Environmental Management: Principles and practice

262
♦ Sustainable development and coping with
global environmental change
263
♦ The 1992 UN Conference on Environment
and Development, Rio de Janeiro, Agenda 21,
and follow-up meetings
265
♦ Post-Cold War environmental management
266
♦ The politics and ethics to support
environmental management
267
♦ Concluding note
270
♦ Recommended reading
272

---

262
‘We have to understand that we can never control Nature. Nature’s
systems are far, far too complex. But we can manage them’
(Charles Secrett, Director, Friends of the Earth:
The Times, 28 April 1998:8).
Key challenges and new supports
Some of the problems faced by environmental managers are reasonably clear:
population increase, pollution, urbanization, and rising consumption (consumerism)
and globalization (Kiely and Marfleet, 1998). A consequence of some of these are:
possible greenhouse warming, worsening soil degradation, and loss of biodiversity.
For some of these problems remedial action has been much too limited, and necessary
future responses may have to be ‘quick and dirty’ with no time to wait for adequate
data, better technology, change of public opinion and effective legislation. It is fair
to say that environmental management is increasingly running-on-the-spot, trying
to keep up with growing environmental problems, and some fear that cumulative/
synergistic problems may be emerging to make it even more difficult. North (1995:
105) warned of ‘a blizzard of cliché and prejudice’ surrounding environmental
challenges. However, he was able to present a rational, often optimistic and readable
assessment of the challenges being faced by environmental management. North felt
that, though the world may have to support 10 billion people within a couple of
generations, it might be possible to do so and still care for the natural world.
Not all challenges faced by environmental management are about human
survival and conservation of biodiversity. Many concern aesthetics. For example,
windfarms make sense as a means of supplying clean sustainable electricity, but
siting them in countries like the UK is proving controversial. Often environmental
management will be invoked to give scientific respectability to government or public
preferences, rather than to ensure sound research and rational choice (North,
1995:119).
There is a need to better integrate physical and social sciences, and to get a
more problem-oriented problem-solving form of environmental science (de Groot,
1992, has discussed such issues). Some of these issue are familiar to geographers,
and perhaps human geography and environmental management can be usefully linked.
Both environmental management and geography stress the importance of
multidisciplinarity or interdisciplinarity. There are difficulties in seeking this—Marion
(1996) warned of ‘infoglut’, the flood of data that has to be constantly sifted and
made sense of. To be effective, environmental management must have mastery of
‘infoglut’ and effectively develop a clear overview of development scenarios.
Environmental management can draw upon palaeoecologist and historian to
‘backcast’, i.e. from an understanding of past events obtain warning of possible future

---

THE WAY AHEAD
263
challenges and of how environments and people might respond to various changes
in the light of past responses. Environmental managers might benefit from two popular
books which also use backcasting to try explain the present and suggest future
situations: Diamond (1997) provided an interesting insight into how human fortunes
might be affected by environmental factors and past history; and Kennedy (1993)
tried to produce an objective assessment of likely future scenarios using the approach
of a historian. Environmental managers must have a broad and long-term view, which
can bring them into contact with the field of futures study and ‘futurists’. These may
often (if not always) be speculative, but they provide ideas, warnings, and prompt
contingency planning (e.g. futures debates in the 1960s and 1970s helped prompt
concern for limits and the concept of sustainable development).
Environmental management must deal with a diversity of stakeholders—
ministries, NGOs, various groups among the public, international agencies, etc. That
demands an ability to cope with complexity and conflicting demands. Environmental
management must not be pursued in isolation from issues like growing poverty,
resource degradation, etc.
There has been progress in understanding and monitoring the world’s structure
and function, the development of environmental management standards and
systems, accessible computing systems, tools like remote sensing, automatic
instrumentation and GIS which permit much better data gathering, information
storage, retrieval and processing. The tools used for risk, hazard and impact
assessment have also improved a lot since the 1970s. The improvement and spread
of telecommunications, especially the Internet, makes contact between the
environmentally concerned easier and cheaper, and should help prevent planners,
governments or special-interest groups from hindering dissemination of information
to the public, NGOs and various other bodies. The Internet has made it easier for
people to blow the whistle on environmentally ill-advised activities, share
information and promote environmental issues.