Ethnographic Overview And Assessment: Zion National Park, Utah ...

Scale
Agencies must consider the broad-scale, long-term ecological consequences of
their actions. (Interagency Ecosystem Management Task Force 1995:17-18)
Ecosystem research involves new sizes of analytical units. Previously funded agency
research has focused on and usually has been geographically limited to lands specifically
managed by the agency. From a practical standpoint, even though natural and cultural
resources obviously extend beyond the park, forest, or whatever lands the agency manages, the
scientists have been restricted from conducting studies beyond the Federal administrative unit.
As research is less geographically bounded by the administrative unit itself, new questions arise
about what is the scale of appropriate ecosystem studies. Once we start expanding, where do we
end? How do we come to agree upon common criteria so that all of the new ecosystem studies
correspond geographically?
Time is another type of scale issue that must be addressed by the new ecosystem
research. Previous studies have been designed to answer immediate management questions,
often to the exclusion of temporally broader questions about the formation and dynamics of the
ecosystem. In general, each science will have a preferred time-frame for best understanding its
research questions. Usually, the greater the time depth under consideration the more information
is required to provide an answer to a research question.
Longer analysis time-frames will combine with geographically broader study units to
produce new kinds of studies -- often studies that have never been conducted by either scientists
nor agencies. These new scales of analysis will make it even more important that all scientists
conducting ecosystem research use similar analysis frames.
Holism
Under the ecosystem approach, management is oriented towards interacting
systems, and addressed ecological, economic, and social concerns. (Interagency
Ecosystem Management Task Force 1995:19)
Traditional resource management tends to be oriented towards one or a few resources,
such as timber, minerals, single wildlife species, water, or cultural resources, with less attention
paid to other resources or to the interdependent relationship between these resources. New
ecosystem studies must look at many aspects of the ecosystem and their interrelationship to one
another. This requires multivariable models that probably have not been developed because
either the funding or the expressed policy need for them had not previously existed.
Holistic social science studies not only include the widest appropriate array of social
and cultural variables, but also include all appropriate kinds of people. The term cultural
affiliation is used to specify American Indian ethnic groups and tribes who have cultural ties to
parks and other Federal lands. Other types of people also have social or cultural ties to Federal
land management units and these people should also be included if all the human dimensions of
the ecosystem are to be understood.
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