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

In The Death of Nature, Merchant argues that through the processes of commercial expansion and mechanization unfolding in the 16th and 17th Centuries, humanity came to experience the world in a new way, as extensively manipulated and controlled by machine technology. As a result, she argues that there was, "A slow but unidirectional alienation from the immediate daily organic relationship that had formed the basis of human experience from earliest times" (Merchant 1980: 68). Partially as a result of this alienation, and feeding back into the decline of this organic relationship, was the rise of philosophical and scientific conceptions of nature as mechanical.

Merchant argues that the emergence of this mechanical conception of the environment and the corresponding "death of nature" enabled a new pretension on the part of humanity concerning our ability to dominate nature. The rise of the machine metaphor, cemented in the course of the scientific revolution, delivered the promises of power and control over a wild, unruly, and fickle nature. At the same time, the metaphor lifted a previously existing "normative restraint" on the scale and type of human exploitation of nature that was based on the image of nature as a "nurturing mother" or "world soul" (Merchant 1980: 20).

An I-Thou relationship in which nature was considered to be a person-writ-large was sufficiently prevalent [in the Renaissance mind] that the ancient tendency to treat it as another human still existed. ... [This] could effectively function as a restraining ethic (Merchant 1980: 28).

In combination with a utilitarian conservationist ethic arising initially as a result of timber shortages in England, Merchant argues that the scientific and philosophical (1) trends toward mechanism and away from vitalism find their expression in the concept and practice of environmental management -- a practice that has an abysmal track record of failure and destruction in its present form.

Merchant thus lays out a historical movement from a relationship to nature characterized by material reverence and restraint to one characterized by a utilitarian pretension to control through scientific rationality. The imagery of nature itself shifts from that of a living benefactor to that of a chaotic, capricious force that can and must be controlled in the interests of order and progress. The controlling aspirations of modernity are brought to bear on nature, as they are on all spheres of life. A number of green theorists have taken up Merchant's themes and expanded upon them.

One consistent and central aspect of the critique of management is that it locates the roots of environmental crisis in the "wider crisis of modernity" (Rogers 1994: 2). The crisis of modernity, concerns the crumbling of those stout walls of scientific certainty and rationality that were constructed during and following the Enlightenment. From this, the critique calls into question our ability to intervene in various systems without unforeseen and often disastrous consequences (e.g. Szabo, this volume). The practice of intervention in both social and natural realms that is based on technocratic managerialism stands as a "ruin on the intellectual landscape" of Western civilization (Sachs 1992a: 35). Bureaucratic conceptions of both social and natural systems as dead matter, or as passive receptacles of management schemes are targeted in these kinds of critiques not only as insufficient for an ecological understanding of the world, but as central to the problem of ecological crisis. Management -- conceived excl usively as an attempt to bring chaotic and wild nature under control -- is presented as the villain of the piece. Management is discussed independently of the purposes to which it is put and of the interests and powers that dictate its objectives.

Specifically, no attempt is made within critiques of management per-se to separate the concept of management -- in the sense of some form of conscious regulation of relations and processes, in this case regulation of relations between humans and nature -- from the form it assumes under various sets of social relations. A major contributor to this problem is that the concept of management as we currently understand it developed in tandem with the currently dominant set of social relations, making the two difficult to separate analytically. This has an analogy with problems identified in critiques of technology. Adomo, for example, points out the problematic practice of seeing technology as a historical force independent of the relations that spawn and condition it:

It is not technology which is calamitous, but its entanglement with societal conditions in which it is fettered. I would just remind you that consideration of the interests of profit and dominance have channeled technical development: by now it coincides fatally with the needs of control. [...] By contrast, those of its potentials which diverge from dominance, centralism and violence against nature, and which might well allow much of the damage done literally and figuratively by technology to be healed, have withered (Adorno, 2000, 160 n. 15).

