Introduction Resilience, the capacity of a nonlinear system to remain within
a stability domain (Holling 1973, Ludwig et al. 1997), is a central concept. Surprise and crisis are often the consequence
when an ecosystem shifts between stability domains. Fishery collapse is a well-studied example (Walters 1986). Crisis may
provide opportunities for learning, introduction of novel approaches, and reorganization, or it may prompt ever more rigid
policies for ecosystem management (Gunderson et al. 1995). Paradoxically, rigid management systems can create conditions favorable
to shifts in stability domains (Holling and Meffe 1996). Thus it seems important to understand the interactions of ecosystem
resilience with social decision-making systems (Holling and Sanderson 1996).
p.3-4 The application of economics to ecosystem management raises a number
of fundamental questions. How should alternate states, thresholds, and irreversible changes in the ecosystem affect economic
policy prescriptions? These phenomena are central to ecosystem resilience, but they have not been addressed effectively in
economic analyses. How should environmental stochasticity and uncertain ecological predictions affect economic analyses? Although
there is an extensive literature on making decisions in the presence of uncertainty (e.g. Lindley 1985, Walters 1986), the
implications for managing nonlinear ecosystems are not yet well understood.
p.26 These results indicate that policies based on the assumption
that lake dynamics are precisely known will underestimate attainable P[hosphorus] concentrations, and overestimate economic
value, in comparison with policies that account for uncertainty.
p.33 An important limitation of our model is its highly simplified
representation of social dynamics. Abstract utility functions are helpful for gaining the general insight
reported here, but fall well short of capturing the trends, shocks and nonlinearities that arise in social systems
and may impact notions of utility or alter decisions through processes that have nothing to do with economic policy choice
