ABSTRACT
It is a central contention of this book that the guiding principle for environmental management should begin with the awareness and appreciation that all environ - mental management efforts are ultimately concerned with addressing the ecological crisis writ large. At first sight, the very idea of addressing the ecological crisis seems overwhelming and beyond our individual and collective means, and perhaps rather naive and even absurd. We would concede that it may indeed appear that the task of dealing with the ecological crisis is truly daunting, but we do not agree that it is beyond our means to address it. Rather, we would argue that it is beyond our current and conventionally understood ways of addressing the challenges through existing environmental management approaches. For this reason, we have argued that a new approach is needed based on an altogether different orientation informed by a distinctly broader conception of the ecological crisis and environmental management. In this regard, recall that we have mentioned in the introductory chapter that narrow definitions of environmental management that conceive of this field as a business activity are not helpful with respect to the broader goals of the “management of the environment” or sustainability. Indeed, we have made the case throughout this book that environmental management is a broad, collect - ive, and collaborative endeavour – that it involves nothing less than governance for sustainability with conscious efforts directed at addressing both the root causes and downstream elements of the ecological crisis. With this expansive understanding of environmental management in mind, we propose that a new orientation to environmental management must be built on insights from ecological and social sciences – two areas of research that themselves eschew reductionist approaches to the phenomena they respectively study (i.e. ecosystems and societies). We have further argued that this new type of orientation must be imbued with a decidedly critical stance that is receptive to more unorthodox and expansive ways of thinking
about the ecological crisis. The adoption of a broader orientation is necessary to overcome the resistance and inertia of conventional modes of thinking about the ecological crisis, as currently found within the field of environmental management – approaches that typically tend to focus on particular and specific ends to managing the environment in the narrowly defined terms of partisan political and policy objectives. As many of the barriers to more innovative ways of thinking about the ecological crisis tend to be social and political in nature, in this monograph we have opted to focus on and emphasize more explicitly the critical social-scientific rather than ecological side of the equation (recognizing, of course, that the two are intertwined as we have argued throughout).
