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Ecosystem Services and Beyond: Using Multiple Metaphors to Understand HumanEnvironment Relationships
CHRISTOPHER M. RAYmOND, GERALD SINgH, KARINA BENESSAIAH, JOANNA R. BERNHARDT, JORDAN LEVINE, HARRY NELSON, NANcY J. TURNER, BRYAN NORTON, JORDAN TAm, AND KAI M.A. CHAN Ecosystem services research has been focused on the ways that humans directly benet from goods and services, and economic valuation techniques have been used to measure those benets. We argue that, although it is appropriate in some cases, this focus on direct use and economic quantication is often limiting and can detract from environmental research and effective management, in part by crowding out other understandings of humanenvironment relationships. Instead, we make the case that the systematic consideration of multiple metaphors of such relationships in assessing socialecological systems will foster better understanding of the many ways in which humans relate to, care for, and value ecosystems. Where it is possible, we encourage a deliberative approach to ecosystem management whereby ecosystem researchers actively engage conservationists and local resource users to make explicit, through open deliberation, the types of metaphors salient to their conservation problem. Keywords: conservation, stewardship, deliberative approach, environmental management, ecosystem research

cologists and economists have drawn on the ecosystem services framework as a way of bridging human and natural systems, accounting for environmental externalities, and supporting conservation efforts (Daily 1997, Daily etal. 2000). Most ecosystem service assessments have been framed using the conceptual metaphor of economic production, which has encouraged a focus on the benets of ecosystems to humans in terms of how the processes of nature deliver supplies and goods (Daily et al. 2000, Armsworth et al. 2007), coupled with an economic quantication of the costs and benets of providing those ecosystem services and goods (Bryan 2010, Newton et al. 2012). As Luck and colleagues (2012) summarized it, the ecosystem services concept has been applied for different purposes in several resource management contexts, including motivating and structuring payments for ecosystem services programs (e.g., Engel et al. 2008); structuring strategic policy guidance and priority setting using multicriteria assessments (e.g., Nelson et al. 2009) and green accounting methods (World Bank 2012); and highlighting the importance of ecosystems and biodiversity to human well-being in a way

that promulgates dominant political and economic views (Luck et al. 2012). The ecosystem services approachand, therefore, the production metaphor on which it relieshas become the predominant tool used by ecologists, conservation biologists, and conservation planners to communicate their work to the public and to implement environmental management strategies (Pagiola et al. 2004, Ranganathan et al. 2008, UNEP 2008, World Bank 2009, Dempsey and Robertson 2012). Despite its dominance, numerous critiques have been directed at the monistic application of the economic production metaphor. By framing the problem in terms of maximizing human benets, with the environmental costs measured as externalities, the ecosystem services concept (a) often implicitly assigns rights in a manner that favors the status quo, implying that individuals or groups seeking the benets of those services have the right to despoil nature and deserve to be paid not do so (Van Hecken and Bastiaensen 2010); (b) is focused disproportionally on the production of services and less on the demand or human access to these services (Daw etal. 2011, Robardsetal.2011);

