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	Natural resources management is usually a misnomer. What comes to your mind when you think of &ldquo;managing&rdquo; something? The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology traces the word back the Latin word&nbsp;<em>manidiare</em>, to handle, from&nbsp;<em>manus,&nbsp;</em>meaning hand. In the 16th through 18th centuries, it came to mean train, wield, conduct, control, or do successfully. Sound familiar?&nbsp;</p>
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	While in popular culture, the professional world and academia, &ldquo;management&rdquo; has come to connote &ldquo;success through prediction and control&rdquo;, a growing body of activism and scholarship rejects that meaning because it is actually impossible to achieve in what are now widely called complex, adaptive systems (CASs). CASs are organized yet unpredictable: they adaptively self-organize over time and exhibit properties that emerge from smaller scales in the system. Though examples of CASs abound in pots of boiling water, atomic physics, and cybernetics, it turns out that groups of interacting people and natural resources (called social-ecological systems or SESs for short) are a type of CAS in which we are embedded! And these are the types of systems Au Sable exists to steward. In fact, stewardship is the only &lsquo;management&rsquo; term appropriate for complex, adaptive, multiple outcome systems, because it&rsquo;s the only word that upholds:</p>
