INDIRECT CAUSALITY IN ECOSYSTEMS: 

 ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL 



PROTECTION 

 Bernard C. Patten 



During the environmental decade of the 1970s this nation undertook to redress the 

 abuses of former generations and restore our polluted waters, bad air. deteriorating 

 cities and abused landscapes to states more conducive to "productive and enjoyable 

 harmony between man and his environment." On the first day of the decade the 

 National Environmental Policy Act was enacted into law, and the country was 

 launched on a crusade for environmental protection. Legislation was passed which 

 established air quality standards, pollutant, and ha/ard safe levels for the work place, 

 improved waste management, and control of water pollution and to.\ic substances. 

 In the 1970s, words like Santa Barbara, Love Canal and Three Mile Island, Kepone. 

 DDT, PCBs and "nuke" became etched on the national consciousness as part of the 

 vocabulary of struggle. And indeed, it was a struggle to reduce the hazards of a 

 neglected environment to human health and well-being, to correct our wasteful 

 habits, and to reclaim, develop and conserve our precious natural resources. 



Great and obvious progress was made, particularly in areas of glaring imbalances 

 and abuses. Still more progress needs to be achieved on the tractable problems. But 

 as the decade of the 1980s proceeds, we can expect to see an increasing shift of 

 emphasis to more difficult problems requiring more refined methodologies. Environ- 

 mental protection will tend to grade over into en\ ironmental management in which 

 competing uses will vie more cleverly and subtly for ever more limited resources. 

 "Environment" will not remain a fuzzy generality, but will have to be comprehended 

 and dealt with for what it is what ecologists call "ecosystems": the total collection of 

 living things and associated abiotica within an area. 



Conventional environmental protection is not particularly ecosystem oriented. 

 The concept does occasionally enter practical concerns as an abstraction from 

 academia. but by and large it is not operational. Endangered species are now 

 protected only because they are rare, not necessarily important, in blithe disregard of 

 the lesson from paleontology that species were made to go extinct. Standards for 

 toxicant levels are based on laboratory bioassays; never mind that ecology 

 abundantly demonstrates that the organism of the laboratory is not the same, 

 functionally or behaviorally, as its counterpart in nature. 



The present unholistic paradigm, with its origins in laboratory experimentation, 

 will not disappear in the 1980s, but it will be challenged and its foundations will begin 

 to be eroded in two ways. First, tough problems requiring a more sophisticated view 



The Author: Bernard C. Patten is Professor of Zoology. University of Georgia. Athens, and President of 

 Ecology Simulations. Inc. His primarv interests are at the ecosystem level of organization. He presently is 

 conducting two ecosystem research programs, one in the Okefenokee Swamp (NSF) and the other on the 

 continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico (NOAA). He is also involved in development of a mathematical 

 system theory of environment. 



92 