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(c)does not account for ecosystem interactions beyond perceived stocks and ows (Norton and Noonan 2007, Norgaard 2010); and (d) implicitly deemphasizes the notions that organisms and ecosystems are important in and of themselves (intrinsic value) or that they may be of benet to people in the future (future value)(Chan etal. 2012a). Some have even argued that the economic production metaphor does not incorporate important moral and ethical concerns that humans have for nature (Luck et al. 2012), which are embedded in held values, beliefs, and norms about nature (Raymond et al. 2011) and in the multiple and complex values that humans attribute to the environment (Kosoy and Corbera 2010, Daniel etal. 2012). A new way is needed for thinking through the different values that humans hold or assign to the environment and for sorting through contradictory insights and management priorities (Norgaard 2010). Several solutions have been proposed, including more discursive forms of learning, knowing, and governing (Zellmer etal. 2006) and shifting the unit of analysis from the willingness to pay for discrete commodities to development paths that protect a range of human values and that, in doing so, recognize the multiple ways in which humans value nature (Norton and Noonan 2007). In practice, this type of inquiry may result in many complementary models and policies for describing humanenvironment relationships that can be evaluated across multiple criteria and scales. Such models and policies will also need to account for complexity in humanenvironment relationships. For example, individuals have the ability to express their relationship with the natural environment using multiple metaphors and sometimes switch between metaphors to address the interests of their audience (Klain 2010). Systematically considering additional metaphors of humanenvironment relationships has been proposed to promote deliberation, to recognize multiple values in ecosystem research, and to determine whether the framing of the problem is appropriate. A conceptual metaphor is a simple set of relationships between known entities expressedfor the purpose of communicating more complex analogous concepts (in contrast to an approach, which is a method for undertaking an action; approaches may or may not be rooted in a metaphor). Metaphor sharing promotes collaboration and dialogue about values and goals between scientic and traditional management systems (Armitage 2008, Larson 2011), thereby providing space for additional voices and ideas in the public discourse. It also facilitates the establishment of new links between science and society by creating a language that challenges the status quo and enables the communication of information in ways that resonate with diverse groups in society. Larson (2011) noted that language must not only be adequate for environmental scientists but must also be socially adequate if the goal is to engage diverse groups in environmental research, decisionmaking, and action. However, systematically considering different metaphors may not lead to common ground in environmental
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decisionmaking: Metaphors both highlight and hide (Larson 2011, p. 209). This means that each metaphor inherently accounts for only a partial understanding and privileges different perspectives, methods, management objectives, indicators, conservation ethics, and decision outcomes. Similarly, sharing multiple metaphors may not improve environmental decisions because of the power dynamics between individuals and institutions. Some metaphors are likely to receive more attention than others for a variety of reasons, and these will probably dominate environmental decisionmaking in that domain, even if the popular metaphors are more appropriate as a tool for communication than as a framework for management. The challenge for researchers is to make implicit metaphors explicit during their ecosystem research and management and to nd ways to systematically consider the merits of different metaphors during environmental decisionmaking. In this article, we identify and discuss the validity and potential applicability of ve metaphors for under standing humanenvironment relationships. We use case studies to highlight the uid boundaries of application of each metaphor and their strengths and weaknesses in regard to communicating, understanding, and managing human environment interactions. We propose that multiple metaphors might apply to a conservation problem (none is truer than the others) and that effectively engaging diverse groups within decisionmaking requires that decisionmakers and stakeholders proactively make implicit assumptions explicit. Furthermore, we argue that there are both benets and drawbacks to the creation of decision contexts that enable the systematic consideration of more than one metaphor. Closing the loop by emphasizing human effects on ecosystems One might argue that a metaphor that equally emphasizes humans positive and negative impacts on ecosystems would mitigate any limitations of the human-use metaphor. In this section, we explore the possibility of such a closed-loop production metaphor and argue that, although it has con siderable promise, it also has limitations. The closed-loop metaphor has its origins in the economic production metaphor in which costs and benets are expressed in economic terms and how they directly affect human welfare; however, many ecosystem services researchers and conservation practitioners have expanded the metaphor to more fully represent the range of human activities and values that can enhance and degrade the ecosystems on which they rely. It builds on the notion that humans have always had a close relationship with the natural environment. This relationship includes both supporting and degrading activities that lead respectively to benets and costs to human well-being: from the use of re to increase food-plant productivity (Boyd 1999, Kimmerer and Lake 2001) to agricultural practices and crop production (Hails 2002). Certainly, humans have overharvested and disrupted food webs, but in other cases, they have enhanced
