The Future Has Other Plans: Planning Holistically to Conserve Natural and Cultural Heritage

By Jon Kohl and Steve McCool

Crisis has enveloped the more than 200,000 nationally and regionally protected natural and cultural heritage sites around the world. Heritage managers – those who manage natural sites such as national parks, wilderness areas, and biosphere reserves, as well as those who manage cultural sites including historic monuments, battlefields, heritage cities, and ancient rock art sites – face an urgent need to confront this crisis, and each day that they don't, more of our planet's common heritage disappears. Although heritage management and implementation suffer from a lack of money, time, personnel, information, and political will, The Future Has Other Plans argues that deeper causes to current problems lurk in the discipline itself. Drawing on decades of practical experience in global heritage management and case studies from around the world, Jon Kohl and Steve McCool provide an innovative solution for conserving these valuable protected areas. Merging interdisciplinary and evolving management paradigms, the authors introduce a new kind of holistic planning approach that integrates the practice of heritage management and conservation with operational realities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781938486623

Book preview

THE FUTURE HAS OTHER PLANS

Planning Holistically to Conserve

Natural and Cultural Heritage

OTHER BOOKS IN FULCRUM’S APPLIED COMMUNICATION SERIES

EDITED BY SAM H. HAM

Interpretation—Making a Difference on Purpose, by Sam H. Ham

Designing Interpretive Signs: Principles in Practice, by Gianna Moscardo, Roy Ballantyne, and Karen Hughes

Conducting Meaningful Interpretation: A Field Guide for Success, by Carolyn Widner Ward and Alan E. Wilkinson

Interpreting the Land Down Under: Australian Heritage Interpretation and Tour Guiding, by Rosemary Black and Betty Weiler

Guide to Global Environmental Issues, by Terry Lawson-Dunn

Effective Slide Presentations: A Practical Guide to More Presentations, by Jon Hooper

The Passionate Fact: Storytelling in Natural History and Cultural Interpretation, by Susan Strauss

Environmental Interpretation—A Practical Guide for People with Big Ideas and Small Budgets, by Sam H. Ham

THE FUTURE HAS OTHER PLANS

Planning Holistically to Conserve

Natural and Cultural Heritage

Jonathan M. Kohl and Stephen F. McCool

Sam H. Ham, Editor

Applied Communication Series

Fulcrum Publishing

The authors would like to thank PUP Global Heritage Consortium for their assistance in the development of this book.

Text © 2016 Jonathan M. Kohl and Stephen F. McCool

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review—without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kohl, Jonathan M., author. | McCool, Stephen F., author.

Title: The future has other plans : planning holistically to conserve natural

and cultural heritage / Jonathan M. Kohl and Stephen F. McCool.

Description: Golden, CO : Fulcrum Publishing, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040038 | ISBN 9781682750001 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Conservation of natural resources--Planning. | Cultural

property--Protection--Planning. | BISAC: NATURE / Environmental

Conservation & Protection. | EDUCATION / Higher.

Classification: LCC S944 .K64 2016 | DDC 363.6/9--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040038

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

Cover photo by Jon Kohl. The Church of St. John at Kaneo overlooks Ohrid Lake, which separates Macedonia from Albania in the city of Ohrid, a Mixed World Heritage site. Along with Lake Ohrid, Galicica National Park, in the background, combine as part of the UNESCO designated site.

Fulcrum Publishing

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800-992-2908 • 303-277-1623

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To all those heritage managers who sensed there was a better way to plan, but weren’t sure how to get there.

NOTE FROM THE SERIES EDITOR

Jon Kohl and Steve McCool are two of the world’s most respected voices in protected area management who, together, bring an uncommon perspective to heritage site planning. Rarely in the scholarly literature related to planning do we find two authors whose ideas have been so nourished by decades of on-the-ground practical experience. It is no surprise that their thinking has impacted how some of the world’s most special places are being cared for and preserved today, or that tens of thousands of stewards of natural and cultural heritage on virtually every continent have been the beneficiaries of their work. That’s why I am so happy they decided to capture their combined wisdom in this book. The fortunate reader of The Future Has Other Plans will be treated not only to a journey of introspection and self-reflection related to their understanding of heritage site planning but also to a stark realization that we have been doing things wrong for much too long.