The Price of Abandonment: Two consequences of scrapping "management"

In failing to make a similar distinction between management and the "societal conditions in which it is fettered," and thereby concluding that the problem lies inherently within the former, green theorists end up with at least two problems. The first is a practical problem: having to define, from scratch, alternatives to modernity and management. Such alternatives are often cobbled together using materials ready to hand in the realms of idealist romanticism and/or spirituality. As a result, they fail to address the material relations in which the alienation of humans from nature is based; the separation of workers from the means, processes and products of their labour power, including the material environment. This trend is reflected in common appeals of some environmentalists who argue that we ought to adopt a reverent position before nature -- that our relations to nature be governed by a sense of the sacred. These appeals are rooted in an extreme form of idealism, implying that humans have the capacity to transcend, through sheer imagination and will, the material conditions that shape our understandings of nature. (2) This is not to say that all critics of management retreat into mysticism in the face of rationalized, centralized, or dominating forms of environmental management. It is merely to suggest that this is an easy path from the identification of modernity and management as the villains of environmental crisis, and one that has been taken many times by those struggling to defend forests, rivers, oceans, and air.

The second difficulty is that critiques of management per-se distract from the profoundly anti-ecological logic and drives of the capitalist system, which orient, channel, and limit the purposes of management. Such critiques also deny the possibility of human organization in construction of a different set of social relations, which could provide the possibility of escaping the anti-ecological relations of capitalism. As Szabo's work (this volume) so cogently demonstrates, critiques of modernity call into question the wisdom and possibility of engaging in any sort of "social engineering." Bauman's work on the Holocaust convincingly demonstrates that the tools of modernity enable the capacity for atrocities on a grand scale (Bauman, 1989). Indeed, we need not look to such extreme cases to see the shadowy side of rationalization, attention to efficiency, planning, and coordination. As will be discussed below, Marx argues that these characteristics of "modernity" hold the promise of liberation from material want ,, yet their "dark side" becomes apparent when harnessed to capitalist relations of production and the necessities of accumulation. Rationality and scientific technique become shackles on the bulk of humanity, creating immiseration and alienation instead of liberation (Marx, [18671 1976).

For Marx, it is the social relations of production specific to capitalism that produce oppression, rather than the generalized application of rationality, planning, and co-ordination -- in other words -- management. This emphasis and distinction allows for the possibility of an organized political project to seize control of the forces of production and for the conscious transformation of the entire mode of production, encompassing objectives and techniques. If the conditioning influences of societal structures on the form and purpose of technique are neglected, then we are encouraged -- if not forced completely -- to abandon the possibility of consciously altering our environment. For example, if we fail to recognize the influence that the capitalist mode of production and its need for accumulation has on management practices, we will fail to see the potential for intentionally changing our environment, including our natural environment, but also our social environment; the social relations in which we live, work, recreate, and die.

Critiques of modernism and its associated projects of management and control stress that the pathological effects of these projects arise regardless of objectives and goals. The implication is that any attempt at rational regulation of human or other systems is doomed to result in a system of domination and oppression, with the extreme cases of genocide and ecocide. We are left to trust that if we leave our environment "unmanaged" and wild, things will work out. One might note that this bears a striking resemblance to the rhetorical devices employed by proponents of neoliberalism, in which a wild, uncoordinated, and complex system is theorized to produce an optimal social outcome. Attempts to organize, control, or fetter the behaviour of system elements are theorized to produce pathological results ranging from unemployment and inflation to Stalinism. Human efforts to socially regulate or consciously intervene in complex systems -- no matter the objectives -- are precluded.

As an alternative, I suggest that there is some value in attempting to salvage the concept of management from its self-inflicted wreckage. The initial step in this operation, I contend, is to create clear distinctions between the idea of management -- conceived abstractly as the conscious regulation of human-nature interaction, and the form this takes in association with capitalist forces and relations of production. However, history makes the creation of this distinction a complicated operation. Management came into its own under the capitalist form of production. From the extreme forms of managerialism exemplified by Frederick W. Taylor's dissection and manipulation of human motion as a component in the production process, management became an integral part of the capitalist labour process. Geared toward control, efficiency, and predictability, management also became integral to the way we relate to our natural environment. An analytical extraction of management, as a transhistorical abstraction, from its form under capitalist relations, is subsequently difficult to accomplish. However, I believe that it is worth attempting, if only because humans and non-human nature do and will interact.

