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An Open Approach to Ecosystem Change: Adopting a New Paradigm for Ecological Restoration and Land Management

repeat the phrase to impress upon the listener the complexity and dynamism of nature. We may also use it to placate a listener concerned about a particular kind of change, or as a rhetorical device to prepare the listener for a particular theory of change. Ecological restorationists, on the other hand, often find that the ceaseless change of nature can be a real conundrum. This is especially true when they are criticized for picking an arbitrary point in time as their restoration model. Their critics ask: If change is ever present and timeless, how can any one time be more or less correct as a reference point for a restoration than any other time? This question contains within it a certain level of common sense and obvious truth that is troubling. In all this talk of change and time, restorationists and land managers seem to have lost an intellectual mooring point—lost a systematic relativistic frame of reference— from which to rigorously evaluate the character and meaning of change in both a scientific and an ethical sense. In this article, I would like to suggest that restorationists and land managers adopt a more open approach to the study of change in nature. I believe that such an approach can serve as a rigorous and practical alternative to the theory of succession, which is the model most restorationists and land managers now use to understand changes within ecosystems and to set their restoration goals.