From the days of the American Frontier, the term "open spaces" has evoked a vision of unspoiled landscapes stretching endlessly toward the horizon, of nature operating on its own terms without significant human interference. Ever since, government agencies, academia, and conservation organizations have promoted policies that treat large, complex systems with a one-size-fits-all mentality that fails to account for equally complex social dimensions of humans on the landscape. This is wrong, argues landscape ecologist and researcher Charles Curtin. We need a science-based approach that tells us how to think about our large landscapes and open spaces at temporally and spatially appropriate scales in a way that allows local landowners and other stakeholders a say in their futures.
The Science of Open Spaces turns conventional conservation paradigms on their heads, proposing that in thinking about complex natural systems, whether the arid spaces of the southwestern United States or open seas shared by multiple nations, we must go back to "first principles" – those fundamental physical laws of the universe – and build innovative conservation from the ground up based on theory and backed up by practical experience. Curtin walks us through such foundational science concepts as thermodynamics, ecology, sociology, and resilience theory, applying them to real-world examples from years he has spent designing large-scale, place-based collaborative research programs in the United States and around the world.
Compelling for not only theorists and students, but also practitioners, agency personnel, and lay readers, The Science of Open Spaces offers a thoughtful and radical departure from business-as-usual management of Earth's dwindling wide-open spaces.
Preface
Chapter 1. Integrating Conservation and Complexity through the Perspective of Place
Chapter 2. Experiments in Post-normal Science in Southwestern Rangelands
Chapter 3. Experiments in the Governance of Maine?s Coastal Fisheries
Chapter 4. The Conceptual Underpinnings of Open Spaces
Chapter 5. Resilience and the Social-Ecological Synthesis
Chapter 6. Practical Aspects of Sustaining Open Spaces
Notes
Literature Cited
About the Author
Index
Charles Curtin is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy, University of Montana, Missoula, where he will be developing programs for the Practitioners Network for Large Landscape Conservation. He is also Interim Director of the Mora Watershed Alliance in Mora, New Mexico, where he helped develop a landscape-level conservation program in the one million acre Mora Watershed in north-western New Mexico. He was previously the director of the Resilience Design Group in the Department of Environmental Studies, Antioch University New England, in Keene, New Hampshire.
"[...] an important book, with the landscape ecologist author urging a paradigm-changing, science-based approach to pursuing large-scale, transboundary conservation.[...]
– Des Thompson, BES Bulletin 48(1), April 2017