Foreword

Half a century ago, concerned folk in voluntary networks collaborated with facilitation of the International Joint Commission (IJC), and other transboundary institutions, to assemble and organize a set of roughly compatible scientific concepts and methods that came to be designated as an ‘Ecosystem Approach’. This was to be applied in a major effort to reverse the expanding and intensifying degradation of the waters of the Great Laurentian River Basin (GLRB), especially in parts of Lakes Erie, Ontario and Michigan. The Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management Society (AEHMS) has suggested the following five references as particularly relevant, I posit, to the scientific provenance of the AEHMS, which was a close collaborator with IJC's governance-related institutional family focused on the waters of the Great Laurentian River Basin, GLRB, and beyond: Vollenweider et al., 1974; Vallentyne and Beeton, 1988; Vallentyne and Munawar, 1993; and Schindler and Vallentyne, 2008. I proceed here with an expectation that my text below is complementary to the texts cited above. Those authors, separately and together, innovated as scientists and in important applications of the science to help change human culture locally, regionally and globally with respect to the health and management of our waters.The scientific ‘agglomerate’ that emerged with versions of an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ in the 1960s and 1970s did not mesh to become an elegant, closed episteme. It was a willing workers’ open assemblage of enquiry and decision-oriented tools to achieve remediation of past harm and prevention of new harm in turbulent cultural circumstances. This cultural process may be perceived as an echo of the Scottish and German Enlightenments of the 1700s, here related in part to remediating serious abuses that emerged among highly desirable consequences fostered by those Enlightenments.In retrospect, I like to think that the ensuing further explication, development and practical application of this ‘Ecosystem Approach’ in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, GLWQA, interactively with other interjurisdictional institutions, has served our cultures moderately well. Some cultural stresses have abated, but others have intensified and have come to be integrated explicitly in the earlier episteme.In the present foreword I sketch the provenance and celebrate the efforts of the AEHMS, as a participant in this arduous GLWQA undertaking within the GLRB and beyond. The global biosphere has been the increasingly explicit systemic context for this complex ecosystemic approach. I personally participated in global conferences with an ‘ecosystem-within-biosphere approach’ on: applied inter-population ecosystem science in 1966 (Reading, UK), marine pollution and fisheries in 1970 (Rome), global environmental governance in 1972 (Stockholm), human population growth in 1974 (Bucharest) and some five more.Global weather patterns have always been a part of the complexity of the aquatic parts of the GLRB and are now exacerbating harmful effects of cultural stresses of smaller scale. In view of the great multi-factorial variability of weather events and of the harm done by them, is there an elegant way to mobilize science to cope with the harm of a tornado or a drought? Actuarial scientists with probabilistic mathematics and risk assessment may help with precautionary planning and practice for expected disasters and may also help with planning and practice of insurance to help defray costs of remediating harm done by disasters. The cost of such insurance may be reduced by effective precautionary measures that may be applied. Updating prudent measures and relevant insurance becomes part of the challenge of the GLWQA as it develops over the decades with predictably greater risks generated at the biosphere level, perhaps for centuries to come. Pragmatic effectiveness of the enquiry and decision undertaking is more in demand than aesthetic elegance.As I recall now, I have long been curious about the provenance of the complexity of conservation movements of recent centuries. For example, I now understand in retrospect that on our homestead in Alberta's northerly bush country starting in 1928 my immigrant parents practiced a kind of agricultural conservation that resembled what five generations of their ancestors had practiced near what is now Zaporizhzhia in the Ukraine. In the 1880s my father's father had served as a bookkeeper and assistant administrator of a Czarist forestry camp that was planting trees in valleys on the steppes. The administrator, Isaac Dyck, would later be elected the pastor of their local church. An earlier Czar had visited a forestry academy at Tharandt, near Dresden in Saxon German lands, where a version of an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ related to forestry was under development by Heinrich Cotta and peers. Their emphasis was on ‘Nachhaltigkeit’ of extraction of lumber in forests, i.e. ‘precautionary withholding’ some of the practical intensity of extraction and focusing extraction on particular ages of trees, thus achieving ‘sustainability’ of an optimal yield. Management of extraction was combined with rearing young of valued coniferous species artificially through a vulnerable early life and then planting them where they hardly reproduced naturally.Forester Bernhard Fernow, expert on the Tharandt conservation episteme, migrated to the US and served in the US federal forestry agency in the late 1800s. In 1898 he was appointed