I attended State of the Estuary Conference this past week, which brings together a broad spectrum of people: policy-makers, hydrologists, biologists, activists, and specialists of various angles. And we're all talking about the system of water moving from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the San Francisco Bay—one of the United States' largest estuaries.
At this conference and in reading some recent journal articles, I have been trying to pay attention to the language we use for the interface between natural processes and the engineering/regulatory mechanisms that seek to control them. The tides rise and fall regardless of what bill is being passed in Sacramento, and we don't really know if we're going to have a wet or dry year in California until we're actually having it. But, in true American fashion, we'll try to assert dominance of our landscape regardless, and I think this sensibility exposes itself in the language we use.
One phrase that came up a lot at the conference is "ecosystem function"—basically, identifying if the typical processes are occurring within an identified system or sub-system. Ecology, academically, sits at a difficult intersection of expectations: held to scientific standards of reproducibility and quantification, but typically grounded in observation/description and grappling with unbounded, non-hierarchical systems of flora and fauna and geography.
The discussion of ecosystem "function" often reduced the estuary to an asset, squeezing the tangled patchiness of ecology into an economic quantization of what is going on. Translating ecosystems into "ecosystem functions" and assigning dollar value to each seems to be the default technique for weighing ecological health against the industrial uses of the system (transit, fresh water, and agriculture in the case of the conference). The SF Estuary struggles to be commodified due to its own dynamism and year-to-year variability—economic and regulatory norms often take an approach devoid of context when considering how to divvy up flows, resources, and decision priorities, expecting the flows to be steady and true and ahistorical in terms of justice. Most of the American West suffers the same, per Cadillac Desert—the Colorado River Compact speaks to this.
I found the conference exhilarating. Everyone in the room seemed to understand that ecosystem "function" is really just an easy and occasionally effective proxy for ecosystem health in a broader view. I left feeling inspired by so many people who have dedicated their careers to managing this system from all angles, making it healthier, and making it work for a more populous California.
Functioning,
Lukas
At this conference and in reading some recent journal articles, I have been trying to pay attention to the language we use for the interface between natural processes and the engineering/regulatory mechanisms that seek to control them. The tides rise and fall regardless of what bill is being passed in Sacramento, and we don't really know if we're going to have a wet or dry year in California until we're actually having it. But, in true American fashion, we'll try to assert dominance of our landscape regardless, and I think this sensibility exposes itself in the language we use.
One phrase that came up a lot at the conference is "ecosystem function"—basically, identifying if the typical processes are occurring within an identified system or sub-system. Ecology, academically, sits at a difficult intersection of expectations: held to scientific standards of reproducibility and quantification, but typically grounded in observation/description and grappling with unbounded, non-hierarchical systems of flora and fauna and geography.
The discussion of ecosystem "function" often reduced the estuary to an asset, squeezing the tangled patchiness of ecology into an economic quantization of what is going on. Translating ecosystems into "ecosystem functions" and assigning dollar value to each seems to be the default technique for weighing ecological health against the industrial uses of the system (transit, fresh water, and agriculture in the case of the conference). The SF Estuary struggles to be commodified due to its own dynamism and year-to-year variability—economic and regulatory norms often take an approach devoid of context when considering how to divvy up flows, resources, and decision priorities, expecting the flows to be steady and true and ahistorical in terms of justice. Most of the American West suffers the same, per Cadillac Desert—the Colorado River Compact speaks to this.
I found the conference exhilarating. Everyone in the room seemed to understand that ecosystem "function" is really just an easy and occasionally effective proxy for ecosystem health in a broader view. I left feeling inspired by so many people who have dedicated their careers to managing this system from all angles, making it healthier, and making it work for a more populous California.
Functioning,
Lukas