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of locust or rodent plagues on grain production or that of long-term droughts on water quality and quantity for human consumption. One consequence of this metaphor is that it implicitly assumes that humans and ecosystems are distinct entities that engage in a multidirectional ow of benets (and harms). More important, without intentional distance from the production metaphor, the closed-loop metaphor inherits the production metaphors focus on quantication. By relying on a metaphor that highlights the quantitative ows of ecosystem services, other important benets from ecosystems that cannot be easily measured or represented on a commonly recognized scale (i.e., most cultural ecosystem services) may be excluded from decisionmaking, unless efforts are made to include some of these dimensions in a more integrative, locally driven process (Chan etal. 2012a). Ecosystem research and management may therefore benet from a wider consideration of metaphors of human environment relationships when diverse groups are involved in environmental decisionmaking and where there are multidirectional ows of benets (and harms). Using additional metaphors to understand humanenvironment relationships A variety of other metaphors exist for helping us understand humanenvironment relationships. There are, for instance, a variety of ways to frame humans as part of an ecosystem. There are also ways to frame ecosystems in modes in which their main purpose is not presupposed to be the provision of services for humans or, conversely, to possess an ideal, human-independent state that is either enhanced or degraded by human interference. Norton and Noonan (2007) suggested that the creative choice of appropriate metaphors of humanenvironment relationships will guide policy-relevant choices for development paths to protect a range of human values. A variety of metaphors for understanding humanenvironment relationships exist for example, feedback metaphors that highlight widely held cultural values; metaphors of consumerism, such as DNA barcoding; and metaphors that involve terms with various and interwoven denitions, such as sustainability (Larson 2011). Ecologists have represented ecosystems using multiple metaphors, including the ecosystem as a machine, as an organism, as a house, and as an algorithm. Ecosystems can also be represented using a set of metaphors describing resistance, resilience, diversity, or adaptability to change (Pickett and Cadenasso 2002). Discussing a comprehensive list of metaphors is impossible, and we instead describe three additional metaphorsnamely, the stewardship, webof-life, and ecocultural-community metaphors (gure 2). We selected these three metaphors because, when they are viewed in unison with the economic production metaphors, they provide a continuum of perspectives on human environment relationships, ranging from the perspective that the benets of the environment to humans can be assessed objectively in economic terms (in which the only
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Figure 1. Closing the loop in the production metaphor by including human activities that affect ecosystems. wildlife populations and food webs through restoration and other sustaining and conserving practices. By including the humanenvironment interaction, the ecosystem services concept can close the loop by highlighting the multi directional ow of interactions and can help us think of humanenvironment relationships as including both benecial and detrimental relationships and feedbacks. Such framing implicitly suggests that ecosystems are entities that can be degraded, maintained, restored, or enhanced by humans (gure1) and that learning, adaptation, and transformation in humanenvironment relationships takes time. By employing the closed-loop production metaphor, one seeks to understand humanenvironment relationships through the quantication of key relationships in linked social and ecological systems. Although the focus of this metaphor is predominantly on monetary valuation as a metric for decisionmaking, such a metric is mostly used to compare the production of multiple services and is underpinned by the quantitative measurements of stocks and ows (e.g., De Groot etal. 2010). Using this metaphor therefore introduces more complexity in its assessments (beyond the economic production metaphor) by considering both positive and negative human impacts on ecosystems and, therefore, the ow of ecosystem services under alternative scenarios (Bennett et al. 2009, Nelson et al. 2009). Where social dynamics are important, not only is this metaphor focused on the ecological production of services through the incorporation of notions of equity and distributional impacts, but it also addresses peoples ability to access those services (Daw etal. 2011). But, ultimately, this metaphor implies that humans have a right or entitlement to use ecosystem services as long as those services can be used sustainably or can be properly substituted with equivalent natural or humanmade services (gure2). The closed-loop production metaphor takes into account that ecosystems can be of disservice to human well-being. By disservice, we refer to the negative and sometimes catastrophic ways in which ecosystem components and pro cesses affect human well-being, such as the negative impact
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Figure 2. Broad description of multiple metaphors for understanding humanenvironment relationships, including potential associated management ethics, management objectives, and indicators of success. issues are appropriate valuation techniques) to a completely subjectivist perspective that humanenvironment relationships should be considered in terms of the interconnections among spiritual, natural, and social realms within a given context. Together, these ve metaphors form logical endpoints from which ecosystem researchers and conservation practitioners can begin to understand humanenvironment relationships. We recognize that metaphors are incomplete, simplied, or generalized, in that they are rarely applied in a pure form without elements of other metaphors. Ecosystem researchers and managers often apply multiple metaphors in their studies and often modify the mix of metaphors depend ing on the research question, the context of management, and the prevailing needs of the funding body. Moreover, although metaphors pertaining to humanenvironment relationships do not in and of themselves prescribe parti cular management objectives, our experiences and the literature seem to suggest that their application is often associated with different management ethics, objectives, and indicators of success (gure 2). Because of these associations, which may be triggered unwittingly by the use of a metaphor, itbehooves researchers and managers to be explicitly aware
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of the metaphors and their associations that they apply in their studies. Below, we compare the economic production and closedloop production metaphors on the basis of their context for application and assumptions, the prominence and role of their valuation, and the related decisionmaking outputs. We then repeat this comparative analysis for the stewardship, web-of-life, and ecocultural-community metaphors. Together with the economic production and closed-loop production metaphors, these metaphors provide examples and pathways for characterizing humanenvironment relationships. For claritys sake, we simplify each metaphor to crystallize key insights. We focus on the ways in which humanenvironment interactions are conceptualized and on how this might affect management outcomes. The name that we give to each metaphor is partly for convenience, andwe note that there may be variants of a metaphor.
The stewardship metaphor. The stewardship metaphor com-