the first dean of forestry at Cornell University where the conservation department's building was named after him. My graduate degrees were earned in Fernow Hall in the late 1950s.Later in life Fernow came to the University of Toronto and helped organize the forestry faculty. At Toronto, fisheries-related research has been collaborative with forestry-related research since the mid-1800s. For example, my first professional activity in 1954 related to stream surveys as part of river basin ecosystems in the Toronto region with a focus on the distribution of Brook Trout as affected by urbanization. The overall project was led by foresters. Our survey team reported to Kenneth Mayall, a graduate of the forestry faculty. Inferences from stream surveys and related research of that program helped with planning and initiation of the 1972 GLWQA, and its conduct for the next 50 years. Ken Mayall and his fisheries peers including William Harkness and Fred Fry would have supported the objectives and activities of the AEHMS as piloted by Mohiuddin Munawar and his peers within the larger collaboration led by the IJC.The above is a sketch of one ‘thread’ in the provenance of an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ -- that was self-organizing into a complex epistemic entity longer than two centuries ago on the forested hills and valleys of what is now central Germany -- to the GLWQA and AEHMS half a century ago. There are threads that may have been ‘stronger’ within research related to fisheries. For example, those that mobilized under the rubric of ‘trophic limnology’ that self-organized mostly in the Baltic Basin and Rhine Valley of continental Europe and those that mobilized as ‘logical experimental design related to fisheries with mathematical biometrics and statistics’ that emerged in the coastal waters of the North Atlantic and especially in northeastern North America both starting in the late 1800s.There were more threads that were melded with those sketched above in the GLWQA: public health and sanitary engineering related to water pollution; preventive preservation of wild biota in wild locales for park purposes; combatting ill health of piscivorous birds as diagnostic also of subclinical harm to human health by hazardous contaminants at infinitesimal concentrations; etc. The inelegant composite episteme of the GLWQA has entrained an enquiry process something like that of a governance democracy in a country shared by numerous groups of people with somewhat different cultures or ideologies. Inferring the ‘truth’ of a particular concept of a particular ‘thread’ may be important in a forensic enquiry concerning who is to blame for a particular degradation. Proving truth is usually not an explicit objective of an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ that is intended to foster health of a multi-stressed ecosystem from a particular human value orientation. Rather an objective is that the relevant thread with its complex set of approximately compatible concepts and methods should be helpful toward improvement of ecosystemic health. The science is applied pragmatically after all and would likely not be funded in a democratic jurisdiction if some notable success was not apparent.Several kinds of quasi-revolution occurred in the GLRB and adjacent vast ecosystems of North America and Europe during the 1960s: against the American war on Vietnam; against suppression of civic rights of Indigenous and previously enslaved people; against gender inequity; and against environmental degradation. The production of new chemicals of largely unknown genotoxity for use in Vietnam produced hazardous wastes for which there was no safe disposal; much of it was buried in shallow pits on land from where it leaked away largely unseen. The relevant politics were dynamically disordered when the leaders of the federal governments of the US and Canada signed the GLWQA in 1972. That GLWQA came to have political meaning, explicit and implicit, with respect to each of the five quasi-revolutionary movements sketched above. Hence, the GLWQA was of interest to politicians beyond just the issue of extant environmental degradation; for some voters in recent decades, it seemed to have the wrong colour, blue in the US and red in Canada, see below.Back to the array of epistemic threads that were part of the provenance of the IJC's Ecosystem Approach. The Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, GLFC, was created in 1954 to focus mostly on invasion by a harmful species of fish, the sea lamprey, that followed ‘degradation’ or breaching of the natural barrier that prevented upstream migration of non-native fish taxa. Thus when the IJC began to mobilize its efforts following creation of the GLWQA in 1972 in order to remediate a particular sub-family of cultural stresses related to eutrophication, the GLFC already had three series of published reports that implicitly applied versions of an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ to large ecosystemic issues: Vernon Applegate and fellow networkers had published on the sea lamprey; Henry Regier, Vernon Applegate, Richard Ryder and peers on walleye in Western Lake Erie that were subject to several degrading stresses; and Kenneth Loftus, Henry Regier and peers on salmonids in oligotrophic lakes in a circumpolar latitudinal ‘salmonid belt’ subject to a variable number of stresses.By 1978, the IJC organizers were aware of the implicit epistemes of some of the GLFC's and other extant initiatives by interjurisdictional organizations and proposed a way to