Utilitarian conservation focuses on a few ecological processes: population regulation in resource-limited systems, succession, predation, and competition. This approach assumes that nature tends toward equilibrium. According to this balance-of-nature mindset, populations are regulated by density-dependent processes. Exponential population growth can generate high numbers quickly, but competition for limiting resources generally keeps populations near the carrying capacity of their environment. In the absence of predation, however, populations may erupt, deplete their food supply, and crash. Similarly, plant associations go through predictable sequences of seral stages culminating in stable climatic climaxes that are able to reproduce themselves indefinitely unless in the absence of disturbances such as fire. Plant associations are groups of interdependent species that all react in the same way to their environment. Utilitarian conservation focuses on keeping populations of economically valuable species such as game animals and commercially harvested trees in balance with their environment.

The idea there is a “balance of nature” was a staple of the schools of natural philosophy from which biology emerged. Not until the second half of the twentieth century was the concept of a balance of nature rigorously characterized as ecological stability, and the metaphysical speculations about its cause superseded with scientific hypotheses about its basis. But significant uncertainty and controversy exists about what features of an ecological system’s dynamics should be considered its stability and thus no consensus has emerged about how ecological stability should be defined. Instead, ecologists have employed a confusing multitude of different terms to attempt to capture apparent stability properties, e.g., constancy, persistence, resilience, resistance, robustness, tolerance. This chapter diagnoses and resolves the underlying lack of conceptual clarity about ecological stability. It presents a comprehensive account of stability as a three-fold concept that crucially depends on two reference specifications. The account clarifies the concepts ecologists have used that are defensible, their interrelationships, and their potential relationships with other biological properties. Besides providing insights about how problematic scientific concepts should be characterized, the idea that ecological stability is a conceptually confused concept is also criticized.