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Anniversary Forum
Environmental History and Ecosystem Management
Daniel W. Schneider
| A MANAGERIAL APPROACH to environmental manipulation recently has been enshrined in federal policy as "Ecosystem Management" and has become one of the nation's primary conservation strategies, adopted by the United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and agencies responsible for implementation of the Endangered Species Act. Ecosystem management is vaguely defined as the application of ecological principles to natural resources for the purpose of achieving both conservation and social needs. Despite its importance in policy, however, and over a thousand articles since 1983 describing it in the scientific literature, ecosystem management as a process remains poorly understood. |
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Environmental historians, who have just begun to examine ecosystem management, can provide critical analysis of this increasingly dominant way of understanding and managing nature. Historians have examined natural-resource management during the early history of conservation, but more work remains to be done to connect ecosystem management to its historic antecedents in forest, range, and river management. In doing so, environmental historians should further explore and interrogate the term "management" itself. What does it mean to manage an ecosystem, and what were the origins of such an explicitly managerial approach to the environment? The last century has seen a number of innovations in the approach to management in business, engineering, and defense that could illuminate the ideology and techniques underlying a managerial approach to the environment. For example, the connections between the environment and Taylorism and other movements for scientific management around the turn of the century, or between operations research in the defense industries and the growth of ecosystem analysis in ecology during the post-World-War-II period need to be explored. The impact on environmental management of more recent paradigms from computing, such as neural networks, fuzzy logic, or expert systems, also would enrich our understanding of ecosystem management. |
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