When Jon and Steve first spoke with me about an early draft of their manuscript, I knew even then that I wanted their book in the Applied Communication series I edit for Fulcrum Publishing. Not only is communication with and among stakeholders a necessary dimension of any successful planning process, it is also the heart and soul of a truly collaborative and Holistic Planning approach of the kind Jon and Steve have brilliantly detailed in these pages.

Long gone is the naive sponge model of communication in which things were thought to begin with some sender who transmitted a one-way message to a passive receiver who in turn simply absorbed it and acted on it. Dozens of studies since the 1990s have shown that the communication playing field is far more complex than this model suggests, and that the audience is far from sponge-like. Indeed, when communication actually occurs, the audience is quite active—processing information as it arrives, agreeing, disagreeing, questioning and wondering, and sometimes counterarguing. Such is the real world we live in, one in which everyone involved in an act of communication unavoidably contributes to co-constructing whatever meanings result.

And according to Jon and Steve, so it is with planning. While conventional observers have viewed planning as nothing more than a one-way technical protocol to arrive at peer-reviewed, polished, and published planning documents, this conventional approach has resulted largely in plans that went unimplemented and doomed to obsolescence even before the ink on them was dry.

However, readers who turn these pages will discover a new and compelling real-world view of planning—a view that treats planning as a continuous, facilitated conversation among heritage area community members. They argue that although a heritage area planning process usually produces a temporary plan to record commitments to carry out actions in both the near and intermediate future, it is founded on an understanding that, because the world changes so rapidly, the plan will never be complete or finished. Rather, in this planning model the temporary action plan produced at the outset merely marks the beginning of a continuous decision-making process that lives on indefinitely—forever. And this is what distinguishes the Kohl-McCool Holistic Planning process from a conventional approach—in their holistic view, the planning conversation never ends. So planning is not simply a time-bound technical-scientific process. It is, at heart, a dynamic n-way communication process applied to heritage communities.

In The Future Has Other Plans, planners are no longer seen as people who simply collect information and write plans. Rather they are seen mainly as facilitators of communication between all members of a heritage community, often in the heat of clashing objectives and conflicting ideas about how the future should look. Importantly, holistic planners not only help participants communicate within themselves to understand their own personal visions and needs, they also help participants to communicate with each other by teaching them the communication skills of planning, such as dialogue, conflict resolution, and group facilitation. The planners then work with the community to produce policies, incentives, tools, and institutions necessary for change to take place.

As every reader of this impressive book will see, such an approach to planning depends entirely on communication carried out in a complex, ever-changing environment. And it is precisely why I am so pleased to count The Future Has Other Plans as the newest volume in Fulcrum’s Applied Communication series. May heritage areas everywhere be better for it.

Sam H. Ham, Series Editor

Moscow, Idaho, United States

FOREWORD

During the 1860s, at the height of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which would profoundly alter the ways of the world, Matthew Arnold wrote a series of now classic essays, published as Culture and Anarchy in 1869. Arnold already lamented the worship of machinery and the resultant mechanical way of doing things, instead of turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits (pp. 5–6). This period, which would later be identified as the beginnings of Modernity, saw also the birth of urban planning as a rational and comprehensive discipline for the management of urban development. It blossomed in the twentieth century, and gained added momentum after World War II, with the aim to guide large-scale urban growth and rehabilitation processes.

Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, however, planted a bad seed, fracturing the previous relatively unitary approaches to management of the urban environment—since then, specialization and fragmentation, increasingly the norm, have resulted in an ever-more disjointed process to managing the city, both historic and contemporary. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the urban planning discipline has not only lost its appeal but also its ability to govern urban growth and development processes (Bandarin 2014); these have largely been replaced by ad hoc urban projects and zoning and strategic planning, among others. Rem Koolhaas has referred to this shift as the death of urbanism (Koolhaas and Mau 1995).