This interaction between humans and nature is the essence of all labour: "Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature" (Marx [1867] 1976: 283). Indeed, Marx argues that it is through this interaction that humans constitute themselves and come to know their world. The conscious and social process of the transformation of nature in production is, for Marx, our "species-being." It is through productive interaction with the material environment that we create, recreate, and express our humanity (Tucker, 1972: 62-63).

Marx's discussions of the relationship between humans and nature in the labour process have spawned considerable debate over of concept of nature in Marx" (Schmidt, 1971). While space does not allow a full treatment of the tricky concept of nature in Marxist writing, a brief comment on the subject is warranted. For Marx, the process of interaction between humans and nature is a mutually formative one. Through labour, both the labourers (humans) and their object (nature) are transformed. The two exist in an interpenetrating and y relation. Some seminal works on Marx and nature (Schmidt, 1971, Grundman 1991) have interpreted this as an argument that there is no such thing as an "external nature." They argue that within Marx's writings, nature is understood as a purely social construction, without any dimension external to human subjectivity. This interpretation is put to use in defending notions of "domination" and "mastery" over nature. In response to this reading, some ecological Marxists have argued for a re formation of Marxist e the onto as to emphasize the primacy of an external nature. Benton (1996) is a good example. Such a recognition would force us to consider the "natural limits" imposed on human activity by external nature. Foster has argued for a more dialectical reading of Marx. He suggests that Marx recognizes an external nature that is ontologically prior to humans, but one whose "limits" are socially conditioned. This, Foster argues, "allowed [Marx] to express the human relation to nature as one that encompassed both 'nature-imposed conditions' and the capacity of human beings to affect this process" (Foster, 2000:158).

As Marx discusses at length in the Paris Manuscripts, the formative process of labour takes place in a degraded way under capitalist relations, subsequently producing alienation both from ourselves and from nature (Tucker, 1972: 56-67). Our efforts to manage and control nature have to be understood in the light of capitalism's alienating character. The way we relate to nature, the ways in which we attempt to regulate our interaction with nature, indeed the way we know nature at all, have been historically conditioned through the act of labour. It is little surprise, then, that our concept and practice of management is so destructive when entangled within capitalist relations and that "those of its potentials which diverge from dominance, centralism and violence against nature, and which might well allow much of the damage done...to be healed, have withered" (Adorno, 2000: 160 n. 15). However, if we hold out any hope for a post-capitalist system, we need to be able to rehabilitate and articulate these withered potentials. Some kind of process to regulate the productive interaction of humans and nature is necessary in order to minimize harm and avoid the destruction of people and their material environment. 'Management' of some sort seems like a possible candidate for describing such a process of regulation.

If a transhistorically valid critique of management can be formulated, then indeed we would be compelled to engage in the struggle to develop alternatives to management. If not -- if our critiques turn out to be directed toward a capitalist form of management -- then we can turn our attention to what it is, specifically, about this form of management that is pathological. In order to attempt such an extraction, the method of analysis Marx uses in Capital to discuss the emergence of co-operative forms of production and the division of labour provides a useful model.

Marx's Method: The example of co-operative labour

As an historical materialist, Marx was primarily interested in analyzing and seeking an explanation for the process of transformation from one social formation to another -- for example, from feudalism to capitalism in England. However, he also devoted a great deal of energy to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. This required that he develop a distinction between concepts that could be validly applied across social formations and concepts that were specific to particular times, places, or modes of production. An example of the former is "labour" -- which is common to every society throughout history; an example of the latter is wage labour" -- which is specific to capitalism. A comparable distinction could prove useful to the way that green theorists assess the role of management in the production of ecological crisis. An example should help clarify this.

In Chapters XIII-XIV of Capital, Marx ([1867] 1976) outlines the development of cooperation, the division of labour, and machine production under capitalist relations of production. In doing this, he thinks and writes about the potential of these forces of production for human liberation while at the same time providing a damning critique of how this potential is constantly thwarted by the relations of capitalist production. This is, of course, representative of the dialectical mode of thinking. While Marx demonstrates the power of social labour relative to the labour of isolated individuals (Marx [1867] 1976: 443-447), he also shows how the forces of production under the discipline and control of capitalist management lead to alienation and to the bodily deformation and ill-health of those inserted into processes of specialized and machine-based labour (Marx [1867] 1976: 448, 482553). As a transhistorical abstraction, Marx argues that:

the special productive power of the combined working day [i.e. co-operation] is, under all circumstances, the...productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself. When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species (Marx [1867] 1976: 447).

As this social power of labour is brought under the historically specific social relations and purposes of capitalism, however, Marx argues that it produces severely pathological consequences for humanity. Workers become "fragment[s]" of themselves (Marx [1867] 1976: 482), and the "peculiar division [of labour]" specific to manufacture "attacks the individual at the very roots of his life" (Marx [1867] 1976: 484). He contends that:

Not only does [the specifically capitalist form of the process of social production] increase the socially productive power of labour for the benefit of the capitalist instead of the worker; it also does this by crippling the individual worker. It produces new conditions for the domination of capital over labour. If, therefore, on the one hand, it appears historically as an advance and a necessary aspect of the economic process of the formation of society, on the other hand, it appears as a more refined and civilized means of exploitation (Marx [1867] 1976: 486).

Co-operation thus takes on a dual nature in Marx's analysis: a liberatory side which sees beyond capitalist control of co-operative production, and a destructive, predatory side in which the progression of co-operation through the division of labour and manufacture are responsible for enormous human suffering.

Similarly, the management of the environment, or, more appropriately, the regulation of human-environmental exchange -- metabolism, in the Marxist lexicon (3) - offers a potential avenue toward the mitigation, if not resolution, of environmental destruction. Human groups, organized and working toward collectively determined objectives, can and do 'regulate' themselves and their interaction with nature. This is what it is to labour socially. It is not inconceivable that such conscious regulation would have beneficial ecological consequences in terms of the development of a practical, restitutive relationship between humans and their environment. However, this potential can conceivably be realized only in the absence of the constraints created by the requirements of infinite growth and capitalist alienation of workers from the means of production. It is the specifically capitalist form of management that thwarts the human potential of aniving at a sustainable relationship of co-production with nature, just as M arx argues it thwarts the full potential of co-operative labour.

Capitalism and Environmental Management

Marx describes in great detail how the capacities and "natural limits" of the human body become increasingly irrelevant to the rate and scale of production with the rise of capitalist-oriented machine production -- the form of cooperative labour adopted under capitalism. The result is bodily deformation and sickness (Marx [1867] 1976: 586). However, he does not conclude from this critique that we must abandon cooperative labour if we hope to minimize the sickness and infirmity resulting from productive activity but rather that the working class must and will struggle to create new social relations in which cooperative labour's liberatory potential is realized. In a similar manner, the capacities and "natural limits" of ecological systems are neglected as they become subjected to the overriding objectives of profit and expansion -- the form of management required by capitalism. This does not necessarily imply that we must abandon the prospect of management. It implies, rather, that any attempt at management, b e it of the "command and control," "adaptive," or "ecosystem," variety, must run up against certain systemic constraints. Political projects aimed at the pathologies of management must thus grapple with recognizing and alleviating these constraints.

There are a number of immediately recognizable characteristics of capitalist organization that we might discuss as likely roots for the neglect of "natural limits" in the production process and subsequently as constraints to a rational regulation of human interaction with the environment. As Foster has convincingly argued, Marx's own works provide a scathing ecological critique of capitalist production (Foster, 2000). This foundation has been built upon by a number of contemporary ecological Marxists, although Ecological Marxists are highly divided on the issue of whether Marx's original writings are "ecological" or not. Marx has been criticized by greens, and by some Marxists, as "promethean" and overly productivist. For one example of such a critique, see Benton (1996) and for a response, see Foster (2000). Castree (2000) gives a good review of the common ground and points of division among ecological Marxists. Kovel (2002) has recently provided what he calls an "indictment" of capitalism as a profoundly an d inherently anti-ecological system. He points to the requirement of accumulation as a central element in this indictment, claiming that any prospect of an ecologically sustainable, managed capitalism is rendered null by the fact that "confinement of any sort is anathema to (capital)" (Kovel, 2002: 41).

Ecological Marxists have pointed out a number of different ways in which attempts to subordinate ecological processes to the logic of capital accumulation have proven environmentally damaging. O'Connor (1998), for example, has argued that capitalism produces a "second contradiction" between the relations of production and "external nature" as a condition of production. According to O'Connor, this is parallel to Marx's "first contradiction," between the forces and relations of production. The second contradiction is supposed to create a "crisis of underproduction," in which efforts to reduce costs on the part of capital by externalizing environmental costs produce barriers to the reproduction of the conditions of production. (4) Soper (1996) looks to Marx to explain the wastefulness and irrationality of specifically capitalist production, pointing to the implicit suggestion in Marx that human production need not be as "rapacious and destructive" as it is under the rules of commodity production. Altvater (1994) examines the contradiction between time and space as constructed under the logic of capitalism on the one hand, and the qualities of time and space required for the unfolding of ecological processes on the other. Foster (2002) has compiled an entire set of essays in Ecology Against Capitalism that set out the contradictions between capitalism and the possibility of sustainability. All of these authors (and a host of others) hold in common the materialist notion that when it comes to relations between humans and nature, the mode of production matters. We must recognize, then, that management as it has emerged under capitalist relations, has been chained to predetermined objectives of economic growth and profitability -- objectives that require least-cost access to a steady and predictable flow of inputs from nature and an available dumping ground for the unmarketable byproducts of production.

In addition to the need to continually produce surplus value, Kovel points to the centrality of exchange value in relation to use value as problematic within capitalism. Exchange value comes to dominate use value as the purpose of production. Since exchange value is a purely quantitative concept, this shift involves the ascent of quantitative and abstract criteria in managerial decision-making, and the almost complete disappearance of qualitative and particular criteria from the framework. As Kovel puts it, "The ceaseless rendering into commodities, with its monetization and exchange, breaks down the specificity and intricacy of ecosystems" (Kovel, 2002: 40).

All of this is to say that capitalist production -- characterized by infinite growth, the requirement of surplus value generation, the separation of the worker from the means of production, and production for exchange value -- inscribes itself not only on human bodies and on nature, but also on the forms of our regulation of the interaction between the two. As the critics suggest, management so inscribed must fail to produce ecologically rational results. However, understanding management as inescapably chained to these conditions is to reify capitalist relations and removes from our imagination the ecological possibilities of alternative forms of organization.

Capitalism as Backdrop

Indeed, much of the critique of management implicitly acknowledges that the problem lies in the dynamics of capitalism, while continuing to lay the burden of environmental destruction at the feet of "management" itself. The positioning of capitalism as an immovable backdrop occurs in a number of ways, largely through the discussion of concepts and processes that are discussed as independent and self-contained phenomena, although they are intimately related to capitalist forms of production. Consider the following passages from Holling and Meffe's critique of command and control:

When the behaviors of people, institutions, or nature violate the norms: desires, or expectations of society, command and control is often sought as the primary solution in an effort to move human or ecosystem behaviors to a predetermined, predictable state. Consequently, much of natural resource management has been an effort to control nature in order to harvest its products, reduce its threats, and establish highly predictable outcomes for the short-term interest of humanity. [...] We dampen extremes of ecosystem behavior or change species composition to attain a predictable flow of goods and services or to reduce destructive or undesirable behavior of those systems (Holling and Meffe 1996:329).

There are a number of ways in which the capitalist relations underpinning management objectives are glossed over in this passage criticizing command and control management. We might ask, for example: Why are we so concerned with establishing "highly predictable outcomes" in nature? Which part of humanity, exactly, has its short-term interests served in the attainment of a predictable flow of goods and services from nature? Whose definitions of "destructive or undesirable" are we working from?

These questions are answered, implicitly, in the passage immediately following the preceding:

For example, we control agricultural pests through herbicides and pesticides; we convert natural, multi-species, variable-aged forests into monoculture, single-aged plantations; we hunt and kill predators to produce a larger, more reliable supply of game species; we suppress fires and pest outbreaks in forests to ensure a steady lumber supply; we clear forests for pasture development and steady cattle production, and so forth (Holling and Meffe 1996: 329).