pares the Earth to a household in which humans hold the position of a steward whose responsibility and obligation it is to care for that household. Stewardship is a unifying metaphor that embraces the notion that humans moral
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concerns drive the protection of ecosystems (Ratner 2004). This metaphor was eloquently expressed by Leopold (1949) in what is commonly known as the land ethic: We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect (p. viii). In applying this stewardship metaphor, one recognizes that humans hold multiple values and concerns for nature, which derive from their affective and cognitive interactions with other species and ecosystems. Monetary considerations alone are not sufcient to drive environmental management (Ludwig 2000), but rather, humans manage ecosystems out of moral concern for them (gure2). A variety of theories and empirical frameworks have demonstrated that moral and normative concerns, such as human values, environmental concerns, and personal and social norms about conservation have direct and indirect effects on behavioral intentions and on self-reported or actual behavior (Steg and Vlek 2009, Raymond etal. 2011). These concerns derive from individuals interactions with and ideas and feelings about other people, species, and ecosystems. For example, farmers in the Eyre Peninsula region of South Australia commonly rated leaving the environment in a better condition than that in which they found it as one of their highest land management goals and, in many cases, higher than the goal of maximizing the income from their farm (Raymond 2009).
The web-of-life metaphor. Implicit in the web-of-life metaphor is that species are nodes within complex webs of connections. In the web-of-life metaphor, humans are one part of a wider ecological system and have the responsibility to understand their impacts on the various components of the broader system (gure2). We therefore have a responsibility to manage ecosystems on the basis of the complex inter actions between natural systems. The web-of-life metaphor is common to both biology and indigenous worldviews for instance, the Vancouver Island Nuu-Chah-Nulth First Nations view that hishuk ish tsawalk (everything is one and all is interconnected; Atleo 2011). More recently, this metaphor has spread across a variety of disciplines and elds of application, inspired notably by complex systems theory (e.g., Folke et al. 2005). The web-of-life metaphor can be seen as underlying the ecosystem research and management ethic that valuable species cannot be adequately managed in isolation (McLeod and Leslie 2009). Although an understanding of the parts and components is essential, the only way to truly determine why species do what they do is to assess their roles within the broader ecosystem (Paine 2010) and how those roles change depending on the time, location, and context (Salomon etal. 2010). The ecocultural-community metaphor. The ecocultural ommunity metaphor is one of association, in which c humans treat nonhuman species and aspects of the environment as part of their community. Humans therefore