Reacting to an increasingly mechanized way of planning with fragmentation and standardization of the built environment, several lines of thought have emerged, both with regard to urban and territorial planning, for example, seeking a more ecological foundation and connection with the human environment¹, and the management of the historic city, in particular seeking an integration of the conservation of urban heritage within the urban development process². This book, The Future Has Other Plans, by heritage management experts Jon Kohl and Steve McCool, is the latest in this search for innovation—in particular how a new kind of planning could be envisioned that would integrate the disciplines of planning and conservation, their principles, and their operational realities.

Because our contemporary world is characterized by accelerating change and interconnectivity, their argument goes, planners require an approach that starkly deviates from the reductionist Modernist view of the world and instead encompasses Postmodern values, such as integration of principles and processes; dealing with increasing complexity, including advanced civic engagement and democratization of societies; consensus forming and conflict negotiation; and lots of interdisciplinary context analysis; among others. Anyone working in the current context of heritage management, whether in the developed or in the emerging world—as I do—would wholeheartedly agree. We have clearly come to the end of the road and urgently need a new way of seeing and doing things.

Both authors have an extensive track record in working in heritage places—both natural and cultural—around the globe, and many among them are World Heritage sites. Their working relationship with UNESCO started in 1998 with the establishment of Public Use Planning (PUP), with the assistance of the World Heritage Centre in Paris, and it has subsequently grown into the PUP Global Heritage Consortium (cosponsor of this book).

One key requirement for achieving World Heritage status is the presence or establishment of a management system to ensure protection of the site and its values, and the conservation of the site’s attributes that convey these values. With the exception of a few traditionally managed sites, that is, through customary law and practices (such as at East Rennell in the Solomon Islands), the overwhelming majority of World Heritage sites have developed or are developing management plans as the foundation of their site management systems. In fact, it would be fair to say that the development of management plans for heritage sites, even more than conservation plans, is a primary business in the heritage field nowadays, occupying local governments and employing scores of consultants everywhere.

This book’s key point and purpose—as well as that of the PUP Global Heritage Consortium itself—is based on the assumption that many of these management plans for protected areas and cultural heritage sites end on shelves and remain unimplemented (the problem presented in chapter 1). The authors argue that the root cause of this crisis lies in the way the plan has been established: primarily through a standard Modernist, scientific-technical approach (Arnold’s mechanical way), which does not work in practice for a variety of reasons, as chapter 3 outlines. By the 1960s, the planning literature had already started to notice this challenge and has been arguing ever since for more participatory, collaborative, empowering, bottom-up approaches that contribute to collective learning processes (as opposed to outsourcing to consultants). This frustration and general failure of the status quo have motivated the authors to start working with Public Use Planning as a methodology and to write this book.

One reality, the authors stress, is that the conventional planning paradigm dominates the global community of heritage management. No matter in which country or culture a site is located, its management plan largely follows the same approach—and thus the same fate of not being (properly) used in practice. This book draws on multiple examples from around the world based on the authors’ personal experiences, demonstrating that the global community largely uses the same paradigm. Having worked on all the world’s continents, and currently deeply engaged in Asia and the Pacific’s heritage management, I fully endorse their views, as well as their strategy—as demonstrated in my own recent book (Reconnecting the City, Bandarin and van Oers 2014).

In chapter 2, the authors discuss their new vision as opposed to prevalent paradigms. They have been inspired by, among others, American philosopher Ken Wilber’s remarkable synthesis of the world’s spiritual and philosophical frameworks, which took him more than three years to compile. Wilber’s Integral Theory (IT) and his Integral Map use the four fundamental perspectives: Interior-Individual (Self), Exterior-Individual (Behavioral), Exterior-Collective (Social), and Interior-Collective (Cultural). Each implies different realms of analysis, research, training, and action (explained in chapter 4). Before arriving at Integral Theory, however, they explore in great depth and breadth the rise and fall of Modernism, the rise and fall of Postmodernism, and then the rise of Holism, or Integralism. After a critique of Technical Rationality across the board, they go on to demonstrate how a new Integral framework is the next step in the evolution of consciousness and societal thought and practice. In short, their book covers a large, holistic context and then gives concrete examples of what this new kind of heritage planning might look like.

