation goals and ecosystem management. The alternative metaphor, the “flux of nature” (FON) and its associated paradigm of non-equilibrium theory, is much more complex and challenging in conservation terms. In contrast to the conceptualization of nature under the BON paradigm as stable and unchanging, under the FON paradigm, ecosystems are understood to be dynamic (variable over time), patchy (variable over space), non-linear, complex and stochastic (full of surprises) (Grumbine, 1997; Holling, 1996). Yaffee (1996) has pointed out the difficulty of developing conservation goals for systems that are inherently dynamic. Conserving a spatially and temporally variable system requires understanding the processes which generate heterogeneity, and a shift in focus to important ecosystem and evolutionary processes such as nutrient cycles and migration, rather than a particular species assemblage or population size (Grumbine, 1994, 1997). The concept of ecosystem resilience—the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance without changing to a different state (sensu Holling, 1973)—is important in conservation based Downloaded from http://pus.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 6, 2009

Ladle & Gillson: The (im)balance of nature 231

on the FON paradigm. Understanding resilience and flux in ecosystems requires complex and long-term data on ecological change in order to determine the normal range of variability of ecosystems, establish the limits of ecological resilience, and understand the thresholds at which rapid transitions in ecosystems occur (Carrión et al., 2001; Landres et al., 1999). Without this information, the FON paradigm is open to abuse, because ecosystem variability and resilience can be misconstrued as justification for over-exploitation. In the words of Pickett et al. (1992: 82): “Nature has a range of ways to be, but there is a limit to those ways and therefore, human changes must be within those limits.” By understanding the underlying long-term processes and drivers of change in ecosystems, it should be possible to decide whether any given management activity is within the ecological tolerance of ecosystems, or whether new conservation goals can be developed that accommodate transitions to new ecosystem states if the resilience of ecosystems is exceeded (Holling, 1996; Kay et al., 1999; Pickett et al., 1992). However, conservation decisions must often be made while information is incomplete, and management outcomes uncertain. Ecosystem management, and specifically active management, have therefore developed as means of managing as an iterative process, by the effects of management interventions are assessed and fed back into the decision-making system. Though this approach is promising (Biggs and Rogers, 2003), problems in implementation have been met because of the mismatch between relatively static conservation institutions and management systems and the dynamic nature of ecosystems (Knight et al., 2006; Rogers, 1998). In this paper, we aim to provide a detailed description of the representation of BON and FON metaphors in the academic and public spheres. We investigate whether the change from a BON metaphor to a more dynamic FON perspective is reflected in the representation of conservation and ecosystem management in newspapers and on the Internet. We compare the extent to which the FON metaphor has replaced the BON metaphor in the academic literature, on the Internet and in newspapers, and explore the reasons for any differences in the representations of nature between these media. We achieve this by reviewing the representation of these competing metaphors in the popular sphere (UK newspapers and the Internet) and compare it to representation in the academic literature (peer-reviewed journal articles). We test the idea that popular media coverage is underpinned by assumptions of balance rather than flux, and discuss the size of the “public perception gap” as an indication of the difficulty of developing a clear conservation message based on the FON metaphor. We discuss our findings in terms of the mismatch between ecological understanding, conservation messages, and the potential for misinterpretation and misapplication of the FON metaphor.

2. Methods We adopted a two-phase methodology in an attempt to effectively capture the thematic content of the public and academic discourses. First, we identified conservation and ecology themes associated with the BON and FON metaphors in the public sphere, reviewing articles using these terms in UK national newspapers. Second, we assessed representation of “balance” and “flux” arguments on the Internet (representing public discourse), and in academic literature. In the identification phase of the research we searched the content of UK national newspapers published between January 2000 and December 2005 on Lexis-Nexis using the search term “balance of nature” (BON) and the term “flux of nature” (FON). In total 159 articles were retrieved and, using standard research procedures, each of these articles was scanned for content (Antilla, 2005; Salinas, 2006). In this manner 47 articles were identified that contained narratives relating to the environmental and ecological aspects of the balance of nature metaphor. No articles were Downloaded from http://pus.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 6, 2009