have a responsibility to manage ecosystems on the basis of the connections among the spiritual, physical, and social worlds (gure2). The level of integrity among these worlds is an indicator of management success. The ecoculturalcommunity metaphor has been presented in the comanagement literature, with specic reference to how indigenous and other long-resident peoples manage their landscape and resources (Turner and Berkes 2006). It also encompasses the Nuu-chah-nulth concept of hishuk ish tsawalk. Employing the ecocultural-community metaphor also involves intrinsic connections among land, family, ancestors, and the spiritual realm (Bohensky and Maru 2011; see also Atleo 2011). These connections can be explored but not quantied. The ecocultural-community metaphor also encompasses concerns for ecological systems and human species as a cohesive whole (Toman 1994). This altruistic view is contrasted with the economic production metaphor, which is focused on the environmental values that are of direct use to human beings. Case studies of the effectiveness of the different metaphors for ecosystem research and management In this section, we provide examples of how each of the metaphors of the humanenvironment relationship pertains to environmental management practice.
Case 1: The economic production metaphor in the Panama Canal watershed. Conservation efforts in the Panama Canal water-

shed illustrated by the development of protected areas and payments for ecosystem services schemes provide an iconic case study of the human-use metaphor. The Panama Canal facilitates the transport of 5% of global commerce through its locks, providing considerable revenues to the country. Carse (2012) argued that, since the late 1970s, there has been increased technocratic and engineered control over watershed management, especially of forested and agricultural lands, which articulates the notion that nature is, or might become, infrastructure delivering critical services for human communities and economies (p.2). At the heart of the notion of infrastructure lies the concept that the benets of nature are measured by their use by humans. Within this framework, several organizations have developed payments for ecosystem services projects to improve water quality in the region. For example, ForestRe, a forestry insurance company, uses the nancial markets to encourage insurance companies to underwrite a 25-year bond that would pay for the reforestation of the slopes of the Panama Canal in order to reduce eutrophication and siltation and to increase water ow in the dry season. These insurance companies then ask clients such as Wal-Mart, Toyota, and Honda to buy their bond in return for a reduced premium for insurance against the losses associated with the closure of the canal (Economist 2005). In this case, the framework implicitly assigned who had those rights and how those rights could be used to generate value in the system (gure2).
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Case 2: The closed-loop production metaphor in Hawaii. Kamehameha Schools, an educational trust and the largest private landowner in Hawaii, undertook a comprehensive landplanning process on the island of Oahu that was intended to balance environmental, economic, cultural, and community values (Kamehameha Schools 2000). Kamehameha Schools and local stakeholders considered a range of future scenarios for the use of the land. They considered restoration activities, such as invasive species removal, restoring degraded agricultural lands for biofuel production, diversied agriculture and forestry, and residential development. This suite of options encompassed their goals of maintaining and enhancing the environmental and cultural resources in the region (exemplifying a closed-loop view of the human environment relationship). They used a spatially explicit modeling tool to quantify changes in the delivery of services such as carbon storage and water quality and the nancial return from the land (Goldstein etal. 2012). The scenarios would lead to varying degrees of trade-offs among water quality and carbon storage. In spite of the fact that residential development was projected to yield the greatest nancial returns, Kamehameha Schools and the local stakeholders chose a plan in which diversied agriculture and forestry were emphasized instead. They were concerned that selling and developing the lands could lead to potentially irreversible losses of cultural assets. Consequently, they strived to close the loop in the human environment interaction by incorporating diverse human activities, including restoration and extraction activities, intolocal land-use planning. The ecosystem services model provided a quantitative way for stakeholders and decision makers to consider the environmental, economic, and cultural implications of alternative land-use scenarios and provided a pathway for understanding how ecosystem services could be replaced by equivalent natural or humanmade services. Case 3: The stewardship metaphor in South Australia. Researchers in the South Australian MurrayDarling Basin region of South Australia investigated the inuence of values, place attachment, beliefs, and norms on the conservation of native vegetation by rural landholders. The results indicated that the strength of landholder connections with nature was a signicant predictor of the landholders environmental concerns (e.g., awareness of the consequences of environmental problems), which in turn inuenced their personal norms about conservation and their self-reported planting behavior (Raymond etal. 2011). The connection to nature was measured by asking a random and representative sample of rural landholders (n= 1300) to respond to a set of items about the strength of their bonds to natural features (e.g., to native plants and animals) found in different areas of rural South Australia. In this case, a strict focus on the economic benets would have been too limiting; the research revealed the need for resource managers to consider the inuence of connections to nature if the www.biosciencemag.org