An important component of the paradigm change involves training, which, based on my own experience of working for two decades in heritage conservation and management, I fully embrace. Because the authors describe Holistic Planning, the training they advocate is holistic: it refers not only to traditional skills training but also to training to work with oneself, one’s values, emotions, and mental discipline. The training works with teams to learn to work with cultures, paradigms, communities, and beliefs of different groups; it is also training that works with institutions, tools, and policies—all realms covered in Wilber’s four perspectives, essential to initiate and nurture development in its broadest sense. The Future Has Other Plans is truly insightful and innovative in its thinking about the application of new modes of reasoning stemming from key thinkers today, and then translating that to the operational practice of the planning and management of natural and cultural heritage sites.

As a final word of encouragement, I would like to point out that Jon and Steve present some new ideas in their book that might be challenging to some—certainly to those who feel comfortable with the status quo. I sincerely advise people to suspend their assumptions and preconceptions for a while and embrace the journey that this book represents. It will be a rewarding exercise to allow a stream of fresh and free thought upon your stock notions and habits, which will surely alter the way in which you see things, foremost as regards the proper management of heritage resources—and hopefully also in the way you will subsequently do your stuff.

Ron van Oers, Vice Director

World Heritage Institute of Training and Research in Asia and the Pacific (WHITRAP) under the auspices of UNESCO, Shanghai, September 2014

We regret that Ron never saw this foreword in book form as he passed away on mission in Tibet on 28 April 2015.

PREFACE

Man plans and God laughs.

—Yiddish proverb

How Each of Us Came to Write This Book

From Jon

I started working with RARE Center for Tropical Conservation in 1997, and although the organization was grassroots and perhaps ahead of many in participatory approaches, we still worked with a strong rational comprehensive bias. When the task of creating a public use planning effort fell upon me, I first studied how other conservation organizations, such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and The Nature Conservancy, conducted planning in protected areas: they used Rational Comprehensive Planning. It would be several years before I met the concept face-to-face; I only knew that the president of RARE had issued a mandate to create a planning process that identified and avoided plan implementation barriers that sent so many plans to the dungeon.

In 2000, with UNESCO funding, our team developed the Public Use Planning (PUP) Program. I had already concluded that outsourcing planning and writing to expert consultants constituted a recipe for plan implementation failure, so our program’s focus switched to training on-staff personnel we called public use coordinators. We trained them in facilitation, planning organization, and writing skills. We taught them to use and modify our basic public use planning modules (public use product development, monitoring, financial planning, etc.), and we offered intensive one-on-one mentoring as well as some financial support. Our fundamental assumption held that if the public use coordinator, with our help, had not achieved the integration of this new do-it-yourself-and-learn approach into the rest of the park’s technical staff within three years, there was a good chance the public use coordinator would move on, effectively burning the bridge we had built with the park.

This approach resulted in elaborate multisegmented, training-mentoring interventions. Our first round of training, however, produced far less than we had hoped. Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras and Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve in Mexico recast some of the modules to fit into their conventional management plan that later were not implemented; Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Mexico decided that it simply did not want to play at all. At our most hopeful location, Tikal National Park in Guatemala, we teamed up with The Nature Conservancy, which had also received simultaneous UNESCO funding, to create a management plan using its Conservation Action Planning (CAP) methodology. We had hoped to create a prototype mini-park within the larger park where staff could experiment and learn about new management techniques that the park could later either discontinue or expand to other locations, depending on their reaction. The Nature Conservancy, however, hoped that we would produce the public use content of the management plan, an aspect that CAP was not designed to handle. In the end, the government terminated our idea for a safe space to practice and innovate, and we produced public use components that then ended in a conventional plan that suffered the expected implementation woes of Rational Comprehensive (management) Planning.