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returned that used the FON term. The textual content and the contextual circumstances of each article were then analyzed by breaking the articles down and as far as possible considering their morphological characteristics and structural organization, linguistic and rhetorical issues, and discursive strategies and ideological standpoints (Carvalho and Burgess, 2005). The general thematic areas to emerge from the analysis were: conservation, biodiversity, climate change, deforestation, fishing, culling, hunting, introduced species (considered synonymous with invasive or alien species and combined for the purpose of analysis), species reintroductions, fish farms, wind farms, biocontrol, genetically modified (GM) crops, and pollution. Apart from conservation and biodiversity, which cut across most of the other categories, all of the other themes were implicated in either maintaining or (more often) disrupting the “balance of nature” in some way or form. We then took the themes listed above, merging “hunting” and “fishing” (both forms of natural resource exploitation) into a single category, and conducted two parallel searches using online search engines in an attempt to quantify the representation of BON and FON arguments within each of the identified themes. We ran successive searches during January 2006 on Google (popular representation) and Google Scholar (general scientific representation) using each of the identified sub-themes and either “balance of nature” or “flux of nature” (following a similar methodology to Ladle et al., 2005). It should be noted that we did not explicitly account for multiple web pages within a single website since informal analysis suggested that these constitute less than 5 percent of listed pages and that this was consistent across all categories. We then assessed relative representation of BON and FON metaphors by calculating the proportion of sites that use each metaphor from the total number of sites that refer to either metaphor, e.g. % representation of FON = [Nos. of FON sites / (Nos. of FON sites + Nos. of BON sites)] × 100. 3. Results UK newspapers There is virtually no use of the FON metaphor in the UK news media. We found only one article that refers directly to FON, and this was not directly concerned with conservation or environmental management—it was about how modern artists are raising awareness about pollution in Edinburgh. Conversely, the BON metaphor is widely used in a variety of different contexts that mainly relate to humans’ relationship to the natural world (Figure 1). Our thematic analysis revealed that the BON metaphor is normally used in relation to some aspect of environmental management for biodiversity conservation. However, this generalization masks two quite different forms of the BON argument. In the first, wild nature is envisaged as being in “balance” and humans’ intervention in nature (e.g. pollution, climate change, and deforestation) is destroying or disturbing that balance. This is illustrated by the following quotes: The delicate balances of nature have been upset by climatic conditions, say pest controllers and insect experts. (Sunday Express, 10 July 2005) He [Prince William1] has an in-depth understanding of his subject and has become committed to the need to address the problems of greenhouse gases, deforestation and planetary changes that threaten the balance of nature. (Mail on Sunday, 19 June 2005) Environmentalists warned the farmed fish could “tip the balance of nature” as they compete with wild fish for food and habitat. (Daily Mail, 2 February 2005)



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Themes Figure 1. Representation of the BON metaphor in UK national papers between January 2000 and December 2005.

The second context in which the BON metaphor was used within the UK national newspapers was as a justification for interventionist policies. The argument, although never properly articulated in the press, is that nature is no longer in “balance” in the UK owing to past human alteration of the environment and intervention (e.g. hunting/fishing, culling) is therefore needed to maintain an artificial (but nevertheless desirable) balance. Although the derivation of this ideal balance is never alluded to, the context of the articles implies that the ideal level for any particular species or ecosystem should be something similar to pre-industrial levels. These arguments are well illustrated by the following quotes: “Hunting,” said Dave King, a local farmer, “is part of the balance of nature.” (The Guardian, 16 April 2005) The balance of nature is a delicate one which needs the careful assistance of man, not illjudged interference, to survive. (The Express, 31 January 2005) Moreover, he claimed seal hunting was a matter of trying to balance nature. “We know the seals eat the cod. If we don’t hunt the seal, the seal will get bigger and bigger and eat the last cod.” (The Independent, 10 April 2004)


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They calculate how many stags and hinds must be shot from a graph. He calculates from the balance of nature observed minutely every day through the wind and rain. (Daily Mail, 9 December 2003) Thus, qualitative analysis of the content of these articles points to strong preservationist and interventionist themes whose proponents are both adopting the BON metaphor to legitimize their views. Internet versus academic representations Our qualitative analysis of the UK media uses of the BON metaphor uncovered at least four general themes that we further subdivided into 13 sub-categories (see above) that represented the search terms in our Internet survey. The themes were certainly not mutually exclusive and one of the characteristics of the UK news media discourse in this area is that BON is often used in more than one context within the same article. Our first thematic category is general conservation that we represented by the search terms “conservation” and the slightly more technical “biodiversity.” Our second category was perceived contemporary causes of biodiversity loss that included “climate change,” “pollution,” “introduced species” (= alien species = invasive species), “GM crops” and “deforestation.” Our third category was the utilization of nature, represented by “hunting/fishing,” “wind farms” and “fish farms.” The final theme we identified was the management of nature within which we identified the sub-categories of “culling,” “biocontrol” and “reintroductions.” As expected, there was much greater representation of the BON metaphor than the FON metaphor although the difference was less pronounced in the academic literature (Figure 2). Interestingly, FON arguments were far less apparent in the popular discourse on general conservation themes and those related to biodiversity loss, but had a much greater prominence in discussions of the management of nature (Figure 2). 4. Discussion As the public increasingly uses the Internet to find and interpret the findings of scientific research, the scientific community needs to better understand how the social and spatial dynamics of Web dissemination might affect public understanding of science (Ladle et al., 2005; Ashlin and Ladle, 2006). The next generation of web-literate laypersons could be misled or polarized, thereby undermining the considered public debate that underpins effective environmental policy. This topic has so far received little attention and there have been few published studies on how scientific information is translated and interpreted as it passes through electronic media, whether there are any differences between the representations of environmental science in the different communities that inhabit cyberspace, and the relationship between newspaper and Internet representation of environmental issues. The simple analysis presented here gives a clear but crude snapshot of professional and public opinion that suggests that the aim of conservation science and of conservationists is still portrayed as being one of maintaining stability, harmony and balance in both newspapers and in the websites of environmental non-governmental organizations (environmental NGOs). The BON metaphor is less prevalent in the academic literature, indicating a shift toward the non-equilibrium paradigm in ecology, which is underpinned by the FON metaphor. There are two main reasons for the persistence of the BON metaphor in the popular media (Internet and newspapers). The first relates to the difficulty of building a clear conservation