Here we see that the backdrop to Holling and Meffe's critique consists primarily of the requirements of capitalist production and profitability. A second example appears in Grumbine's proposals for the elements of a viable system of ecosystem management. He suggests that "policymakers must successfully confront issues of population growth and resource consumption in the U.S. Ecosystem management has little chance of success without being embedded in the broader context of reducing growth in industrial societies" (Grumbine 1994: 33). Grumbine includes this as a small aside in his program for ecosystem management, while I argue that it is, in fact, the central issue.

Grumbine's suggestion also alludes to the concept of scale -- a veil which is frequently used to avoid confronting the capitalist relations that lie behind it. In many cases the scale of our interaction with nature -- which primarily occurs through production -- is discussed as though it has nothing to do with the dynamics of capitalism. Luke, for example, provides an excellent critique of the managerial activities of the Worldwatch Institute in his book Ecocritique (Luke 1997: 7594). A major pillar of his critique lies in the global scale of our managerial pretensions of control (Luke: 82-84). Wolfgang Sachs' (1992b) edited compilation Global Ecology provides another series of condemnations of management on a planetary scale. Both of these works draw connections between increasing scales of production, environmental destruction, and managerial efforts to contain such destruction on the one hand, and the logic of capitalism on the other, yet the preponderance of guilt is placed on the mechanistic view of scie ntific managerialism and its hubristic attempts to control nature.

Scale is just one of several ways in which capitalist relations enter the critique of management in hidden form. The interests that management serves and the logic of capitalist accumulation also often appear as an afterthought or as background scenery to the main event of scientific disassembly and manipulation. For example, in describing the "managerial project," Luke writes "By envisioning [Nature] as an elaborate system of systems, [it] can be continually tinkered with...to rationalize, control, and exploit for the benefit of human beings in wealthy, powerful nation-states" (Luke, 1997: 80).

Luke's conclusions relate largely to the reallocation of power inherent in the project of global environmental management rather than to the identification of the roots of ecological destruction. Sachs' volume concludes that such roots are firmly embedded in the soil of modernity and resource managerialism, regardless of the relations of production in which they emerge. Instead, I argue that the rate and scale of ecological destruction, and thereby of our attempts to regulate it, are the inescapable products of capitalist accumulation. To consider planetary management as the root problem, I suggest, is to mistake branches for roots.

Conclusion

The Marxist method of thinking simultaneously inside and outside of capitalism would go a long way toward easing this misidentification. Marx sees and details the gruesome human consequences of machine-production and the specialization of labour. However, he also recognizes this as a phenomenon peculiar to a historically specific set of social relations -- as the capitalistic perversion of the potential offered by co-operation and the power of social labour outside of capitalist relations of production. Similarly, green theorists might benefit by seeing scientific forestry, fisheries management, or soil conservation efforts today as capitalist phenomena. Behind these, in the absence of alienated relations, lies the potential of a rationally regulated, restitutive process of co-production involving humans and nature.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank all those who contributed to the paper. Special thanks are due to Dean Bavington, Mara Fridell, John Bellamy Foster, Beth Dempster, Joseph Fracchia and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The paper is much richer for their input. The author also wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for financial support.

(1.) This is a distinction which was infinitely more blurred, if not non-existent prior to the 19th Century.

(2.) It should be noted that this view is very much at odds with Merchant's discussion of the development of the mechanistic view of nature, which is deeply materialist and rooted in transformations of productive life. The prospect that we might, in the absence of changes in productive life, transcend the mechanical and utilitarian view of nature, is certainly out of step with Merchant's argument about its development.

(3.) For a rich treatment of Marx's discussion of how this metabolism is disrupted under capitalist production, see Foster (2000).

(4.) O'Connor looks at three distinct conditions of production discussed by Marx: urban space and infrastructure, labour power, and external nature. However, Martin Spence (2000) argues convincingly that the second contradiction relates viably only to the latter of the three.

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Author Biography

Mark Hudson is completing his PhD in sociology at the University of Oregon. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (H) in economics from the University of Manitoba and a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University. His research interests include political sociology, the political economy of the environment, and Marxist theory. He can be reached through the Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA 97403 or at mhudson@darkwing.uoregon.edu.