The Rebirth of Environmentalism as Pragmatic, Adaptive Management
By Bryan G. Norton
INTRODUCTION
If you have visited an environmental website lately--practically ANY environmental website, that is--you are well aware that we are gathered here, at best, for a memorial service. The death of environmentalism has been announced, the obits have been written and published on websites and in print-- environmentalism's wake has been held. An odd wake it was, as some celebrated the life of the movement, or even protested that the reports were exaggerated, even as the Limbaughs and the right-wing bloggers celebrated its proclaimed death. According to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, those of us who are here to discuss environmentalism and its future are just family members who continue for awhile to speak in the present tense of their lost loved one. All that remains for environmental pundits like us, apparently, is to turn to history and try to understand how a once-rich and powerful movement could go moribund, even as our environment suffers insult after insult before our eyes.
In this essay, I offer an alternative account of this death by re-identifying the corpse, and by telling a story whereby death sets the stage for rebirth in the form of a new generation of environmental thinking, what I am calling the “Age of Adaptive Management,” and for a new way of talking about and thinking about “environmental” problems and the values they threaten. What died, I hope, is not the sentiment that favors protecting our natural landmarks, biological diversity, and systems productive of vital resources. No, what ended was not the life of the environmental viewpoint or activity of committed environmentalists. What died was what I call the “Age of Ideology” in environmentalism. My purpose is to sketch the broad outlines of the new Age, by celebrating the re-birth of environmental concern as a commitment to learning by doing.
In my new book, Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, I tell again the oft-told story of the amateur spiritualist John Muir, up against the economic utilitarian, Gifford Pinchot, but I offer perhaps a new twist on the story. While not disparaging the inspired rhetoric of the early years of conservation, I show how its legacy--and the value categories it forced upon us--has been the “Age of Ideological Environmentalism,” which has led to a polarization with respect to environmental goals and environmental values, and to a hopelessly maladapted approach to integrating facts, values, and action in the search for rational environmental policy. Muir damned the dam at Hetch Hetchy and decried economic activity in the National Forest Reserves as evil incarnate, while Pinchot spoke the Gospel of Conservation. As a result, we have since discussed environmental values and goals in a fractured discourse ever since. These fractured languages, and the unverifiable theories that they rest upon, enforce the hold ideology has on environmental discourse. For understandable historical reasons, the early rhetoric and value categories created in these debates have bequeathed to us a formulation of environmental problems as all-or-nothing, zero-sum games, where nature or humans are sure to be losers. These formulations, based on highly questionable normative assumptions embodied in the “original positions” of the two wings of the movement, have ossified within the language of environmental discourse. These ossified categories have in turn led to the ill formulation of problems, and they make any concerted environmental actions in any direction impossible. Communication and cooperation have become unfeasible due to this linguistic and rhetorical quirk of conservation history.
In my book, I propose a new way to talk and write about environmental problems, in a new language that can be embedded within an activist process of adaptive management. My attempt centers on a conscious and detailed attempt to rehabilitate the concept of sustainable development. I cannot, of course, summarize my entire book here, but I do want to emphasize one of its main themes. The advocates of the rhetoric of non-anthropocentric environmentalism-- those who claim that elements of our environment have intrinsic value, independent of us and of the free marketeers, and those who pursue the rhetoric of consumptive opportunity and the maximization of consumer benefits--are equally ideological. The advocates depend upon ontological commitments that cannot be justified by empirical test, which is what I mean by calling them “ideological.” These ontological commitments are a priori commitments that bring with them both their own language and a destructively polarized formulation of problems that prevents productive discourse about how to reach solutions.
I will begin my sketch of adaptive management by emphasizing one important aspect of the thoughts and actions of Aldo Leopold--his pragmatic commitment to experimentalism in management. I believe that Leopold was the first adaptive manager--that he identified and developed the essentials of a post-ideological approach, guided by Darwinian analogies, to environmental decision making and management, even though the phrase, “adaptive management,” was invented decades later by C.S. Holling. By emphasizing this aspect of Leopold's thought--which involves (1) a temporally sensitive, multiscalar interpretation of Thinking Like a Mountain, and (2) Leopold's activism and experimentalism, I believe I can demonstrate that Leopold deserves, despite the tardiness of the label, to be called the “first adaptive manager.”