% Articles using FON metaphor

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Web Scholar Figure 2. Relative representation of FON metaphor on Google (public representation) and Google Scholar (academic representation). Note: Bars represent the percentage of articles using the FON metaphor out of the total number of article on that theme using BON or FON metaphors. It does not incorporate articles on these themes that did not specifically identify these terms.

message on the FON metaphor, and its vulnerability to misinterpretation. The second relates to how deeply engrained the BON metaphor is in the two dominant conservation strategies of the twentieth century. Whereas the BON metaphor provides a basis for a clear-cut conservation message—that nature is fragile and we need to protect it—the FON metaphor is complex in both ecological and conservation terms, and necessitates an experimental, adaptive and iterative approach in order to develop management approaches that maintain variability without eroding ecological resilience. The idea that nature is resilient (within certain definable limits) is central to the FON paradigm, but the definition of ecological resilience given in the introduction contrasts with the everyday usage of the term. The definition of ecological resilience takes into consideration the ecological thresholds of the system, and includes the possibility that some ecosystem changes may be irreversible or effectively so. These points are well understood in the academic literature, where the concept of hysteresis (borrowed from complex systems theory) is used to describe a change that is easier to precipitate than to reverse (e.g. Sternberg, 2001). In contrast, in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), resilience is defined as “Elasticity; the power of resuming the original shape or position after compression, bending, etc.” Describing nature as resilient in the OED sense, then, implies that nature will recover from all disturbance. This is a dangerous message in conservation terms because it can be misused to justify environmentally damaging


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practices on the grounds that ecosystems can and will recover so environmental damage does not matter. This may therefore explain some environmental NGOs’ reluctance to adopt the FON metaphor as a basis for environmental campaigns and as a motivation for conservation. Thus the first challenge for popular conservation science is to convey the message that nature’s resilience is finite and can be exceeded by unprecedented disturbance, over-exploitation, or the combined effect of a changing climate, increased extreme events and anthropogenic activities. The concept of ecosystem variability is similarly problematic for environmental NGOs and newspapers, and equally complex in terms of conservation message. Pickett and White have pointed out that “an essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change” (1985). In this sense, change is a reference to the dynamic nature of ecosystems, in terms of population sizes, species assemblages, climatic variability, patch dynamics, species turnover, evolution, earth surface processes, species migration. The term as used by Pickett and White thus covers the whole spectrum of temporal and spatial scales, and critically, these scales are products of the ecological and environmental processes themselves. Imposing change on ecosystems without reference to the intrinsic rates of ecological processes might again cause unprecedented and irreversible damage to ecosystems, leaving conservationists with the question of how much change is too much. The idea that ecosystems are variable can thus be misconstrued in a similar way to that of resilience, and used to undermine conservation initiatives and justify inactivity or the overexploitation of natural resources. The second reason for the persistence of the BON metaphor is that it is deeply embedded in the two dominant conservation strategies of the twentieth century: preservation and utilization. Preservation is based on the idea that nature’s harmony and balance is fragile, and must be protected from the destructive influence of human beings (Kalamandeen and Gillson, 2007). This idea was important in the Wilderness Movement of the United States, led by John Muir, George Perkins Marsh and others, which argued for freedom from human interference and the strict control or prohibition of hunting and harvesting of wildlife (Jepson and Whittaker, 2002; Kalamandeen and Gillson, 2007) and forms the cornerstone of the influential Yellowstone model of conservation through protected areas (Chatty, 2003; Jepson and Whittaker, 2002). Those in favor of utilization, however, maintained that nature’s balance could be maintained by limiting access to natural resources in order to keep the harvesting rate at levels within the natural rate of regeneration of populations or ecosystems, and that the wise use of natural resources could be the key to their conservation (Weddell, 2002). Interestingly, this latter theme emerged in our analysis in an even more extreme form, where those in favor of wildlife utilization argue that their interventions are essential for maintaining nature’s balance (e.g. through deer culling). Being founded on the BON metaphor, both the preservation and utilization approaches to conservation assume that nature can and should be stable and unchanging. Preservationists assume that populations and vegetation assemblages will tend towards stability (Clements, 1916; Tansley, 1939; Whittaker, 1953), and will thus remain unchanged if disturbance is prevented. Non-intervention and freedom from human interference are thus management ideals for preservationists. Climatic variation and disturbance (both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic) frequently prevent the ideal of stability and non-intervention, and consequently intervention to prevent disturbance or change is a more usual management approach. Similarly, hunters, and other “wise-users” employ ideas of carrying capacity and sustainable harvest that are conceptually underpinned by assumptions of logistic population growth and a faith in the ability of homeostatic mechanisms, especially density dependent competition, to return populations to equilibrium (Milner-Gulland and Mace, 1998; Pearl and Reed, 1920; Verhulst, 1838). Maximum sustainable yield is thus the management goal for “wise-users” but the complexities of population dynamics and environmental variability, and the time-lags between



