Adaptive vs. Prescriptive Management For Homesteads And Lifestyle Design ~Epi-070

Adaptive Management: Observation-driven management for constantly increasing resilience and ecosystem function by employing planned, purposeful disruption.

Prescriptive Management: Labeling your observations so that you can look up a prescription that fits that label. This is a much more myopic way of managing a landscape, as you're automatically confining yourself to pre-existing solutions for truly unique problems or challenges.

Adaptation is Nature's way. Nature is always changing - things may rhyme but they are never exactly the same. Therefore our management needs to change with this constantly changing landscape.

3 Rules of Adapative Management

Compounding: every decision creates a cascade of compounding effects, these effects are never neutral, they are either positive or negative with regards to ecosystem function and whether or not they move you closer to your Quality of Life goals or further from them.
Diversity: Greater species diversity is always better, and creates positive compounding effects.
Disruption: Introduce planned, purposeful disruption in order to vary the stimulus that the landscape receives to continue making gains in ecosystem function, homestead efficiency and resilience, and enterprise profitability.

Never assume you've got it in the bag! ALWAYS base your actions on observation - adapt to the feedback that Nature is always providing, instead of prescribing from a narrow field of pre-existing solutions.

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