goal is to better understand how humans interact with ecosystems, such as the extent to which landholders have planted native vegetation on private land. Consistent with the stewardship metaphor, the study ndings highlighted that humans moral concerns partially drive the protection of ecosystems.
Case 4: The web-of-life metaphor in British Columbia. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, the reintroduction of a well-known keystone predator, the sea otter, has caused the decline of multiple shellsh on which coastal communities had come to rely. The narrow conceptions of sea otters as directly good (e.g., for tourism) or bad (e.g., for mussel production) were arguably limiting andadversarial, given the diverse direct and indirect impacts that otters have on a range of species in these marine ecosystems. Sea otter predation of sea urchins has led to increased kelp production (Watson and Estes 2011). Kelp forests are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet (Mann 1973), so greater kelp growth is hypothesized to lead to increased ecosystem productivity (through nutrient sub sidies to secondary producers and increased habitat for sh and invertebrates) to nearshore systems (Duggins etal. 1989, Tallis 2009). Markel (2011) revealed that such contributions of expanded kelp forests appear to have a dramatic positive effect on some ecosystem functions, including rocksh production. Meanwhile, the effects on mussel growth appear to be minoreven though kelp-derived nutrients constitute a majority of mussel tissue in many sites (Singh 2010). Clearly, the ways of nature are varied and complex, as is implied by the web-of-life metaphor. Humans are but one node in a complex network of interactions. Recognizing and articulating these diverse connections is an essential component of effective ecosystem management. Case 5: The ecocultural-community metaphor in the Tsawout First Nation community, on Vancouver Island. Tsawout, one of ve

