Environmental Management: Principles and practice

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♦ Problems and opportunities
7
♦ Criticism of environmental management
11
♦ The establishment of environmental
management
12
♦ Recommended reading and resources
14

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The evolution of environmental management
From prehistory humankind have accumulated environmental know-how and
developed strategies for exploiting nature. To help regulate resource use people
evolved taboos, superstitions and common rights, formulated laws to improve
stewardship, and even undertook national resource inventories (such as the twelfth-
century AD Domesday survey). While some managed to sustain reasonable lifestyles
for long periods, the idea that pre-modern people ‘close to nature’ caused little
environmental damage is largely an arcadian myth. Indeed, with populations a fraction
of today’s, prehistoric people, using fire and weapons of flint, bone, wood and leather,
managed to alter the vegetation of most continents and probably to wipe out many
species of large mammals (Tudge, 1995).
Developments apparent in the late twentieth century make it critical that
environmental management be got right; these include: global pollution; loss of
biodiversity; soil degradation; and urban growth. The challenges are great, but there
have been advances in understanding the structure and function of the environment,
in monitoring impacts, data handling and analysis, modelling, assessment, and
planning. It is the role of environmental management to co-ordinate and focus such
developments, to improve human well-being, and mitigate or prevent further damage
to the Earth and its organisms.
Technological optimism apparent in the west, particularly from the 1830s
onward, and expressed in natural resources management, faltered a little after 1945
as awareness of environmental problems grew (Mitchell, 1997). Limited efforts were
made to ensure natural resources exploitation was integrated with social and economic
development before the 1970s—e.g. integrated or comprehensive regional planning
and management had been undertaken as early as the 1930s with the establishment
of river basin bodies (Barrow, 1997). Urban and regional planning also have some
roots in holistic, ecosystem approaches (things which have more recently attracted
those interested in environmental management) (Slocombe, 1993:290). However,
natural resources management (in contrast with environmental management) is more
concerned with specific components of the Earth—resources—which have utility
and can be exploited, mainly for short-term gain and the benefit of special-interest
groups, companies or governments. Also, natural resources management responses
to problems tend to be reactive, and often rely on quick-fix technological means and
a project-by-project approach. Natural resources managers have often been drawn
from a limited range of disciplines, typically with little sociological and limited
environmental expertise. Their management can be authoritarian and may fail to
involve the public; they also tend to miss off-site and delayed impacts. Because of
these failings natural resources management has lost ground to environmental
management in the last 40 years or so.

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INTRODUCTION
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Some feel environmental management has, or is developing, a more flexible
and sensitive style than natural resources management: assessment of a situation
leading to an appropriate approach, emphasising stewardship rather than exploitation.
Stewardship implies the management of something with the goal of long-term careful
use and sustainable benefit. The focus of such an approach to environmental
management is multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or holistic (see chapter 7), and
the style precautionary and participatory. Increasingly, the aim is to promote
sustainable development (Royston, 1978a; Dorney, 1989). It should be noted that a
multidisciplinary approach draws upon various disciplines for information, analytical
skills and insight, but does not seek an integrated understanding. An interdisciplinary
approach draws upon common themes and goes beyond close collaboration between
different specialists to attempt integration, and is very difficult because it involves
blending differently derived concepts (O’Riordan, 1995:2–4). These approaches
demand awareness that issues may be part of complex transnational, even global
environmental, economic and social interaction, which is likely to be affected by
politics, perception and ethics.
Others dismiss much of present-day environmental management as
‘environmental managerialism’ which pays insufficient attention to human-
environment interaction, has become institutionalized, and is essentially a state-
centred process concerned with formulating and implementing laws, policies and
regulations which relate to the environment (Bryant and Wilson, 1998). The difference
in viewpoint may partly reflect theory and practice. Whatever one might wish for
environmental management as a subject, it is used for real-world problems and
consequently managerialism and other shortcomings may creep in. It should be
stressed that environmental management is currently evolving and is far from being
fixed in form.
Environmental management, whatever its approach, is related to, overlaps,
and has to work with environmental planning. The focus of environmental
management is on implementation, monitoring and auditing; on practice and coping
with real-world issues (like modifying human habits that damage nature), rather
than theoretical planning (Hillary, 1995). While a close integration with environmental
planning is desirable, environmental management is a field of study dedicated to
understanding human-environment interactions and the application of science and
common sense to solving problems.
General acceptance that economic development and environmental issues should
not be approached separately came somewhere between 1972 (the UN Conference on
the Human Environment, Stockholm) and 1992 (the UN Conference on Environment
and Development, Rio de Janeiro—the ‘Earth Summit’). By the early 1990s natural
resources management had given way, as Wisner (1990) observed, perhaps unfairly, to
‘a murky philosophical plunge’ towards environmental management.