The Science of Open Spaces Quotes

“Collective impact (fig. 3.8) operates on the premise that much of conservation and donor funding has fallen short of meeting its goals of significant societal transformation because decision and implementation programs are too fractured and diffuse, generating competition among players rather than collaboration in what is often a zero-sum game.”
― Charles G. Curtin, The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems

“In a dynamic world, there will always be a lack of precise knowledge; rarely do we have the ability to predict the interactions among multiple variables. The challenges, therefore, are to design institutions that are durable in the face of uncertainty, to find ways to connect biological responses in natural ecosystems to human actions through policy, and to build sufficient slack into the system so that the inevitable mistakes are less costly. Even if accurate predictions of optimal harvest were possible, the ability to achieve that goal in practice would remain nearly impossible, because harvests undershoot and overshoot target levels through time.”
― Charles G. Curtin, The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems

“In a great many places in our society, including academia and most bureaucracies, prestige accrues principally to those who study carefully some aspect of the problem, while discussion of the big picture is relegated to cocktail parties.”
― Charles G. Curtin, The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems