Leaving Productivism behind: Towards a Holistic and Processual Philosophy of Ecological Management (original) (raw)

Limits to Managing the Environment

2011

Book Part III investigates some of the limits and contradictions of management of the environment and its resources, through detailed discussions of key dimensions of applied environmental management. This part introduces studies of 1) resource management (rivers as well as recycling), 2) specific techniques drawn on in corporate and public environmental management (suggestion schemes, and respectively, visualisation techniques), and finally, 3) policy discourses (Clean Development Mechanism). The studies presented here are linked by a common thread which recognises that the historicity of environmental management as a social practice requires us to scrutinise its specificity as a practical, social, cultural as well as political achievement. The ascension of science and modernity gave rise to a qualitative change in cultural conceptualisations of the human-nature relationship: nature became an object to be ‘managed’ by so-called experts. By now, however, environmental management has come under critique in that what it proposes as solutions may simultaneously comprise the causes of environmental problems. First, the means used by environmental management can be identified as instances of modernism, industrialism as well as capitalism. Second, scholars of environmental problems criticise the ‘instruments’ of environmental ‘management’ for reproducing the problems, rather than solving them. To examine how environmental problems ought to be approached a critical stance is now seen as essential. Necessarily then, do issues of ideology, epistemology and theory crop up.