This work is an analysis of American ecosystem management against a backdrop of competing ecological concepts: holism and individualism. The holistic view conceptualizes ecosystems as definable units with recognizable and regenerative stable states, while individualism sees ecosystems as coincidental and transient assemblages of opportunistic species. I suggest that this debate is not purely academic, but rather that it has profound implications for the ways in which we endeavor to protect and manage natural areas. The question I pose is this: given its historic legacy of holism, how has American ecosystem management responded to increasing recognition of ecosystems as individualistic associations that are seldom at equilibrium? I address this question by analyzing holistic concepts and individualistic objections and by assessing selected examples of ecosystem management in policy and practice. Specifically, I evaluate ten cases of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem management with a rubric of holism and individualism.

Results/Conclusions

Results indicate that management practices are strongly holistic in four of the ten cases and moderately holistic in the other six, suggesting that many of our professed goals of ecosystem conservation and management are incongruent with the concept of the ecosystem as a dynamic and stochastic mosaic. My central conclusion is that the modern American approach to ecosystem conservation is strongly holistic despite evidence that ecosystems are individualistic associations, and that much American ecosystem management is accordingly fixated on the preservation of an abstraction. I suggest that holistic preservation is the wrong goal. Instead, I make the case for a more individualistic approach to ecosystem management—one in which the maintenance of some ideal ecological structure, function, or composition is not the objective.

Rather, ecosystem management based on individualism would feature the reduction of anthropogenic stress to promote heterogeneity, to encourage functional diversity, and to protect ecosystems that are well-suited for variable response to environmental change.