Many ecological systems have disturbance regimes built in; some are
actually dependent on some disturbance. These disturbances are not
+predictable+ in the sense that we know exactly when they will occur, but
they do occur within some range, both spacially (over the landscape) and
temporally (over time). The problem with human disturbance is we tend to
assume that we can take up all the disturbance "space" in the natural
system, when in reality those natural processes keep chugging along. Our
actions are additive, or cumulative, rather than substitutional; and the
rate at which we disturb the landscape tends to be much faster and
broader than natural. This prevents ecological systems from recovering;
in other words, we disturb the natural resiliency of the system. One
human disturbance, be it farming or grazing or a clearcut, is generally
not a problem; the problem comes when too many disturbances, in too small
a time frame, add up over the landscape.
There are also disturbances which look to us to be random, one-time
things. That may be because our time scale is not long enough; ecologic
and evolutionary time is a LONG time. Rather than manage for static
conditions over a given landscape (especially the inland northwest, which
was formed and maintained by disturbance regimes), we need to try to
manage to maintain ecological functions and processes, including
evolutionary processes, over long spans of time.
The best example of a stochastic, or random, natural disturbance lately is
Mt. St. Helens. Lots of damage in the immediate sense; rivers clogged
with ash, forests literally blown away. But less than a decade after the
event, the Toutle River supported salmon again. By contrast, we have some
nearby coastal rivers that were logged 3 and 4 decades ago that do not
support salmon again (and no intervening impacts in the meantime). What
that tells me is that our human disturbances do NOT mimic natural ones,
and that they are somehow more disruptive.
And it also tells me that we need to maintain a healthy enough system as
a whole so that the temporary loss of the habitat of one river does not
endanger the ability of hte system to recover. If the Toutle had been
designated +the+ salmon stream of the coast, and all the other rivers
allowed to go to pot, right now there'd be no fish -- there'd have been
no source for recolonizing the Toutle.
I am reminded of that great story about the reporters taken for a
helicopter look at Mt. St. Helens. After a short time in the air, they
all started exclaiming and snapping photos out the windows -- what amazing
devastation! what a mess! And the guide asked them what they were doing,
they said, we're taking pictures of the devastation of the volcano. He
replied, no, we're not there yet -- that's just Weyerhaeuser land.
How does that play with private property? Well, you don't want to depend
on one site; and it's unfair to let everyone do what they want until you
get to the last landowner, who then has to provide public resource
protection for everyone -- dinging the last guy over the fence, we call
it. So the solution is some sort of equitable distribution of the burden
of public resource protection among all, as the benefits accrue to all (we
all want clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, birds to watch, fish
to catch, deer to hunt or watch, open space to relax in). The way to do
that, distribute the burden, is some agreement among landowners. Over a
large enough pool of people, that's called self-government, or democracy.
The mechanism by which that self-government acts is called -- tada! --
regulation; that also ensures that no selfish bad apples (human nature
alas being what it is) enjoy the benefits and try to slide out of the
burden.
Regulations can also include incentives, such as tax breaks for
maintaining land in habitat as opposed to development. But the
"government" is not a separate entity from we, the people. We all share
the burden, we all reap the benefits. Finis.