In the book, I provide additional evidence for my hypothesis, first stated in 1988, that Leopold was deeply influenced by Arthur Twining Hadley, who was President of Yale University when Leopold studied there.5 From Hadley, Leopold picked up a form of Darwinian naturalism regarding both science and ethics, and defined the truth, following Hadley's pragmatist definition, as “that which prevails in the long run!”--an almost-direct quotation from an important paper, published by Hadley the year Leopold graduated from Yale.6 This influence, when embedded within Leopold's commitment to activism, led him to avoid any distinction between the right and the true: there is only one way to settle disagreements, whether they be about scientific unknowns or value assertions, and that is the method of experience, experience that accumulates gradually across time. Leopold the manager was not a positivist; he was an activist who respected the role of experiential learning across time as the only response both to uncertainty in science and to confusion and disagreements about value. Leopold was a post-positivist, a scientist who embedded science in management, practicing what we today call “post-normal,” or “mission-oriented” science before his time. He was also an experimentalist with respect to ethics, insisting that conservation goals be tested in practice, not just argued in theory (as per the final epigram for this paper).
Here, in Part II, I will summarize my reasons for thinking that ideological environmentalism, and the value theories that support the polarized ideologies essential to it, are bankrupt; I hope they are also dead. Then, in Part III, I will take a look at the bigger picture in resource evaluation, challenging the reader to question the usual assumptions about the nature of environmental problems, arguing that a pluralistic understanding of environmental values is more realistic, and also more functional. In Part IV, I present an overview of the approach to adaptive management that emerges if one rejects positivist science and if one rejects, simultaneously, the ideological commitments to a priori ontological positions about the nature of environmental value. Once a pluralistic value system is articulated, and problem formulation is freed from dogmatism about the one right way to characterize environmental value, it is possible to formulate environmental problems so that we can move toward cooperation and compromise.
If you have visited an environmental website lately--practically ANY environmental website, that is--you are well aware that we are gathered here, at best, for a memorial service. The death of environmentalism has been announced, the obits have been written and published on websites and in print-- environmentalism's wake has been held. An odd wake it was, as some celebrated the life of the movement, or even protested that the reports were exaggerated, even as the Limbaughs and the right-wing bloggers celebrated its proclaimed death. According to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, those of us who are here to discuss environmentalism and its future are just family members who continue for awhile to speak in the present tense of their lost loved one. All that remains for environmental pundits like us, apparently, is to turn to history and try to understand how a once-rich and powerful movement could go moribund, even as our environment suffers insult after insult before our eyes.
In this essay, I offer an alternative account of this death by re-identifying the corpse, and by telling a story whereby death sets the stage for rebirth in the form of a new generation of environmental thinking, what I am calling the “Age of Adaptive Management,” and for a new way of talking about and thinking about “environmental” problems and the values they threaten. What died, I hope, is not the sentiment that favors protecting our natural landmarks, biological diversity, and systems productive of vital resources. No, what ended was not the life of the environmental viewpoint or activity of committed environmentalists. What died was what I call the “Age of Ideology” in environmentalism. My purpose is to sketch the broad outlines of the new Age, by celebrating the re-birth of environmental concern as a commitment to learning by doing.