In 2003 in Indonesia, the Public Use Planning Program hired Indonesians to work more closely with public use coordinators and with other local actors, creating more participatory workshops and distributing the work more widely in the constituent community. Despite government pressure to create published, polished, and approved plans in Komodo and Ujung Kulon National Parks, there was no money to help parks implement, and eventually those plans, too, ended on the shelf.

Jump forward to 2009, when we worked completely under UNESCO in Vietnam with two World Heritage sites (My Son and Hoi An) and one biosphere reserve (Cum Lau Cham). In addition to PUP’s traditional staff training, we began to integrate Block’s techniques for engagement and organizational learning, both to more fully motivate our technical assistance team and lobby the government to avoid some of the traditional barriers. In one informal lunch meeting with the vice chairman for the Department of Sports, Culture, and Tourism, Mr. Hai agreed that publication and approval did present additional barriers to implementation (Kohl 2011).

At the time of this writing, the future version of PUP will include a strong component on strengthening the constituent community through vision workshops, aligning objectives, conflict mediation, and distributing decision-making power, as well as formal negotiations to reduce bureaucratic barriers before planning begins. I now regard planning as a facilitated conversation that both integrates learning throughout the process and focuses on the community culture, not just on the heritage site staff’s technical skills (the full definition of Holistic Planning will come in chapter 9). There is a long way to go, but I can now trace this program’s development from its largely Modernist origins to its holistic future.

From Steve

My beliefs about natural resource planning, while always taking a skeptical perspective, began to change in the 1980s. For many years I had considered planning to be the application of science to making choices about the future, but it was also informed by my strong beliefs about democracy in action. I had often admonished my students that the responsibility of planners was to recommend the technically best alternative to decision makers. At the same time, I was a strong advocate for public engagement throughout the planning process. It seemed to me that good ethical practice warranted involving those impacted by decisions into the decision-making process.

My attitudes began to change significantly in the 1980s, however, when I helped facilitate a planning process for a large protected area in Montana. That process was modeled on Friedmann’s Transactive Planning Theory. Friedmann argued that the dominance of technical expertise in planning had resulted in what he called the Crisis of Knowing between planners and the citizens they served. This gap meant that citizens did not understand what planners were doing and why, and planners had become insulated and isolated from their clients and no longer understood their visions, dreams, and needs. The gap could be overcome, Friedmann argued, by undertaking dialogue in small groups involving both planners and citizens. Through this dialogue, social learning (about the problem) would occur, and eventually a consensus about the appropriate future and actions could be constructed.

During this period, the US Forest Service was mandated by Congress to initiate forest-level planning, in response to an emphasis on timber harvesting at the expense of other values. At the time, a strong wave of concern about timber harvesting levels on national forests swept the country, and the agency frequently found itself facing protests, litigation, and civil disobedience. Those forest plans were contentious, each one often receiving dozens of administrative appeals. Quite clearly, the paradigm of Forest Service planning, based solely on a rational comprehensive model was under attack.

In the late 1980s, I began to ask, Why are all these plans, both Forest Service and other natural resource plans, failing? My measure was the extreme level of contention and the lack of implementation. And, Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence of failure do natural resource planners continue to use the same planning process? It was then, as a result of this questioning, that I began to change the content of my senior-level planning class—moving away from technical aspects to more planning theory. Most of my reading—and consequently most of my students’ readings—began to focus on the urban planning literature and away from the visitor and recreation planning literature—the area in which both my research and teaching focused. The urban planning literature was dealing with similar issues and could inform natural resource planning. (The most classic critique of modern urban planning is by Jacobs [1961].)

