Page, John; Brower, Ann --- "Does (Property) Diversity Beget (Landscape) Sustainability?" [2012] ELECD 265; in Martin, Paul; Zhiping, Li; Tianbao, Qin; Du Plessis, Anel; Le Bouthillier, Yves; Williams, Angela (eds), "Environmental Governance and Sustainability" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Environmental Governance and Sustainability

Editor(s): Martin, Paul; Zhiping, Li; Tianbao, Qin; Du Plessis, Anel; Le Bouthillier, Yves; Williams, Angela

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000472

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Does (Property) Diversity Beget (Landscape) Sustainability?

Author(s): Page, John; Brower, Ann

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

2. Does (property) diversity beget
(landscape) sustainability?
John Page and Ann Brower

2.1 INTRODUCTION

Streams of scholarship as diverse as ecology and political science suggest that
a more diverse system is a more stable system. The pluralist school of interest
group politics observed that diverse and vibrant interest groups are the core of
a policy system (for example, Truman, 1951), and it is well accepted that
diverse interest group activity is vital to a stable democracy.1 Community
ecologists (MacArthur, 1955; Odum, 1963) have long hypothesised that
`diversity begets stability' (Tilman et al, 1994), though the hypothesis has its
critics (May, 1973) and is far from proven (Givnish, 1994). But ecologists
report `high confidence' in the cumulative finding that a broad range and vari-
ety of species that respond differently to disturbance can stabilise ecological
systems after a shock, such as a hurricane, fire, or biological invasion (Hooper
et al, 2005). As such, more biological diversity in ecosystem function is asso-
ciated with systems that are more resistant to change and more resilient after
a change.
There are three metaphorical variants of the hypothesis that biological
diversity begets ecosystem stability. Paul and Anne Ehrlich (1981) present a
`rivets hypothesis' that likens each species in a system to a rivet on an airplane.
Losing a few rivets might not cause the plane wing to fall off because other
similar rivets will compensate, but eventually the crippled plane will crash.
The redundancy (or driver-passenger) hypothesis suggests that each system
has ...