proceed which they called an ‘Ecosystem Approach’. (Jack Vallentyne used his thespian talents to induce IJC's commissioners to endorse that recommendation.) Some years later a paper by Lee et al., 1982 was published as a good-natured tease not to ignore old aspects of that approach. With retrospect I now wonder if what came to be called an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ would have become an important part of the episteme of the GLWQA if the network of fisheries researchers had not opted to help IJC informally starting with IJC's 1964 fact-finding reference on pollution of the lower lakes.Conceptual and methodological features of my musings above may be traced to the major cultural consequences of the interrelated Scottish Enlightenment and German Enlightenment that started in about 1700. The Dutch Enlightenment of about 1500 may have begun a vast gradual cultural development with respect to toleration, secularization, classification of knowledge and popularization particularly in what became science and may be noted as a precursor for the Enlightenments of the 1700s. With respect to implications for cultural-natural interactions, I posit that two ethical polarities self-organized within the overall consequences of these Enlightenments. One polarity may be caricatured as focused on individualistic opportunistic striving, driving and thriving as with industrialization and commercialization and the other polarity on communitarian cooperative caring, sparing and sharing as with husbandry of natural riches. The complex ethics that have been emerging relevant to this second polarity have come to emphasize ‘environmental justice’ since the benefits and harms that flowed from particular cultural interactions with nature with practices that were consistent with the first polarity on balance have generally affected persons of culturally disadvantaged race, gender and financial income classes adversely in comparison with advantaged folk. Within the eventual electoral politics in the various jurisdictions relevant to the GLWQA I posit that the first ethical pole has been coloured red and the second one blue in the US and vice versa in Canada. I posit that the overall ethical motivation implicit in the GLWQA and especially in AEHMS has had greater resemblance to the second ethical pole than the first one sketched above. Representatives of both of these ethical poles necessarily collaborated to foster the health of the Basin's aquatic ecosystems. With a particular transboundary issue, such as walleye in Western Lake Erie, the administrative methods applied in governance on the left Canadian side of the Great Laurentian River differed markedly from the managerial methods applied in governance on the right American side. C.S. Holling's and Elinor Ostrom's efforts related to such challenges.Three decades ago the IJC sent me an ‘appreciation’ for “major accomplishments during the two decades [that] included: championing the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement; spearheading adoption of an Ecosystem Approach for Great Lakes management; and serving as a member of the Great Lakes Science Advisory Board and providing leadership for its activities.” In retrospect, numerous networkers worked collegially in the continuous activity of developing and applying this complex of concepts and methods for practical purposes. AEHMS was a leading node in which this collaboration has happened. Realistically, I was a willing participant with other networkers who collaborated in the activities sketched above. IJC performed its usual professional magic and fostered self-organization among proponents of complementary epistemes that included earlier versions of an Ecosystem Approach, inter alia. The overall coordinated enquiry process and the practical remediation and rehabilitation efforts that followed, both as a result of the GLWQA with its supportive family of transjurisdictional organizations including AEHMS, may be perceived as a dynamic emergent ecosystemic entity in which living features -- at any level from sub-organismal to biospheric -- could not be reduced to linear deterministic mechanistic elements. Sometimes efforts to do so may have had heuristic value. I have seen no account of how IJC folk accomplished all that; it deserves to be celebrated. Again, such competence may already be serving within the further development of this capability to issues of ever larger scale, as with the GLRB and similar vast ecosystems in a context of the biosphere with some cultural stresses acting synergistically at a global level.I wonder how GLFC's activities relate to what has been happening with respect to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration that started in 2020 and in which the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is involved. Regier and Kelley, 1971 and Regier et al., 1972 relate to early involvements by the Fisheries Department at UNFAO on issues that may be relevant to that Decadal project. In both of these papers programs under GLFC auspices especially as related to Lake Erie were mentioned.Networkers who have helped me in recent years concerning the provenance of the science fostered by our network and my current attempt to sketch that provenance include:Susan Blunt, Stephen Bocking, Steven Crawford, Tracy Dobson, Marc Gaden, John Hartig, Gail Krantzberg, Jennifer Lorimer, Catherine Masson, Andrew Muir, Mohiuddin Munawar, Kevin Reid, Brian Shuter, William Taylor, and Thomas Whillans, to name a few.

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