Eventually, I realized that the cause of planning failure was occurring at a systemic level rather than at the operational level, that issues that were inherently questions of values were being treated as if they were simply matters of technical inconvenience. For example, the debate over permitting snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park is one that derives from different societal preferences about what a park should be, but it was often posed as a technical question of environmental impact. As a result, the values most important to people (solitude, escape, supremacy of nature) were often marginalized in the planning, frequently because they could not be measured and placed into quantitative computer models.

This turn in my thinking was fundamental—and irreversible. While Rational Comprehensive Planning (RCP) had some good points (such as the search for evidence in assessing consequences of alternatives), the weak points (e.g., marginalization of experience, a desire for all possible information) could not be overcome with improvements in the models. RCP needed something else, and that something else was a fundamental redesign of planning.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To write this journey has been a journey. Along the way, numerous people have contributed ideas, reviewed pieces, and shared comments. Before mentioning them, we would like to thank above all our wives, Marisol Mayorga for Jon and Ann for Steve, who put up with us as we found our way through the dark forest of society’s collective mind that has led to widespread nonimplementation.

We would also like to acknowledge contributors including, in alphabetical order, Barrett Brown, Mac Chapin, David Christenson, Jim Collins, Kimberly Comeau, Merrick Hoben, Gail Hochachka, Lizbeth Infante, Emine Kiray (deceased, February 2016), Kerstin Manz, José María Lobo de Carvalho, Jonathan Mariño (our illustrator), Michael Meyer, Sue Moore, César Moran-Cahusac, Alexandra Murphy, Charles Parry, Art Pedersen, Brit Rosso, Michael Simpson, Paul Steinberg, Caroline Stem, Matt Walenski, Ken Wilber, Chris Willis (editor of cover photo), and Francisco Valenzuela.

A thank-you goes out to Ron van Oers who accepted our invitation to write the foreword without previously having heard of us.

We also must acknowledge Sam Ham for accepting and editing our book in his Applied Communication series and for Sam Scinta at Fulcrum Publishing for publishing it. Similarly, the book would not be as good as it is were it not for Fulcrum’s editor in chief Rebecca McEwen and copy editor Alison Auch.

INTRODUCTION

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Why Did the Titanic Sink?

The call of Frederick Fleet, high up in the crow’s nest—Iceberg, right ahead!—pierced the frigid, moonless night on 15 April 1912, and warned the Titanic’s crew of imminent collision. Thirty-seven seconds later, despite a sharp veer to port, the impact buckled the hull, popped rivets, and flooded the ship with icy North Atlantic seawater. In just a few hours, less than a third of the 2,223 people on board were alive.

For 100 years, authors and artists have retold the story of the Titanic in movies, books, documentaries, and other explorations of the ship’s fated finish. How could such a ship, built to the highest standards of engineering design, proclaimed unsinkable, vanish underneath the inky black ocean on its maiden voyage?

While many often attribute the ship’s sinking to the iceberg, we must dive deeper to the bottom of another iceberg—a metaphorical one in this case—to understand the circumstances that precipitated this titanic demise.

Decisions that led to Titanic’s destruction occurred many years earlier when the ship was still but a blueprint. Naval architects, and even more so the owners, were so confident of its engineering that they boasted that their ship was unsinkable. They felt that even in the face of the worst possible accident—a direct hit from another ship—the ship would not sink for two to three days, if ever, leaving enough time for a safe and orderly abandonment of the vessel.

When we dive deeper along the metaphorical iceberg, we see the mental model that described the ship as unsinkable resulted in White Star Lines’ placing only twenty lifeboats on board; fully loaded they would have saved only half the passengers. Because passengers too had been thoroughly convinced of the ship’s invincibility, however, they failed to board lifeboats quickly. Many lifeboats, sadly, carried few passengers to safety. Finally, while nearby ships had radioed about the dangers of ice floes, the Titanic’s radio operators were busy relaying passenger messages.

While the immediate cause of the Titanic’s sinking may have been the violent crash, it ultimately succumbed to an aura of unsinkability precisely because that aura accompanied not only an extreme overconfidence in the ship’s resilience.

