Daniel W. Schneider

Anniversary Forum

Environmental History and Ecosystem Management

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.	1
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.	2
Environmental historians can usefully explore how humans affect the environment by examining those instances where people purposefully manage ecological systems, either for biodiversity or resource extraction, conservation, or recreation. As historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown, resource extraction in forestry and mining dramatically changed the environment. Environmental change was also planned. Yet environmental historians have tended to overlook one group of people involved in directing this change: urban and regional planners. The field can more directly engage the history of planning and planners' roles in managing environmental change. Richard White's work on the Columbia River and Adam Rome's on suburban development offer important examples, but there are numerous instances where an explicit focus on planning could illuminate the process and politics influencing the direction of environmental transformation.	3
Drawing on the insights of science studies, environmental historians can take the field in new directions by further investigating the practice of ecosystem management as performed by scientists and engineers, fisheries and forestry workers, planners and policy makers. A specific focus on the day-to-day practice of ecosystem management helps reveal how people understand the environment and use that knowledge to manipulate it. Work on the history of wildlife and fisheries management, for instance, reveals the importance not only of ecological science, but also the practical knowledge of workers in the industry. By tracing the connections between ecologists and fishermen in my own work on the Illinois River, I was able to describe how the science of ecology depended on the knowledge developed by local residents who fished and hunted along the river, and how the practice of ecology was connected to the local politics of environmental transformation.	4
Extending this investigation of day-to-day practice, one fruitful area for research into ecosystem management is to move the focus from the natural world to the study of industrial ecosystems. Sewage-treatment plants, breweries, biotechnology reactors, or ethanol-production plants are all environments, for they are complex biophysical systems in which communities of bacteria, yeast, and other organisms are maintained to extract resources such as fertilizer, food, pharmaceuticals, or fuel. These environments offer rich opportunities for environmental historians to bring the history of science and technology together with industrial, labor, and environmental history. Controlled and managed by scientists, engineers, and laborers, yet operating under constraints imposed by corporations and governments and by the biophysical systems themselves, industrial ecosystems can be treated as microcosms in which all the multiple influences impinging on larger ecosystems are present.	5
One area of research opened up by the study of these environments is the role of expertise in ecosystem management. Ecological science has made a claim as the relevant science for ecosystem management. This is a question open to historical investigation, however. In my examination of sewage-treatment plants, for instance, I have found that ecosystem management in practice is just as dependent on the expertise and knowledge of industrial workers who have developed their own understandings of the system. The practice of ecosystem management has thus depended on the outcome of contested knowledge as this craft knowledge has vied with ecological and engineering understandings of the system for much of the twentieth century. By studying these industrial ecologies, environmental historians can reveal the contours of the practice of ecosystem management, and provide insight into the problems and possibilities of how people can manage other ecosystems, such as forests, oceans, or even cities.	6
Daniel Schneider is associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an aquatic ecologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey. His article "Local Knowledge, Environmental Politics, and the Founding of Ecology in the United States" (Isis, 2000) received the Price-Webster Prize from the History of Science Society.

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