Saanich communities of southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, has about 1000 residents. The Tsawout, like other Northwest Coast peoples, rely heavily on salmon and other marine life for their sustenance. For many centuries, they practiced sustainable reef-net shing of migrating salmon within kelp beds along the rocky shorelines of the Gulf and San Juan islands (Claxton and Elliott 1994, Turner and Berkes 2006). The bay, lagoon, and sandy spit adjacent to their main village have also provided key resources, including clams, seals, game birds, and food and medicine plants. The entire area plays an integral role in Tsawout economic, social, and spiritual life. These areas have been threatened by outside development, including the establishment of a regional district sewage treatment plant near the spit and a proposed commercial marina adjacent to the reserve, which the Tsawout Nation contested successfully in court (Claxtonv. Saanichton Bay Marina 1987). The Tsawout continue to foster a belief system of kinship and responsibility to their lands and resources, exemplied by their caretaking
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role of the newly formed Tsawout Land Stewardship Society, registered in June 2012. Their beliefs (Tsawout First Nation 2012) include the notions that the origin of the living things of this world are our ancient relatives and that they must be treated with respect, and the islands, the salmon, and the living things can be called upon for help to survive in this life. The inextricable relationship and oneness between humans and all the other entities of the environment, including those concerning spirituality, are embodied in these beliefs and reected in the stories, ceremonies, and resource management actions of the Tsawout, as they are in those of many other indigenous peoples. Conclusions In this article, we have explored some of the ways in which humans conceptualize humanenvironment relationships. We surmise that ecosystem researchers and managers use different types of metaphors for understanding those relationships, such as the economic production, closedloop production, web-of-life, stewardship, and ecoculturalcommunity metaphors. Each metaphor reveals different parts of the humanenvironment dynamic and is aligned with different management objectives and indicators of success. Researchers will not nd perfect metaphors; the validity and potential applicability of each metaphor will vary from one context to another. Using the economic production metaphor provides for a simple and systematic assessment of the goods and services that ecosystems provide to human beings, which can inform the costbenets analysis of different policy options for managing global markets; however, doing so does not foster consideration of the complex interactions between humans and nature (table 1). These feedbacks are inherent to the closed-loop production metaphor but principally within the context of stocks of natural capital and material ows. Applying the stewardship metaphor takes into account a broader suite of values and drivers of behavior from moral, ethical, and ecosystem-health perspectives, which can broadly be categorized as nonmarket perspectives. However, this metaphor is arguably focused on humans (an anthropocentric perspective) and emphasizes a unidirectional relationship of care (not a network of feedback processes among entities and collectives; table1). This metaphor may be appropriate if researchers are examining land management practices from the perspective of individual land managers but may be inappropriate if the land management practice under investigation affects multiple landholders or a regional community. The web-of-life metaphor emphasizes the complex interactions among humans and nature at larger scales (from individual to community and ecosystem scales) and can therefore highlight indirect pathways of interaction that affect things of value. However, the interconnections among the physical, social, and spiritual worlds are missing from this metaphor, and it is difcult to translate the metaphor into practical decisionmaking. Implicit in the ecocultural-community metaphor is the recognition of the inextricable relationship and oneness between humans past, present, and future and all the other entities of the environment. These entities include those related to spirituality, which are embodied in beliefs and reected in the stories, ceremonies, and actions of indigenous peoples. How to add in these additional dimensions is difcult to explain, and it is challenging to measure or quantify the interactions that this metaphor promotes (table 2). Nevertheless, the use of this metaphor will be necessary in order to engage both indigenous and nonindigenous groups who have land management practices, customs, or rituals that are not directly aligned with the economic production metaphor. For example, the application of an ecoculturalcommunity metaphor is salient to managing mining claims and associated land management disputes in parts of Australia and Canada in which there can be conict both within and between indigenous and nonindigenous groups about the economic benets of mining royalties versus the need to retain existing cultural practices and rights over resource use and management. Given the strengths and weaknesses of each metaphor, we encourage ecosystem researchers and managers to systematically consider multiple metaphors to understand humanenvironment relationships and adopt an appropriate metaphor to suit the land management context. In reality, individuals engage with multiple metaphors implic itly, and the challenge is to develop systematic processes for making them explicit. We therefore encourage a deliberative approach whereby ecosystem researchers actively engage conservation practitioners and local resource users to make

Table 1. Comparison of the economic production and closed-loop production metaphors.

Metaphor
Economic production

Main context for application

Monetary valuation for the services that ecosystems provide for human well-being Quantication of the services that ecosystems provide to humans and those that humans provide to ecosystems, not necessarily in monetary terms

Assumptions
Humanenvironment relationships can be quantied in monetary terms Production pathways (stocks and ows) allow for an assessment of the impact that humans have on the ecosystem

Prominence and role of valuation in that context

Focused on the monetary benets that humans derive from ecosystems and is the main decision criterion Modied by the extent to which human actions degrade, maintain, restore, or enhance ecosystem function

Contributions to decisionmaking
Informs the costbenets analysis of different policy options Identies pathways through which ecosystems provide for human well-being and viceversa

Closedloop production

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Table 2. Comparison of the stewardship, web-of-life, and ecocultural-community metaphors.
Metaphor
Stewardship

Main context for application

Explores or explains the factors that contribute to conservation (nonmarket) behavior

Assumptions
A combination of economic, moral, and instrumental factors inuence conservation behavior and can be anthropocentric or ecocentric, depending on school of ethics Humanenvironment interactions can be reduced to and quantied within their component parts; the metaphor is ecocentric

Prominence and role of valuation in that context

Behavior may be related to nonmarket values; instead, the antecedents (drivers) of stewardship may be explored or explained using multiple methods Valuation may not be directly considered; instead, the understanding of complex ecology can lead to unforeseen outcomes that can inform valuation (using multiple methods) Valuation is implicit within the connections between humans, land, and spirituality

Contributions to decisionmaking
This metaphor identies the factors that enable or constrain conservation behavior for targeted policy development

Web of life

Helps represent the interandintraspecic relationships among humans and other species

This metaphor helps identify what components of the natural world are the most important drivers of change and through what pathways

Ecocultural community

Explores the interrelationships among social, physical, and spiritual connections to land and resources

Complex interdependencies exist among humans, land, and spirituality that cannot be quantied; the metaphor is kincentric and includes human and nonhuman relatives

Network diagrams describe the relationships among cultural and spiritual practices and ecosystem management; documentation of oral histories informs legislation and land rights

Table 3. Strengths and limitations of the economic production, closed-loop production, stewardship, web-of-life, and ecocultural-community metaphors.
Metaphor
Economic production

Strengths
This metaphor includes a valuation comparison across sites and aligns with existing economic and policy paradigms. This metaphor includes quantied feedback processes.

