Customer Reviews

The Politics of Ecosystem Management

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This book provides a lot of information for a person not familar with politics and natural resources. Unfortunately, I do not think that this was the authors' intent. For a person familar with this subject, the book just repeats ideas you probably are currently familiar with in a choppy fashion. On top of this, the book seems biased with statements such as "traditional resource managemetn is pragmatic, seeing in nature a collection of resources that can be manipulated and harvested, with humans in control" while ecosystem management "views nature with some reverence and respect for the awsome complexity with which its components are interwoven." Overall, the book is an easy read, but does not provide the reader with much thought or new ideas.

I found this book to pretty well cover the issues without being overwhelming. It is intended to be an overview and the authors provide plenty of cited material for those wishing to delve deeper. I was not familiar with ecosystem management and the book gives a good presentation of the basic tenets, challenges, and suggested prescriptives in a well-organized fashion. I do not believe the authors meant the book to be anything more than a introductory text--it fills this purpose well.

This book, by two former Forest Service employees, provides an introduction to political questions of ecosystem management. The authors don't have a social science background, so they think about politics from the standpoint of practitioners who have learned as they go along.

They begin with chapters on the history of US natural resource management, the theory of ecosystem management, and an alternative approach to ecosystem management that emphasizes community participation and collaboration. They conclude with lots of ideas about reforming ecosystem management. They don't subject these ideas to an analysis of political feasibility, much less economic or social feasibility. As a result, many of these ideas come across as a pie-in-the-sky wish list as opposed to serious ideas for policy reform.

Many of their weaknesses stem from mistaken definitions or poor analytical distinctions, it seems to me. When they say "ecosystem management," they really mean "sustainable ecosystem management" - - an understandable lack of precision but I can live with it. More troublesome is that their ecosystem management entails "socially defined goals" and "collaborative decision-making," among other things. This would rule out an informed, benign manager. Knowing the history of resource management, I understand why they do this - - but it seems analytically messy not to keep "ecosystem management" separate from the *process* of "collaborative decision-making."

Phrased differently, there's a Leftist social agenda in the midst of their environmental policy. I don't wish to argue the social agenda but simply point out that these two agendas do not *logically* go together.

Their collaborative approach could also be criticized. They yield ecosystem management to self-interested groups in the region. Many of those groups wish to exploit the ecosystem economically in some way, from logging to tourism. I don't see how this kind of process leads to ecologically sustainable outcomes, though obviously a participatory process might lead to socially or politically stable outcomes. Cortner and Moote could make this argument, but doing so would require more careful analytical distinctions than they seem to want.

Overall, then, they value community collaboration and have an optimistic view that communities want to preserve ecosystems. I'm skeptical.