Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Concluding note
In 1952 few people expressed concern that there was an environmental problem. In
1962 environmentalists began to publish ‘messianic’ warnings. In 1972 the UN
Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm), one of the first world gatherings
on environmental issues, closed with many of the delegates, especially those from
developing countries, seeing environmental management as a luxury (some even
suspected environmental concern might be a new type of green imperialism), with
only a handful of nations having environmental ministries, and with few in the media
or public interested. In 1992 the UN Conference on Environment and Development
attracted a huge attendance, and there were few delegates willing to state publicly
that environmental care was not a vital component of development: virtually every
country had an environmental ministry or agency; most newspapers and television
channels had environmental correspondents; and the public were following events.
It is likely that better environmental management will be realized through the
evolution of present patterns of international organizations and agreements, the
cooperation and coercion of commerce, local peoples, etc. Unthinking opposition to
modern agriculture or commerce will not counter many of the environmental
challenges, and may exacerbate some problems. There is a need for ways for the
various layers involved in environmental management to communicate and arrive at
decisions. Hildyard (1992:154) called for a ‘Liberation Ecology’ which would

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empower local people to counter pressures from MNCs and TNCs or goverments
and promote better environmental management and improved livelihoods.
Practical, binding agreements and an adequate Earth Charter may not all have
been achieved at Rio. Nevertheless, there has been considerable progress in four
decades—with no serious global crisis yet felt to prompt such changes, so there are
grounds for optimism.
There is a need for environmental management to ensure that it does not neglect
‘blue-sky research’ and slight but worrying risks, issues which state governments
might argue they could not afford to waste funds upon. There was, for example,
reluctance to fund the studies which gave warning of a growing stratospheric ozone
loss; funds for maintaining checks on atmospheric gas levels were hard to come by
in the 1950s, yet without long-term monitoring carbon dioxide and methane changes
would be difficult to understand and extrapolate. Luckily those areas of research
found support. In 1991 asteroid 1191B narrowly missed the Earth. There were
subsequently other interesting events, including the collision of fragments of comet
Shoemaker Levy-9 with Jupiter, and the discovery of the 2-km-diameter asteroid
1997×f11, which it is hoped will narrowly miss in AD 2028. Such astronomical
warnings, together with the debate about possible planetesimal strikes in the past
which may have caused mass extinctions (notably at the close of the Cretaceous
Period), should alert environmental management to the need for some measure to
warn of and react to exogenous threats (Huggett, 1990; Ahrens and Thomas, 1992;
Lewin, 1992; Chapman and Morrison, 1994; Steel, 1995; Gribbin and Gribbin, 1996).
Some people feel that current technology (or technology that could be reasonably
easily developed) would give some protection (for the first time in roughly 4,000
million years of Earth history); unfortunately, there may be some planetesimals which
approach ‘out of the Sun’ or too fast for much warning. There are other slight but
worrying threats: geologists suspect that massive outpourings of flood lavas in the
past may have had serious impacts on the atmosphere and climate; nationally and
regionally. Flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes and drought demand better long-term
planning measures be undertaken.
Space research at present seems to be purely academic to most of the public.
However, it is giving interesting insight into Earth processes and is helping unravel
issues like global warming, natural periodic climate change, vegetation changes,
patterns of pollution, etc. One day environmental managers as well as science fiction
writers may have to worry about terraforming Mars, Europa or other planets
(Robinson, 1992) (terraforming is the alteration of entire planetary conditions towards
something more suited to human needs). Terraforming—interfering in the fate of
worlds, prompts the question: what are environmental managers driven by? A referee
who read the draft of this book commented that environmental managers may be in
the position of selecting one of many possible alternative futures, and in so doing
preventing the other possibilities. The profession should bear in mind the old adage
‘those whom the gods wish to cast down, they first inflate with pride’. The practice
of environmental management—developing policies, collecting data, implementing
developments, co-ordinating, trouble-shooting, etc. —must all be guided by principles
that are based on prudence and sound ethics.

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