More on Systems Thinking and Protected Areas

A couple of weeks ago, I noted the importance of thinking differently about the challenges and opportunities confronting protected areas. I noted that we address many park and protected area problems in a way that suppresses them in one place, but results in them moving somewhere else. This problem displacement process may lead to problems being moved from one park, protected area or wilderness to another which has less capacity—financial, legal, technical—to deal with the problem. In essence, the problem has not been solved, only moved around, much like the children’s game of Whac a Mole that I mentioned a while back. In some cases, the problem is made worse when it is moved.


The Whac a Mole approach to management and planning represents a view of the world driven primarily by responding to events, without diving deeper to better understand what drives those problems. Understanding where problems come from, our paradigms of the world, the structures and processes that result from them means that we need to look first at our organization. I was involved a number of years ago in a workshop on wilderness character, specifically what the phrase “primitive and unconfined character” could mean. This phrase, as many of you know, identifies a principal characteristic of wilderness visitor experiences. During the workshop, we went through an exercise to determine what factors in the managerial, social and biophysical setting would serve to reduce opportunities for visitors to experience these characteristics—things such as high use densities, regulations on visitors, presence of incompatible uses. Nearly all of the factors identified were a function of management! The conclusion was that if federal wilderness management agencies wanted to improve the quality of visitor experiences, they first needed to look at what management actions and policies they employed.

Thus, we, as managers, academics, even activists, are often the source of problems, challenges, as well as important and innovative opportunities. But we will never be able to successfully address these with an event-driven approach, an approach that excludes self-critical examination, or approaches that put the burden on others without understanding the underlying system, the important elements of it, the reinforcing or balancing nature of the relationships between these elements or the delays between causes and effects.

This was graphically illustrated for me when I prepared a presentation for a regional wilderness management workshop several years ago. In that workshop illustrated the negative consequences of event-oriented thinking at the basis for a common backcountry management technique. Wilderness and backcountry managers are frequently confronted with unacceptable levels of biophysical impacts at campsites. A commonly used response is to close campsites. This is exactly the strategy Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness managers used during the 1970s to control impacts in the Big Creek Lake basin. After several years of monitoring, researchers found an increase in impacts rather than the decrease they expected. Why?

The increase resulted from new campsites created by visitors obeying the closure and by other visitors continuing to use the closed campsites. This process is known as a “fixes that fail” type of system-management actions that result in unanticipated consequences leading to exactly the opposite effect than intended. Fixes that fail typify much our action, and occur because we don’t understand the system that is functioning in the particular situation. They are often the result of good faith, but event-oriented responses.

So, to implement systems thinking, and improve the efficacy of our management, we need to think at larger scales, to avoid moving problems around and implementing actions that make the situation worse. We need start thinking about what is the system operating, about the holism and about integrating different disciplines and forms of knowledge.

We will take this up next week.