Limitations
It only involves half of the loop in humanenvironment relationships and from a production perspective; it does not account for the importance of diverse humanenvironment linkages. It is focused on feedbacks within a production metaphor; intangible services tend not to be incorporated because of the difculty in quantifying them. It generally explains only a small portion of the relevant behavior; theory development is limited to the body of ideas held by a research community in what has been dened as a top-down view of reality; it is often considered an anthropocentric metaphor. It is often constrained to system interactions within the biophysical world and this metaphor, alone, does not translate into practical decisionmaking. It is difcult to quantify the interactions among humans, land, and spirituality and to translate these values into practical decisionmaking, particularly in relation to the management of ecosystems by nonindigenous communities.

Closed-loop production

Stewardship

This metaphor can quantify the nonmarket drivers of conservation decisions that are beyond the scope of the production metaphor.

Web of life

This metaphor can highlight indirect pathways of interaction that affect things of value and points out nonintuitive and unforeseen aspects of the environment that are important. Theory development is guided by conservation practitioners; this metaphor includes interactions among the human, physical, and spiritual realms.

Ecocultural community

explicit, through open deliberation, the types of metaphors salient to their conservation problem and how each metaphor can be systematically considered as part of ecosystem research or management. A deliberative approach would involve (a) appreciating the importance of the social context of ecosystem research and management; (b) respecting a diverse set of knowledge cultures, values, and beliefs; (c) actively engaging multiple types of communities (e.g., rural landholders, urban residents, conservation practitioners, indigenous peoples) in ecosystem research and management decisions; (d) respecting that each metaphor has different assumptions and contexts for application and can contribute to decisionmaking in a unique way (table 1); and (e) more generally respecting the notion that humans are part of nature rather than separate from it (table 3).
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There is an empirical literature that indicates substantial advantages of a deliberative approach, including greater buy in by participants (e.g., Sabatier etal. 2005). However, we acknowledge that there are drawbacks associated with this deliberative approach to ecosystem management. They include the opportunity costs associated with the time required to engage multiple communities in ecosystem management and to systematically consider the multiple metaphors, the ideological conicts among those who espouse different metaphors and models for valuating ecosystems, the challenges associated with the commensurability of the different valuation systems associated with different metaphors, and the potential for some groups to feel marginalized if the metaphors to which they subscribe are not integrated into environmental planning or policy.
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In some cases, good economic accounting of the services provided by the environment may be all that is necessary, and therefore, a monistic approach may be appropriate. In other cases, there may be no common ground among stakeholders and no scope for deliberation. In this light, both monistic and deliberative approaches to metaphor use have their advantages and disadvantages. We believe that the deliberative approach may be most applicable when key stakeholders in the conservation problem have different types and levels of knowledge about humanenvironment relationships (Raymond et al. 2010) and when there is evidence that stakholders are navigating among multiple metaphors of humanenvironment relationships to address their interests or concerns. For example, the same person may seek to maximize revenues from forestswhen operating in his or her day-to-day ofce environment while simultaneously supporting forest conservation for the intrinsic value of forests when interacting with friends and familytwo behaviors that are not necessarily incompatible. We discuss the policy implications of this deliberative approach below. Most metaphors are used implicitly or unconsciously but are not made explicit in research or among management teams. The goal of a deliberative approach is to make these implicit metaphors explicit. When a new project is commenced, we encourage that opportunities be provided for individuals and groups to articulate and share their metaphors explicitly with respect to the environmental problem and decisionmaking context of the project. The deliberative approach may benet from the following elements: Innovative ways of communicating and eliciting multiple metaphors from different stakeholder groups will methodologically require adopting and improving on participatory methods that effectively identify and engage with multiple stakeholder groups (Reed 2008) and ways of communicating multiple metaphors. These stakeholder processes may result in the development of simplied metaphors that resonate with both local citizens and scientists. Understanding of context, including explicit understanding of the relevant metaphors, to whom they are important, and how the involved groups navigate among metaphors, would be likely to benet efforts to employ and encourage multiple metaphors. An effective facilitation process is necessary, given that valuations and translations are usually made in power-laden contexts (Gmez-Baggethun and Ruiz-Prez 2011). The framework proposed by Chan and colleagues (2012b) could be adopted by facilitators to address potential power imbalances and to direct research in order to make more effective decisions. This framework involves obtaining consent; determining the decisionmaking context of the management problem; characterizing the components of the social ecological context; determining the ecosystem services, benets, and values, both tangible and intangible; and synthesizing information from the process into inuence diagrams and scenarios that reect the different perspectives.
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A deliberative approach also requires the development of new institutional arrangements that are exible and responsive to local contexts and that are applicable at a variety of scales of management. The international arena is currently dominated by a global monetary system that treats natural resources as largely fungible, even when science suggests otherwise (Koellner 2011). Creative institutional contexts that are buffered, to a degree, from the overriding logic that characterizes the broader global system could be encouraged in order to balance the single logic of the dominant metaphor. Norgaard (2010) noted, Fully thinking through ecosystem service projects from multiple perspectives means [that] society must establish standing institutional mechanisms for bringing out, sorting through, and using complex, contradictory insights in environmental management (p. 1220). To harness these insights, we encourage institutions supporting ecosystem management to be network builders and facilitators of dialogue across multiple stakeholder groups, not just regulatory arms. It will be important to support local organizations that represent the perspectives of multiple ecosystem management groups (e.g., conservation nongovernmental organizations, farm system groups) and other community members with diverse values and ethics. Support can come in many forms and may include arranging regional forums that enable these organizations to share their perspectives and ideas with scientists and policymakers (building on the community engagement pathways proposed by Raymond and Robinson [2013]). Boundary organizations that operate at the interface of science, policy, and community groups may be well positioned to help decisionmakers navigate complex interactions and conicting metaphors at these forums. At the ecosystem project level, the deliberative approach could inform the problem-orientation phase (otherwise known as the scoping phase) of conservation planning. In an exploration of options for improved conservation and management policy, Clark and colleagues (2009) suggested that effective problem orientation requires key stakeholders to determine goals, identify problems, determine alternatives, and evaluate those alternatives from the standpoints of different stakeholders. We encourage that effort be directed to understanding each stakeholders standpoint, including the dominant metaphors expressed by that individual. During this sharing phase, some metaphors raised by the stakeholders will complement one another, whereas others will collide. A useful way to address conicts is to discuss the different perspectives with respect to the different process activities related to addressing the conservation problem, such as agreement on standards for prescription (laws, actions, norms), management goals, asset management, enforcement, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and succession (see Clark and colleagues [2009] for a further discussion about each of these activities). To account for the diversity of metaphors, environmental researchers and managers could benet from learning to employ different types of metaphors on the basis of their strengths and weaknesses within the decisionmaking context.
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Tools that can be used to describe humanenvironment relationships from different perspectives are crucial to such decisionmaking processes. Research could be directed to the development of innovative tools that incorporate ecological, social, and economic values for ecosystems at specic locations and that account for the costs and benets of different management strategies and process activities (building on Smith etal. 2011). The outputs of these tools could be used at different points of the deliberative decision process, particularly in the identication of shared goals for management and the monitoring and evaluation of conservation successes. We also encourage research on the kinds of changes in practice that could result from sharing metaphors and the benets of these changes for improving our overall approaches to ecosystem research and management. These changes may include an understanding of a broader set of values that guide environmental decisionmaking; a new set of ideas or perspectives to guide an approach to ecosystem valuation; a new language for communicating ecosystem management principles that is understood by scientists and citizens; and changes to the relationships among scientists, policymakers, and citizens (e.g., building trust between scientists and citizens by creating opportunities for open dialogue and knowledge sharing). The ecosystem services concept has received signicant attention from researchers and policymakers worldwide, but engagement of diverse groups in the concept remains challenging. This limited engagement can be partly attributed to an overemphasis on the economic production metaphor, which frames humanenvironment relationships as a unidirectional productive relationship in which nature provides for people only in concrete, measurable, and quantiable ways. A more diverse set of metaphors of human environment relationships is rarely applied. We presented the conceptual basis for ve diverse metaphors of human environment relationships and showed how they have been applied in practice. Each is naturally associated with a different resource management ethic, as well as different objectives, indicators of success, decisionmaking outputs, strengths, and limitations. We encourage researchers to systematically consider the validity and potential applicability of multiple metaphors of humanenvironment relationships and, where it is possible, apply a deliberative approach to ecosystem research and management in which researchers, conservation practitioners, and local resource users work together to address complex conservation problems. Such a deliberative approach will require the active creation and support of contexts that allow researchers, conservation practitioners, and stakeholders to negotiate, understand, and apply multiple metaphors. Acknowledgments This article originated from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Exploratory Workshop Ecosystems: Services, stewardship, and sustainability held in Vancouver, Canada, in June 2012. We thank the Peter Wall Institute for
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Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia for funding the workshop (led by KMAC and Terre Sattereld) and all participants for their contribution to the ideas presented here. We would also like to thank three internal reviewers, Anne Salomon, Sarah Klain, and Rachelle Gould, for their valuable insights and edits.

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Christopher M. Raymond (chris.raymond@enviroconnect.com.au) is afliated with Enviroconnect, in Stirling, South Australia, and with the School of Sociology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Gerald Singh, Jordan Levine, Jordan Tam, and Kai M. A. Chan are afliated with the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability; Joanna R. Bernhardt is afliated with the Department of Zoology and Biodiversity Research Centre; and Harry Nelson is afliated with the Department of Forest Resources Management at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Karina Benessaiah is afliated with the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, in Tempe. Nancy J. Turner is afliated with the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Bryan Norton is afliated with the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta.

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