Hamish Kimmins, PhD, Professor of Forest Ecology, University of British Columbia

Mentored by a very wise gardener, Kimmins learned the basics of ecosystem ecology at age seven in the garden where Samuel Johnson wrote the first English dictionary. From there to the University of Wales for a degree in forestry, followed by a Master's degree at University of California, Berkeley in forest entomology. Here he was influenced by Starker Leopold, Buzz Holling and Karl Huffaker, leading to the realization that ecology was his calling. This was pursued in a PhD at Yale focusing on an ecosystem-level hypothesis for the ten year wildlife cycle in Canada under the influence of Evelyn Hutchinson. Over a 39 year career in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, teaching forest ecology and researching the form and function of BC's diverse forest ecosystems, Kimmins increasingly focused on issues of ecosystem complexity, sustainability and the question: what is stewardship? Recognizing the failure of deductive science to address these questions adequately, he has complimented his field ecology with the development of ecosystem management simulation models such as FORECAST and POSSIBLE FOREST FUTURES with which to assess value tradeoffs and undertake scenario analysis employing advanced interactive visualization as a communication tool.

Sustainability in the Face of Change; Stewardship in the Absence of Ecosystem Management
Sustainability is widely misunderstood. Frequently thought of as lack of change (i.e. constancy), the common interpretation of this fundamental tenet of stewardship ignores the nature of ecosystems, the ecological role of ecosystem disturbance, and the reality of human population growth, urbanization, changing land use, the global rise of materialism, and climate change. The concept of "ecological theatre" is offered as a framework within which the biophysical components of sustainability can be assessed, value tradeoffs identified, and ecologically-based plans developed to deliver the diverse products and conditions desired by society from forests. It is a framework that facilitates the integration of management for values such as timber, wildlife, biodiversity, old growth, and ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change. The conclusion is reached that the management of ecosystems - ecosystem management - frequently cannot be achieved given current tenure systems and ownership patterns. Of the many other impediments to ecosystem management, lack of public trust is very important. A critical issue in public trust is the difficulty in communicating the temporal and spatial complexity of forests and their dynamic character because the planning tools used are generally not at the ecosystem level. Process-based ecosystem management models linked to advanced visualization systems are suggested as a critically important component of addressing this issue of public trust. Such tools are needed to implement the concept of "ecological rotations" while accounting for value tradeoffs as we examine possible forest futures in scenario analyses.