Those additions lie at the heart of the adaptive approach. They represent aspects of 

 the conceptual lessons learned. But concepts need to be matched with technique and 

 technique has to emerge from practice. The highlights of the version of techniques 

 that we evolved emerged from practical examples that, in retrospect, fell into three 

 phases. 



Phase 1: What GIRLS Taught Us 



Problem Entry 



Any problem can be entered at various levels, from global to micro. And yet the 

 final results are largely determined by the entry point. More often than not, the entry 

 point is dictated by one's own past experience. Hence, in a recent workshop exploring 

 the consequences of alternative routes to transport oil from Alaska to the Puget 

 Sound area, a wild fowl specialist argued that measures of wild fowl populations were 

 the prime integrator of information concerning the state of environmental health of 

 the marine ecosystem. A fisheries biologist, on the other hand, saw the world as one 

 of catch, effort statistics and stock-recruitment relations in which productivity would 

 be impacted by oil spills. Both these views can be accommodated in the same analysis 

 because they imply similar scales in space and time. Both require designation of 

 alternative tanker routes, representation of spill probabilities, development of sub- 

 models of oil movement, and estimates of population and animal movement by 

 location and time of year. But a senior policy advisor of government argued that a 

 larger scale analysis of energy supply and demand could well indicate that any 

 transport of oil by tanker over new routes was unlikely because of likely changes in 

 supply and demand. That represents a much larger geographical scale of analysis 

 over a longer period of time, but the end result could well alert the wildlife and 

 fisheries biologists to issues and questions emerging in a radically different direction 

 from their original inclination. Rather than simply reacting to proposed tanker 

 routes that might never appear, they could, as well, anticipate developments and be 

 part of their design. 



It is not that one scale of problem definition is correct and one wrong. In this 

 example both are useful the first in preparation for formal hearings concerning 

 four specific proposals; the second in anticipation of the next round of issues just over 

 the horizon. The point is that the scale of problem definition used should be an 

 explicit decision based on needs, not on one's own area of expertise. 



Problems are defined not only by the scale in space and time but also by the choice 

 of the processes most responsible for generating and responding to change. GIRLS is 

 a case in point. The Gulf Islands, off the coast of British Columbia, have rare living 

 resources on land and sea that have been progressively impacted by expanding 

 demands for recreation and development. The first entry point, however, was not 

 biological — it was economic and social, for it was the forces of population growth, 

 land acquisition and development that were the engines of change. This provided the 

 opportunity, then, for biologists and others to evaluate alternative futures in terms of 

 their primary interest and to explore alternative social and economic policies that 

 could better protect or enhance those interests. That can set the stage to pinpoint 

 second-order analyses where their special expertise can come into play. Subsequent 

 to the GIRLS exercise, for example, the AEAM approach was used with fisheries 

 biologists, economists, managers and policy people to. develop radically new 

 perceptions of the impact of sport fishing on salmon, and to develop new policies that 

 are now being put into practice. 



The prime lessons: one's own interest cannot blindly dictate the point of entry into 

 a problem; whatever the point of entry, there are contributions to be made to one's 

 own interest; whatever the point of entry, it is useful to explore the consequences on 

 larger and smaller scales. 



80 



