ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the historical parallels and speculate about how emerging paradigms in the earth sciences may influence resource management. Scientific assumptions about the natural world, in turn, influence societal attitudes toward Nature and natural resources. Of course, resource use and allocation are governed by many factors—economic, political, and religious, as well as scientific—and scientific paradigms are themselves entangled with economics, politics, and religion. Nature was beginning to resist measurement, the earth machine was also showing signs of unpredictable behavior. Like Pierre-Simon Laplace, many modern scientists have continued to embrace the idea that knowing Nature's "rules"—holding the user's manual—will eventually lead to omniscience. Other scientists have begun to question the validity of ascribing even this qualified kind of equilibrium to natural systems. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow writes: Nature reflects the accumulation of countless accidents, not some hidden harmony. Things might have turned out quite differently. Ecosystems are ever changing, dissolving, transforming, recombining in new forms.
