This article puts forward the concept of "Command-and-control". The article was published in the respected journal Conservation Biology[1] and describes, in general, how the western world goes about the management of its natural resources, the motives behind its methods and their consequent risks. The authors discuss how a future strategy of natural resource management, better adapted to nature's functions and dynamic, might be put together. Here follows their most noteworthy conclusions:

The earth's population is increasing while at the same time its natural resources are diminishing. The solution to this equation has often been to create institutions in society to control diversity and changes in the ecosystem, ensuring an even and constant flow of goods and services. By passing laws, drawing up contracts, recommendations and agreements to control the production of these goods and services we attempt to create a stable and prosperous society with high standards in health and hygiene.
     To begin with this strategy is nearly always successful. In the short term the total production of goods increases. Fishing catches increase, helped by fish plantations or a crackdown on the natural enemies of commercially interesting fish species. Insect plagues are reduced with the help of insecticides thus ensuring larger harvests and floods are controlled with the introduction of dams. However, this type of control mechanism is seldom sustainable in the long run. The ecosystem consequently runs a high risk of collapsing.
     These collapses consist of two main components, one ecological and one socio-economic. The ecological component is seen in that with our efforts to control nature's production of goods and services we nearly always cause a slow yet continuous reduction in biological diversity. For example, by altering the composition of the species included in our food requirements we are trying to create a regular, predictable production. We convert natural forests consisting of several species to forests made up purely of same age and same species trees. We fight small fires and disease to ensure an even and constant timber production. Control reduces natural variations in the ecosystem, which in turn contributes to making it more sensitive to both natural disturbances (bad weather, fires, floods) and man-made disturbances (eutrophication and discharge of environmental poisons likewise social and institutional change). An ecosystem that has a low buffer capacity in dealing with disturbances has low ecological resilience. Resilience is a measurement of how powerful a disturbance an ecosystem is able to cope with and absorb before it reaches a threshold where it turns into another ecosystem with a new structure and function, that is to say where it collapses. An ecosystem with low resilience has therefore greater difficulty in coping with different types of disturbance and runs the risk of collapsing.
     In addition to the development of an ecosystem with much lower resilience there is also an important socio-economic reason as to why the controlled ecosystem often collapses. With the creation of mono-cultures and increased control, production rises in the short term. However, as a consequence the responsible authorities often change their focus. Instead of focusing on the original problem, they concentrate on streamlining and reducing the costs of the controls they have put in place (e.g. more effective insecticides, methods of extermination and dams). Increasingly fewer resources are thus given to research and monitoring. Those working for the authorities become ever more isolated from both the ecosystem they are managing and the people who are effected by their actions. For this reason the authorities tend to become less flexible and more ignorant to the ecological changes that are continually taking place in the dynamic ecosystem.
     In short, "command-and-control" results in a less resilient, more sensitive ecosystem, narrow-minded and inflexible institutions, and more selfish economic interests aimed purely towards short term successes.
     There is, however, an alternative to command-and-control. Instead of striving after ever greater control over the ecosystem we can accept that nature is complex, non-linear and that our knowledge of the ecosystem will always by limited because the future is never entirely predictable. It is therefore that we must create institutions that increase, rather than decrease, resilience in the ecosystem. This may involve:

• Environmentally damaging subventions must be replaced by incentives encouraging private enterprise to preserve and develop the ecosystem's capacities.
• Flexibility and the ability to adapt must increase within state authorities. This could be achieved by putting strategies of adaptive management into practice, i.e. where each policy is handled as if it were a hypothesis with the method of management being an experiment testing the hypothesis.
• Effected individuals are invited to participate in the developmental process, both within research and policy (e.g. local users who can watch out for changes in the nature).
• Local associations should develop between different interest groups who collectively benefit (or lose out) from good (or bad) management.