In my new book, Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, I tell again the oft-told story of the amateur spiritualist John Muir, up against the economic utilitarian, Gifford Pinchot, but I offer perhaps a new twist on the story. While not disparaging the inspired rhetoric of the early years of conservation, I show how its legacy--and the value categories it forced upon us--has been the “Age of Ideological Environmentalism,” which has led to a polarization with respect to environmental goals and environmental values, and to a hopelessly maladapted approach to integrating facts, values, and action in the search for rational environmental policy. Muir damned the dam at Hetch Hetchy and decried economic activity in the National Forest Reserves as evil incarnate, while Pinchot spoke the Gospel of Conservation. As a result, we have since discussed environmental values and goals in a fractured discourse ever since. These fractured languages, and the unverifiable theories that they rest upon, enforce the hold ideology has on environmental discourse. For understandable historical reasons, the early rhetoric and value categories created in these debates have bequeathed to us a formulation of environmental problems as all-or-nothing, zero-sum games, where nature or humans are sure to be losers. These formulations, based on highly questionable normative assumptions embodied in the “original positions” of the two wings of the movement, have ossified within the language of environmental discourse. These ossified categories have in turn led to the ill formulation of problems, and they make any concerted environmental actions in any direction impossible. Communication and cooperation have become unfeasible due to this linguistic and rhetorical quirk of conservation history.
In my book, I propose a new way to talk and write about environmental problems, in a new language that can be embedded within an activist process of adaptive management. My attempt centers on a conscious and detailed attempt to rehabilitate the concept of sustainable development. I cannot, of course, summarize my entire book here, but I do want to emphasize one of its main themes. The advocates of the rhetoric of non-anthropocentric environmentalism-- those who claim that elements of our environment have intrinsic value, independent of us and of the free marketeers, and those who pursue the rhetoric of consumptive opportunity and the maximization of consumer benefits--are equally ideological. The advocates depend upon ontological commitments that cannot be justified by empirical test, which is what I mean by calling them “ideological.” These ontological commitments are a priori commitments that bring with them both their own language and a destructively polarized formulation of problems that prevents productive discourse about how to reach solutions.
I will begin my sketch of adaptive management by emphasizing one important aspect of the thoughts and actions of Aldo Leopold--his pragmatic commitment to experimentalism in management. I believe that Leopold was the first adaptive manager--that he identified and developed the essentials of a post-ideological approach, guided by Darwinian analogies, to environmental decision making and management, even though the phrase, “adaptive management,” was invented decades later by C.S. Holling. By emphasizing this aspect of Leopold's thought--which involves (1) a temporally sensitive, multiscalar interpretation of Thinking Like a Mountain, and (2) Leopold's activism and experimentalism, I believe I can demonstrate that Leopold deserves, despite the tardiness of the label, to be called the “first adaptive manager.”
In the book, I provide additional evidence for my hypothesis, first stated in 1988, that Leopold was deeply influenced by Arthur Twining Hadley, who was President of Yale University when Leopold studied there.5 From Hadley, Leopold picked up a form of Darwinian naturalism regarding both science and ethics, and defined the truth, following Hadley's pragmatist definition, as “that which prevails in the long run!”--an almost-direct quotation from an important paper, published by Hadley the year Leopold graduated from Yale.6 This influence, when embedded within Leopold's commitment to activism, led him to avoid any distinction between the right and the true: there is only one way to settle disagreements, whether they be about scientific unknowns or value assertions, and that is the method of experience, experience that accumulates gradually across time. Leopold the manager was not a positivist; he was an activist who respected the role of experiential learning across time as the only response both to uncertainty in science and to confusion and disagreements about value. Leopold was a post-positivist, a scientist who embedded science in management, practicing what we today call “post-normal,” or “mission-oriented” science before his time. He was also an experimentalist with respect to ethics, insisting that conservation goals be tested in practice, not just argued in theory (as per the final epigram for this paper).
Here, in Part II, I will summarize my reasons for thinking that ideological environmentalism, and the value theories that support the polarized ideologies essential to it, are bankrupt; I hope they are also dead. Then, in Part III, I will take a look at the bigger picture in resource evaluation, challenging the reader to question the usual assumptions about the nature of environmental problems, arguing that a pluralistic understanding of environmental values is more realistic, and also more functional. In Part IV, I present an overview of the approach to adaptive management that emerges if one rejects positivist science and if one rejects, simultaneously, the ideological commitments to a priori ontological positions about the nature of environmental value. Once a pluralistic value system is articulated, and problem formulation is freed from dogmatism about the one right way to characterize environmental value, it is possible to formulate environmental problems so that we can move toward cooperation and compromise.