Figure 3. The conceptual roots and conservation consequences of “balance” and “flux” of nature paradigmatic structures.

the two, ensure that populations vary in size and “carrying capacity,” and maximum sustainable yield is at best a variable theoretical parameter which populations may tend towards but rarely reach (Milner-Gulland and Mace, 1998). As a result, attempts to harvest at maximum sustainable yield frequently lead to over-exploitation (see Figure 3). The two major strands of conservation narrative are thus associated with the BON metaphor, and although many conservation debates of the twentieth century have been polarized along preservation versus utilization lines, both protagonists were working from the same underlying metaphor, that of nature in balance, and the main difference in their approach is in whether nature is perceived as fragile or “resilient” (in the OED sense). In debates over many key conservation questions, such as protected areas versus community conservation for example, we have the


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appearance of a balanced debate because two apparently opposite viewpoints are represented. However, because both are underpinned by the BON metaphor, and because of the dangers of misinterpretation described above, alternative conservation options based on the FON metaphor are frequently overlooked, because the goal of maintaining stability is common to both preservation and utilization. This structure of conservation philosophy is represented in Figure 3. Our study shows that many academics and practitioners are now using the FON metaphor and the non-equilibrium paradigm as a basis for conservation science (Biggs and Rogers, 2003; Gunderson and Holling, 2001; Holling, 1973; Holling and Allen, 2002; Pickett et al., 1997; Pickett et al., 1992; Rogers, 2003; van Wilgen et al., 2003). This necessitates research and adaptive management aimed towards distinguishing normal ecological variability from anthropogenic degradation, understanding the interplay between anthropogenic and environmental factors and establishing the position of thresholds at which rapid ecosystem changes might occur, in order to design conservation strategies that do not exceed ecological resilience. Despite (or perhaps because of) the difficulty of developing conservation goals for systems that are inherently dynamic (Ravetz and Funtowicz, 1999; Yaffee, 1996), the ecosystem management approach to conservation adopts an adaptive management framework in order to make conservation decisions about complex systems and to continually evaluate and adjust management interventions (Grumbine, 1994, 1997; Rogers, 1998; Sabine et al., 2004). In the Kruger National Park, for example, Thresholds of Potential Concern (TPC) are used to shape management goals and decide when interventions (or indeed the TPC) need to be changed (Biggs and Rogers, 2003). This flexible and iterative approach to conservation goal setting also creates a framework whereby the values that are embedded in conservation ecology can be incorporated more explicitly into conservation science. For example, where more than one ecosystem state is possible, the views of different stakeholders need to be considered in deciding management that favors a particular state (Kay et al., 1999). An example of this can be found in the conservation of some of the scrub heathlands of North America, which have resulted from forest clearance but now add to landscape heterogeneity, but are now valued by local people for aesthetic and recreational reasons (Motzkin and Foster, 2002). This recognition of uncertainty in conservation interventions, an acceptance of the legitimacy of multiple stakeholder views and different value systems, combined with scientific uncertainty, high decision stakes and an urgency in conservation policy-making means that conservation science is increasingly post-normal (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994; Luks, 1999). The role of social science as part of the conservation process is increasingly recognized, and the literature contains a growing body of research aimed at the integration of societal values and scientific uncertainty (Endter-Wada et al., 1998; Healy, 1999; Knight et al., 2006; Waltner-Toews et al., 2003). Despite these advances, we are nevertheless faced with an “implementation crisis” in conservation (Knight et al., 2006; Sutherland, 1990) which has been variously attributed to mismatches in academic research and conservation practice, incompatibility of institutions and ecosystems in terms of scale and process, and differences in values and goals of different stakeholder groups (Holling and Meffe, 1996; Knight et al., 2006; Rogers, 1998; Sutherland et al., 2004). The public perception time-lag highlighted by our study could also form part of the implementation crisis. Our study shows that the “conservation paradox”—preserving what must change (Pickett and White, 1985)—is almost completely lost on a public and conservation movement that is still almost totally immersed in concepts of the “balance” and stability of “nature.” Environmental NGOs’ reluctance, or difficulty, in building a conservation message on the FON metaphor means that the public perception of nature’s fragility, resilience or otherwise, is still very



