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Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management
While many disciplines contribute to environmental conservation, there is little successful integration of science and social values. Arguing that the central problem in conservation is a lack of effective communication, Bryan Norton shows in Sustainability how current linguistic resources discourage any shared, multidisciplinary public deliberation over environmental goals and policy. In response, Norton develops a new, interdisciplinary approach to defining sustainability—the cornerstone of environmental policy—using philosophical and linguistic analyses to create a nonideological vocabulary that can accommodate scientific and evaluative environmental discourse.
Emphasizing cooperation and adaptation through social learning, Norton provides a practical framework that encourages an experimental approach to language clarification and problem formulation, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to creating solutions. By moving beyond the scientific arena to acknowledge the importance of public discourse, Sustainability offers an entirely novel approach to environmentalism.
Emphasizing cooperation and adaptation through social learning, Norton provides a practical framework that encourages an experimental approach to language clarification and problem formulation, as well as an interdisciplinary approach to creating solutions. By moving beyond the scientific arena to acknowledge the importance of public discourse, Sustainability offers an entirely novel approach to environmentalism.
607 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 17, 2021
A discussion of the philosophy of adaptive ecosystem management without a discussion of environmental ethics is nothing more than a waste of words. This discussion is a philosophical integration of human thought and aligns future philosophical thought with the present purpose to contextually define a concept of sustainability.
August 5, 2024
Bryan Norton’s ‘Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management’ is an incredible book. It is, by far, the most thorough and comprehensive look at the philosophy of sustainability and adaptive land and environmental management that I have read. While it is a long book, over five-hundred dense pages, it is very well written, conceptually clear and easy to follow. That said, it is not written in the popular non-fiction vein, it is thoroughly an academic book, and so is for people who are serious about diving deeply into this topic rather than those who want a light overview. It is, however, fairly modular. So, it is possible to read sections of the text and still gain a significant benefit. This means that sections can be used in classroom or study-groups settings.
This book is so comprehensive and insightful that it would be impossible to give a good overview in this short review. But I will give a couple of examples that have been the most helpful to me (I work in this space):
The term “adaptive management” is used throughout the conservation and land management field, but it is seen primarily through an ecological and economic lens. However, critical to the history of the term is its origins in the concepts and science of evolution. Norton refocuses our understanding of adaptive management by bringing us back to that history and what it means to conservation today. One insight that I found particularly valuable was the idea that evolutionary processes both need variation to work from and have constraints on what is possible. This means that actions we take now can open up or limit what decisions it will be possible to take in the future. At a practical level, it is not possible to put everything back in order after some resource has been extracted, especially if that extraction was particularly destructive.
This focus on evolutionary aspects also reasserts the “adaptive” in adaptive management, centering experimentation and the feedback that it provides. Too many land managers, and especially the agencies and entities that they serve, simply monitor the effects of what they are already doing but fail to try new things, and so have little ability to determine the relative effectiveness of those common practices.
Another example of the insight that Norton provides, is his discussion of how we determine and understand value. There has been much work on how to value nature in economic terms, but much less work on other sorts of value. The current default perspective in most cases is that if a value cannot be reduced to economic terms that is not worth pursuing in environmental and land management policy. However, while significant effort has gone into translating values such as well-being into monetary amounts, these attempts often fail to truly account for non-economic values, especially in the long-term (one problem: massive profits from destructive extraction can overwhelm the non-economic values in many analyses). Norton does not provide an easy answer to this conundrum, but he does provide many procedural and community-based ways include voices and values that are not usually included in these discussions.
In Norton’s, perhaps most salient, insight into values, he points out that values are integrally linked to what we measure. If we value dollars, then we will measure in dollars. If we value biodiversity, then we will measure biodiversity. This insight has incredible implications for how we decide what conservation practices are best. It can both shed light on our past successes and failures and give us pathways forward into future practices. Norton is particularly adamant that if communities can translate their values into some sort of meaningful measurement, then they will have much more leverage in shaping conservation policies. These measures do not have to be monetary, but they do need to be tractable. Taking an example from above, we may not be able to translate biodiversity into dollars, but we can still measure biodiversity. So, if a community wants thriving ecosystems they may decide that measuring biodiversity is the best measurable quality to express that value.
I could provide many more examples of the kinds of topics and insights that Norton writes about, but I think the two examples I gave provide a reasonable glimpse into what this book contains. I highly recommend ‘Sustainability’ to anyone who wants to truly learn about this topic, and especially to anyone who is on the front lines of conservation, land managers, conservation scientists, communities of interest, activists and more.
This book is so comprehensive and insightful that it would be impossible to give a good overview in this short review. But I will give a couple of examples that have been the most helpful to me (I work in this space):
The term “adaptive management” is used throughout the conservation and land management field, but it is seen primarily through an ecological and economic lens. However, critical to the history of the term is its origins in the concepts and science of evolution. Norton refocuses our understanding of adaptive management by bringing us back to that history and what it means to conservation today. One insight that I found particularly valuable was the idea that evolutionary processes both need variation to work from and have constraints on what is possible. This means that actions we take now can open up or limit what decisions it will be possible to take in the future. At a practical level, it is not possible to put everything back in order after some resource has been extracted, especially if that extraction was particularly destructive.
This focus on evolutionary aspects also reasserts the “adaptive” in adaptive management, centering experimentation and the feedback that it provides. Too many land managers, and especially the agencies and entities that they serve, simply monitor the effects of what they are already doing but fail to try new things, and so have little ability to determine the relative effectiveness of those common practices.
Another example of the insight that Norton provides, is his discussion of how we determine and understand value. There has been much work on how to value nature in economic terms, but much less work on other sorts of value. The current default perspective in most cases is that if a value cannot be reduced to economic terms that is not worth pursuing in environmental and land management policy. However, while significant effort has gone into translating values such as well-being into monetary amounts, these attempts often fail to truly account for non-economic values, especially in the long-term (one problem: massive profits from destructive extraction can overwhelm the non-economic values in many analyses). Norton does not provide an easy answer to this conundrum, but he does provide many procedural and community-based ways include voices and values that are not usually included in these discussions.
In Norton’s, perhaps most salient, insight into values, he points out that values are integrally linked to what we measure. If we value dollars, then we will measure in dollars. If we value biodiversity, then we will measure biodiversity. This insight has incredible implications for how we decide what conservation practices are best. It can both shed light on our past successes and failures and give us pathways forward into future practices. Norton is particularly adamant that if communities can translate their values into some sort of meaningful measurement, then they will have much more leverage in shaping conservation policies. These measures do not have to be monetary, but they do need to be tractable. Taking an example from above, we may not be able to translate biodiversity into dollars, but we can still measure biodiversity. So, if a community wants thriving ecosystems they may decide that measuring biodiversity is the best measurable quality to express that value.
I could provide many more examples of the kinds of topics and insights that Norton writes about, but I think the two examples I gave provide a reasonable glimpse into what this book contains. I highly recommend ‘Sustainability’ to anyone who wants to truly learn about this topic, and especially to anyone who is on the front lines of conservation, land managers, conservation scientists, communities of interest, activists and more.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews