Solving the Scale Problem

• Author: Rebecca L. Kihslinger/James M. Mcelfish Jr.
• Pages: 196-210

chapter twelve

Solving the Scale Problem

The jurisdictional limits of local government land use plans, development and

construction plans, and governmental programs aimed at environmental miti-

gation or remediation do not often correspond to land areas def‌ined chief‌ly by

ecological processes. For at least some processes and biological resources, deci-

sions may suffer from a mismatch of the scale of the decision to the scale of

the ecological process or unit of relevant habitat. But waiting for a grand ecore-

gional plan and a series of coordinated subordinate plans is almost never an

option for decisionmakers. Decisions must be made now,by landowners or gov-

ernmental units with limited geographical jurisdiction. And existing

accountability mechanisms often privilege other values—location of trans-

portation facilities, water supply, public recreation, utilities, township and

county governance, to name a few—over ecological results.

Environmental advocates and professionals have generally hoped to make

decisionmakers more familiar with conservation biology concepts, with the

expectation that some of these concepts would creep into project design, devel-

opment approvals, or plan-making. Graduate schools and their faculties have

sought to train conservation biologists and ecologists with the hope that their

expertise would be valued by entities other than f‌ish and wildlife conservation

agencies and organizations. But even where these lessons are heard and expert-

ise is available, it takes an additional step to deal with the problem of scale

rather than to conf‌ine conservation to the four corners of a parcel of land or

planning area.

It turns out that institutional and proceduralpractices—what we have called

“nature-friendly land use practices”—make it possible to deal with the prob-

lem of differing scales in ecological processes and land use decisions. Land

use decisions taken at any level can have positive conservation inf‌luences on

ecology at the parcel, site, watershed or subregional, and ecoregional levels.

Although each of the case studies in this book offers unique lessons for habi-

tat conservation, six practices make it far more likely that scale issues can be

addressed effectively.

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