much rooted in the BON paradigm. As a result, it seems likely that public understanding of adaptive ecological management as “learning by doing” may be perceived as a high risk or even reckless strategy, because conservation based on the BON metaphor still suggests that preventing change should be the most important conservation goal (see Figure 3). Our survey suggests that the public representation of conservation is still lagging far behind ecological advances and is centered on ecologically simplistic messages of preventing change in order to preserve nature’s fragile balance. Environmental journalists and science editors may need to develop a more sophisticated language and argumentation to effectively discuss environmental management in a way that reflects the changing perspectives within professional ecology. The debate also needs to encompass the idea that where ecosystems have several possible future states, societal values can legitimately help to shape conservation interventions (Kay et al., 1999; Yaffee, 1996; Jepson and Canney, 2003). We therefore suggest that the post-normal conservation science might provide the conceptual and theoretical underpinning for this approach. We contend that informed public debate about combating threats to biodiversity (e.g. global warming or the effects of exotic species) requires that environmental science communicators inform society that ecological resilience has its limits, but that there is also considerable scientific uncertainty over where these limits are. Crucially, ideas of flux and resilience must not be used to justify over-exploitation and unprecedented change. Rather, the processes that maintain and protect ecosystem heterogeneity and resilience should be discussed in terms of future management options under continuing social and environmental flux. In order for stakeholder groups to contribute effectively to conservation policy and practice, it is essential that scientific information about variability and flux, including the limitations and uncertainties of the science involved, is presented to the public in an accessible way.

5. Conclusions In this study we have provided a simple methodology for assessing the extent of the public understanding “gap” for a rapidly moving area of science and environmental policy, that of the FON metaphor and associated non-equilibrium paradigm. The reasons for the public perception gap can be explained in terms of the complexity and uncertainty inherent in a dynamic understanding of ecosystems, and in the risk of misinterpreting and exploiting the perceived resilience of ecosystems in order to justify environmentally destructive practices. Our data suggest that changing public perceptions of nature may be difficult, owing to the subtleties and complexities inherent in adopting a “flux of nature” metaphor, and the risks associated with overemphasizing or misinterpreting nature’s resilience. The challenge for environmental NGOs and journalists is to find conservation messages that are both ecologically realistic (based on a FON paradigm) but also precautionary, in as much as the limits of resilience are finite and poorly understood, and need to be respected if over-exploitation, degradation and biodiversity loss are to be avoided. Our methodology could be implemented in the future to assess whether the same public perception “gap” is closing as the new paradigm of “flux of nature” becomes better established in the global conservation movement. Note 1 Interestingly, several articles that use the BON metaphor are connected to the views of the British royal family—it is tempting to speculate that they also consider themselves to be somehow part of that balance.


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Authors Richard J. Ladle, D.Phil., is the Director of Oxford University’s M.Sc. in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management. He has a background in theoretical ecology and his current research is focused on media representations of environmental science and the use of new electronic information platforms for disseminating environmental and conservation narratives. Correspondence: Oxford University Centre for the Environment, Oxford University, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK; e-mail: [email protected] Lindsey Gillson, D.Phil., is currently Lecturer in Plant Conservation Biology in the Botany Department at the University of Cape Town. She has an academic background in biology, environmental science, conservation ecology and paleoecology. She is interested in the application of long-term data to understanding ecological variability, and in exploring the implications of this for theoretical ecology and biodiversity conservation.


Public Understanding of Science - CiteSeerX

Public Understanding of Science - CiteSeerX

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