Branches for roots: recalling the context of environmental management.

Abstract:

There is a strong tendency in critiques of environmental or ecological management to disregard social relations of production and the political-economic context of capitalism. Management itself, uprooted from history, is frequently fingered as the central villain in ecological crises. Rather than focusing on management as though it has some defined form and consequence beyond the socially-defined purposes to which it is put, this paper argues that environmental thinkers could [earn from the methods adopted by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Marx thinks and writes simultaneously "inside and outside' of capitalist relations. He distinguishes between historically specific forms of key concepts and these same concepts as transhistorical abstractions. Using this method would focus attention on the material influences currently shaping the dominant form of environmental management and on the historically specific constraints to the development of a 'rational regulation' of human-nature relationships .

II existe chez les critiques de la gestion environmentale ou ecologique une forte tendance a ne pas tenir compte des relations sociales de production et du contexte politico-economique du capitalisme. La gestion, sans ses racines historiques, est souvent presentee comme la principale fautive lors de crises ecologiques. Cet article soutient qu'au lieu de mettre l'accent sur la gestion ellememe (comme si elle avait une forme et des consequences determinees au-dela des objectifs definis socialement et pour lesquels on l'a mise en place), les theoriciens de l'environnement pourraient apprendre des methodes adoptees par Karl Marx dans sa critique de l'economie politique. Marx pense et ecrit simultanement << a l'interieur et a l'exterieur >> des relations capitalistes, en faisant la distinction entre les aspects sp6cifiques des concepts cles, et cles memes concepts en tant qu'abstractions transhistoriques. L'utilisation de cette methode attirerait l'attention sur les influences materielles qui faconnent actuellemen t la forme dominante de la gestion environmentale, et sur les limites historiques specifiques associees a l'elaboration d'une << regulation rationnelle >> des relations entre l'humain et la nature.

Keywords:

Environmental management, capitalism, Marxism, nature, materialism

Introduction

In her powerful work The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant (1980) made the case that the development of a mechanistic view of nature -- exemplified by the metaphor of the clock-work universe -- paved the conceptual road toward human pretensions of domination and control over nature. She argued that this pretension has since become manifest in, and is best exemplified by, modern attempts at environmental management.' In so doing, Merchant influenced a long line of critiques of managerial approaches to ecological crises. The focus of these critiques is on management itself, as a process or activity distinct from the social relations that condition its means and objectives.

In this paper, I argue that although critiques of management are often contextualized to some degree within industrial capitalism, they often fail to recognize the possibility of a non-capitalist form of management, where the latter can be interpreted as a rational regulation of the interchange between human societies and their environment. I present a case that if green theory is to avoid the reification of capitalist social relations, it must adopt a framework which distinguishes between historically specific forms -- in this case the specific form that management has taken under the capitalist mode of production -- and transhistorically abstract concepts or categories -- in this case, the idea of management as it might apply across historical periods and social formations.

This critique involves adopting the same kind of method as that employed by Marx in Capital. In the context of laying out his critique of political economy, Marx thought and expounded simultaneously inside and outside of capitalism when dealing with broad concepts such as co-operative production and the division of labour. He examined these concepts in two ways. First, as common elements of all societies and historical periods -- that is, as transhistorical abstractions; and second, as specific forms within the framework of capitalist productive relations -- that is, as historical specificities (Marx [1867] 1976: 439-638). Application of this method to develop a critique of managerial ecology would allow ecological thinkers to avoid the conflation of a transhistorically abstract notion of environmental management -- as the conscious regulation of human-non-human relations -- with the historically specific form of management that has emerged under capitalism -- a process synonymous with the optimization of pro fit rates and within a time frame determined by the discount rate.

The paper begins with an overview of responses to the failure of environmental management in its efforts to generate sustainable systems of resource use. A brief discussion of Merchant's The Death of Nature follows as an example of critiques that paint management as the villain in the environmental drama. I then discuss the dilemmas that emerge from focusing on management per-se as the root of ecological crisis. In particular, I suggest that the "pathology of management" is intimately related to the anti-ecological logic and drives of capitalism -- a point that appears, if at all, only in the background of managerial critiques. The paper concludes by suggesting that the methods employed by Marx open up the possibility of distinguishing between management as a transhistorical abstraction, and the form of management we experience under capitalist relations of production. This offers the potential for 'rescuing' management as a useful concept and practice, while it simultaneously provides an ecological critique of management's capitalist form.

Death or Rehabilitation: The sentencing of environmental management

The history of "scientific management" of resources from forests to fisheries consists largely of a catalogue of ecological destruction, a point well established elsewhere (see Bavington, this volume). Responses to managerial failure can, for my purposes, be roughly categorized into three groups. First, is a continuation or intensification of the managerial status quo. Here, failure of scientific management is viewed as a result of imperfect information, incomplete monitoring, or lack of enforcement, so advancement is to be found by improvements in these areas. The shortcomings of this response have been amply covered by managerial critics and critics of "command and control" management techniques (e.g., Holling and Meffe 1996). Second is an appeal for a managerial transformation away from "command and control" methods and toward adaptive and ecosystem management techniques (Grumbine 1994; Holling and Meffe 1996). Here, failure is seen as a "pathology" of dominant management techniques in which the tools of " command and control" have the effect of reducing the variation and resiliency of natural systems. The solution is presented as a new paradigm of management that admits of inevitable uncertainty and tailors resource management practices to the realities of indeterminacy (Holling and Meffe 1996: 330; Bavington, this volume). The third response is a fundamental and radical questioning of the entire project of management, be it targeted at ecosystems, economies, or social systems (see Bavington, this volume; Szabo, this volume).

Certainly the status quo response cannot be considered viable in the long term, as evidence of its complete failure mounts in the form of simplified and vulnerable ecosystems, collapsed fisheries, and species extinction. The second response attempts to address the shortcomings of the status quo by recognizing the complexity of ecological systems and calling into question our ability to control and predict system behaviour. It shifts the focus of management from controlling ecosystems to controlling human populations (Bavington, 2003). As such, it focuses on retooling the techniques of management -- shifting from "command and control" techniques to "adaptive" or "ecosystem" techniques -- but leaves untouched the question of whether "management" is a problem in and of itself. The final response calls into question not only the techniques of management, but its usefulness as a dominant paradigm and as a concept. I will restrict my argument to the important questions posed by the radical critique: whether the con cept of management itself is salvageable and whether there is some use in making the attempt. This paper is an initial attempt to enter into this debate by suggesting that (1) there are serious difficulties -- both practical and political -- in attempting to jettison the concept of management; and (2) that if we can distinguish between management as a transhistorical abstraction and its historically specific capitalist form we might more clearly understand the roots of ecological crisis and avoid some potentially dangerous pitfalls. In order to set the stage for these contentions, we need some understanding of the core elements of the critique of management and their implications. It is to this that we now turn.

The Machine Metaphor and the Rise of Managerialism