Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Structure and function of the environment
Living organisms, including humans, and non-living elements of the environment
interact in often complex ways. The study of these interactions—ecology—was
founded as an academic subject (oecology) in 1866 by Ernst Häckel. By 1914 The
Journal of Ecology had been established. Charles Elton in 1927 described ecology
as ‘scientific natural history’; modern definitions would include: the study of the
structure and function of nature; the study of interactions between organisms (biotic)
and their non-living (abiotic) environment; the science of the relations of organisms
to their total environment, and the interrelationships of organisms inter-specifically
and between themselves within a species (Fraser-Darling, 1963; Odum, 1975; Park,
1980). Since the early 1970s ‘ecology’ has also come to mean a viewpoint—typically
a concern for the environment—as much as the discipline (O’Riordan, 1976). The
science of ecology should guide environmental management, environmentalism and
environmental ethics.
People’s behaviour and culture are partly a consequence of physical
surroundings and partly human genetics (just how much of each is debated). Humans
either adapt to, or seek to modify, their environment to achieve security and well-
being. In making modifications people create a ‘human environment’ (Treshow,
1976). Human ecology developed in the early twentieth century to facilitate the
study of people and their environment, expanding in the 1960s and 1970s, and
then dying back (Sargeant, 1974; Richerson and McEvoy, 1976). A field that
currently seems to be expanding, and which can be very useful for environmental
management, is political ecology. Political ecologists seek to build foundations
for sustainable relations between society and the environment (Atkinson, 1991b;
Blaikie, 1985) (see chapter 13).

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SCIENCE
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The global complex of living and dead organisms forms a relatively thin layer,
the biosphere. The term ‘ecosphere’ is used to signify the biosphere interacting with
the non-living environment, biological activity being capable of affecting physical
conditions even at the global scale. The global ecosphere can be divided into various
climates, the pattern of which has changed in the past (a world map of climate for,
say, 20,000 years ago would be very different from today’s) and will doubtless do so
in the future. Climate might be affected by one or more of many factors, e.g.:
♦
Variation in incoming solar energy due to fluctuations in the Sun’s output or
possibly dust in space.
♦
Variation in the Earth’s orbit around or change in its rotation about its axis.
♦
Variation in the composition of the atmosphere or in the quantity of dust, gases
or water vapour present (biological activity may alter atmospheric composition).
♦
Altered distribution of continents, changes in oceanic currents or of sea-level
that may expose or submerge continental shelves.
♦
Formation and removal of topographic barriers.
Environmental managers must not assume climate is fixed and stable—even if there
is no significant threat of change through pollution (Figure 7.3).