So many lives were lost at sea, not from any mechanical or engineering fault but rather from a fault in assumptions about an impossibly fast sinking. Like many human-initiated disasters, the causes of the Titanic’s demise were multiple, but also traceable to fundamental, deeply held assumptions about both human and environmental contexts through which the ship had to sail. The notion of an unsinkable ship has parallels in many areas of human life, including conservation and management of natural and cultural heritage: that armed solely with the best science, managers can plan to prevent the sinking of a protected site’s heritage values. Implicit assumptions about the social and political context within which conservation and protected area planning exist often eerily echo planning failures of the Titanic.

Why Did the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project Collapse?

Eighty years after the Titanic’s disastrous collision, the US White House initiated a large-scale conservation planning project to address forest and rangeland health and management of fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This conservation planning project, titled the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP, pronounced ice bump) was based on the application of best available science to conservation problem solving. The science followed the newly developed concept of ecosystem management, itself a replacement for the decades-old notion of multiple-use management. Ecosystem management attempts to emulate naturally occurring ecological processes rather than manage for multiple products such as timber, forage, wildlife, and recreation.

The project followed a similar program for the west slope of the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, Washington, and California, initiated by then President Bill Clinton to resolve controversies enveloping management of old-growth forests and the endangered spotted owl. ICBEMP, however, covered a much larger area: 30 million hectares of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana. ICBEMP employed numerous biophysical, social, and economic scientists; two teams devoted to writing large-scale environmental impact statements; and a communications staff charged with managing public meetings and inquiries.

Several teams were established: landscape ecology, aquatic ecology, terrestrial ecology, economics, social science, and geographical information systems. Each team was to provide objective, insightful information about the basin area that would inform two environmental impact statements. For the first several years, the budget flowed essentially unlimited, allowing scientists a free hand to collect all data they felt necessary. Scientists input data into a spatial model to predict vegetation patterns and consequences of various management alternatives.

After seven years of scientific study and drafting environmental statements, the project collapsed as surely as the Titanic had sunk. The teams prepared and published the two environmental impact statements as drafts, which collided with universally negative public comment. The public found the scale of the project too large and abstract, the proposed actions were too intrusive, and for many people living in small communities dependent on wood products, the plan simply ignored their plight. Native American tribes also objected to the plan for not going far enough in conserving landscapes and culturally significant plants and animals.

Managers prepared final environmental impact statements, but authorities never signed a formal record of decision to implement them. Eventually, the sheer weight of the scientific process ripped tears in the fabric of the project’s assumptions, causing the titanic effort to sink in the dark waters of history.

Some assumptions that did not hold water were technical. For example, scientists assumed that all data needed for the model could be gathered at a 1-square-kilometer pixel size. Other assumptions were social, such as the preexistence of a social agreement that land management should attempt to replicate the historical range of variation of the ecosystem prior to the arrival of Euro-American immigrants.

Other assumptions were embedded in the scientific process itself: scientists were uniquely qualified to carry out what they perceived as a wholly technical task for which other participants were not qualified. They could come up with an optimal and comprehensive decision with their abundant data, finances, and time, and the general public would agree with the scientific conclusions.

Icebergs, Plans, and the Search for Understanding

As with the cases of the Titanic and ICBEMP, innumerable barriers surface in the course of planning for the protection of natural and cultural heritage. Often, while such planning produces a sleek document, the planning itself begins to fail long before the document reaches the printing press: it fails to muster public support, be funded, offer solutions to complex problems, or demonstrate a path toward implementation. To answer why, this book provides readers with new navigational equipment to dive deeper, to see into the opaque depths of reality, to search for good explanations of plan failure. Good explanations help us understand and, in so doing, design more effective plans and planning processes. To guide our search—to help us see below

the surface of planning events—we follow the elusive contours of a metaphorical iceberg often used by systems thinking authors.

This iceberg suggests that under the surface of easily observable events, like the collision of a ship with an iceberg or the failure of a heritage site management plan to be implemented, layers of explanation lurk. And the deeper we dive, the more those failures’