12 - Evaluating Ecosystem States: Two Competing Paradigms

Summary

INTRODUCTION: ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND ANALYSIS: A SHARED CRISIS

Environmental management faces a crisis: legislation, high-level committees, and international agreements all urge that natural systems be managed to protect their health and systematic integrity, but these widely employed analogies have not yet yielded a consensus in operational and specific management directives. Inaction may not be an option, however, because observable trends in the quality of the environment are forcing upon us the conclusion that traditional approaches to resource management are inadequate to the problems of today. Thus, while there is a growing consensus among ecologists, managers, and environmentalists that we must supplement traditional concerns for human health with more ecosystem-oriented management criteria, this consensus has not led to major changes in management or environmental decision-making.

Unfortunately, this crisis in management has an analogue in environmental policy analysis, the very place where one might first search for new directions for management. While there exists no shortage of arguments showing why we need more comprehensive, systematic management objectives, there is a foundational disagreement among policy analysts regarding how environmental objectives should be formulated, discussed, and analyzed. I believe these foundational disagreements can best be understood as “extraparadigmatic” disagreements. A “paradigm” is here defined as a constellation of concepts, values, and assumptions, as well as accepted practices, that give unity to a scientific discipline (Kuhn, 1970).