Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1. Introduction
Jon C. Lovett and David G. Ockwell
Environmental management has risen from being the task of technical
natural resource specialists to being the concern of everyone on the planet.
This has led to a rapid expansion in the range of jobs dealing with environ-
mental issues. Not only are ecologists, conservationists, hunters, farmers
and i shers involved; we now also have professionals in social science i elds
such as environmental economics, law and politics. Previously a topic that
was dominated by the application and interpretation of technical meas-
ures such as species diversity and population growth rates, environmental
management is now being debated in terms such as property rights and
market trading. Sometimes the technical and social aspects make uneasy
bedfellows: for example, ecologically minded conservationists can i nd
themselves at loggerheads with human rights lawyers seeking equitable
access to protected areas for indigenous peoples. In this topic we aim to
provide overviews and specii c examples of case studies and techniques
that are used in environmental management from the local level to
international environmental regimes.
The recognition of a division between technical and social i elds of
study is not new. In 1959 the scientist, administrator and novelist C.P.
Snow gave a lecture in Cambridge entitled 'The Two Cultures and the
Scientii c Revolution'. This focused on the idea that the 'intellectual life of
the whole of western society is increasingly split into two groups', literary
intellectuals and scientists (Snow, 1998). The 'Two Cultures' theme was
taken up again nine years later in another famous paper, 'The Tragedy of
the Commons', written by the biologist Garrett Hardin (Hardin, 1968). In
this paper, Hardin addressed the classic academic divide between social
and natural sciences. He described the gulf thus:
An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in pro-
fessional and semi-popular scientii c journals is that the problem under discus-
sion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be dei ned as one that
requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding
little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
The class of 'no technical solution problems' has members . . . They think that
farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem -
technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found.
(Hardin, 1968, p. 1243)
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