Theme issue introduction: moving beyond managerial ecology: Contestation and Critique.

In May 2002 at the annual meeting of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC) seventeen researchers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and professional positions gathered to discuss resource and environmental management from a unique perspective. We were interested in questioning and offering counterproposals for what we called managerial ecology. This issue of Environments -- and the following one -- contain some of the papers from the conference as well as invited submissions. This issue, subtitled Contestation and Critique, focuses on a fundamental questioning of the idea of management as it is expressed in managerial ecology. The next issue of Environments will explore alternatives to, and opportunities for improvement within, managerial ecology. But what exactly were we talking about when we questioned and sought alternatives to managerial ecology?

Managerial ecology, as expressed in resource and environmental management has involved the instrumental application of science in the service of resource utilization and economic development. As the environmental historian and ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant (1980:238) notes: "Managerial ecology seeks to maximize energy production, economic yields and environmental quality through ecosystem modeling, manipulation, and prediction of outcomes." Managerial ecology expressed in resource and environmental management is increasingly being criticized both within and outside the academy for an uncritical use of managerial tools and concepts which are often embedded within anthropocentric ethics, authoritarian political frameworks, and deterministic, control-oriented scientific worldviews. The contradictions and problems that are increasingly manifest through managerial ecology have been problematized from a number of perspectives. Some have argued on pragmatic grounds that the managerial drive for control is illegitimat e in the context of complex, uncertain, changing, chaotic, interacting and interconnected systems (Bavington, this volume). Others point to the counter productivity and violence of managerial tools, their simplifying assumptions and embeddedness in capitalism (Hudson and Szabo, this volume). Yet others focus on the administrative mind and its antidemocratic and anti-ecological effects, including issues of power and justice implicit in the history of resource and environmental management (Bavington, Garside, Hudson and Szabo, this volume). This issue of Environments is focused on outlining these problems of management as a guiding framework for environmental thought and action.

In "Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents: Exploring the Complexities of Control, Careful Use and Coping in Resource and Environmental Management," Dean Bavington explores the multiple meanings of management expressed in contemporary resource and environmental management with a focus on the challenges offered to management by complex systems science. He argues that an increasing recognition of complexity in biophysical systems has fundamentally altered the nature of management with respect to those systems. However, recognitions of complexity have not been applied equally to all human beings and their interactions with biophysical systems. When irreducible complexity and uncertainty are discovered in nature there are strong desires to find simplicity and certainty in human beings, their behaviours, attitudes and values, to shore up the possibility of management

Mark Hudson argues against claims that place management at the root of the ecocrisis in his paper "Branches for Roots: Recalling the Context of Environmental Management." According to Hudson, it is the relations of capitalism and not management itself that ultimately lies at the roots of many of the problems identified by critics of managerial ecology. By understanding the limits placed on human-nature interactions by capitalism, avenues to improve upon, rather than discard, management become possible to imagine.

In "The Obscured Potential of Environmental Politics" Nick Garside explores the differences that exist between ecological administration and green politics. Garside argues that without an ability to recognize the differences between management, decision making and politics, opportunities made available through the politicization of nature will be squandered. He argues that tensions in the environmental movement between the politicization and management of nature should be encouraged rather than ignored to ensure that ecology avoids becoming anti-democratic and managerial.

In "Managerial Ecology: Zygmunt Bauman and the Gardening Culture of Modernity," Mall Szabo explores the horrifying effects of management applied to human beings and nature through applying the work of Zygmunt Bauman to managerial ecology. Szabo argues that managerial ecology reflects the modern emphasis on order and control epitomized in the stance of the gardener writ large. When management becomes dominant, humans and other species identified with social and ecological problems can easily be cast as weeds in need of totalitarian tending. By drawing on the work of Bauman and his studies of modernity and the Holocaust, Szabo illustrates the dangerous potentialities encoded in managerial ecology.

The four papers in this contestation and critique issue bring out the multiple meanings, capitalist dynamics, authoritarian moralism and anti-democratic politics associated with managerial ecology. They caution us in the use of managerial tools as a way to address the ecocrisis and point toward the need for radical alternatives. The papers in the upcoming issue of Environments will build on these papers by focusing on counterproposals and alternatives to managerial ecology through a diverse set of case studies, perspectives and practices from across Canada and around the world.

References

Merchant, C. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, ecology and the scientific revolution. Harper & Row: New York.