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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 <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>
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	1. Serving the best interests of the owner(s), who are the community members, and ultimately, God.</p>
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	2. Considering the whole in an attempt to achieve the multiple interests of the owners.</p>
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	3. Responsibility for what can be changed and none over what cannot.</p>
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	4. Humility.</p>
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	In the academic world where I currently spend most of my time, I hear a lot of esoteric theories vetted about SESs and the &ldquo;adaptive co-management&rdquo; practice applied to them. But as Cal DeWitt evaluates these sorts of dialogues, there&rsquo;s a voice missing; science and praxis are useless without ethics. There is an elephant in the natural resources room: why do we care about all this anyway?</p>
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	Stewardship has a useful and coherent answer. According to one helpful model of problem solving (the integral model), complex issues require some level of consensus on the (1) task, (2) process, (3) group values, and (4) self-awareness of the problem solvers, while, I would add, being constrained by what&rsquo;s possible and what&rsquo;s not. Stewardship fills the bill. As briefly outlined above, this ethic describes values (the owner&rsquo;s are primary), tasks (whatever accomplishes values, but only what can be changed), processes (that which accomplishes tasks in accord with values, requires considering the whole system), and self-awareness (humility), all of which are in accord with an unpredictable, uncontrollable, self-organizing and emergent complex adaptive system called Planet Earth. Wow, a tall order! &nbsp;But to the eyes of the faithful is it any wonder that God has given us the rationale for living in the world He gave us?</p>
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	When cast in the language of complex social-ecological systems, the scholarship and living demonstration of what it means to be a steward provide examples of the values, processes, tasks and self-awareness needed to achieve and adapt to multiple outcomes in these systems. The academic rubber is hitting the natural resources road, but in many areas of academia at least, there is no engine to keep us going. Perhaps Au Sable Graduate Fellows, like Esther, have been prepared &ldquo;for such a time as this.&rdquo;</p>
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	<img alt="" src="{filedir_5}Laursen_cropped.jpeg" style="width: 150px; height: 133px; " /><em>Bethany Laursen is&nbsp;pursuing an M.S. in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is a member of the <a href="http://ausablegradfellows.weebly.com/university-of-wisconsin-madison.html">UW-Madison Graduate Fellows group</a>. &nbsp;She studies landscape governance through social networks in southwest Wisconsin in light of emerging bioenergy markets. When she&#39;s not conducting research, you can find her laying in the leaves, playing guitar and singing, traveling rivers by canoe, and coiling messy ropes. You can read <a href="http://ausablegradfellows.weebly.com/meet-the-fellows.html">Bethany&#39;s complete profile</a> on our Graduate Fellows webpage, or contact her at bklaursen@gmail.com.</em></p>
