Introduction To Environmental Management

Environmental resources management is taught to make certain that ecosystem services are protected and preserved for potential human generations, and also uphold ecosystem reliability by considering ethical, fiscal, and scientific (ecological) variables.

Key Takeaways

• Environmental resource management helps people to identify factors that climb between meeting needs and protecting resources
• Environmental Management is connected to environmental protection, sustainability, and incorporated landscape management
• Environmental Management manages all the mechanisms of the biophysical environment, both living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic)
• Environmental resource management deals with many areas of science, including geography, biology, ecology, physics, chemistry, etc.  

INTRODUCTION

Environmental resource management is the organization of the communication and effect of human societies on the environment. However, the name of the course may suggest the management of the environment itself. It is actually not!

Environmental resource management tries to recognize factors subject to conflicts that climb between meeting needs and protecting resources. It is thus connected to environmental protection, sustainability, and incorporated landscape management. 

SIGNIFICANCE 

Environmental resource management is a subject of rising concern, as reflected in its occurrence in decisive texts influencing total sociopolitical frameworks such as the Brundtland Commission.

Our Common Future, which decorated the incorporated nature of surroundings and global development and the Worldwatch Institute’s yearly State of the World reports.

The environment determines the nature of people. And, how people interact with animals, plants, and places around the Earth, affecting behavior, religion, culture and economic practices is also a concerning matter.

SCOPE

Enhanced farming practices such as these terraces in northwest Iowa can provide to protect soil and recover water quality. Environmental resource management can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. 

It concerns the management of all mechanisms of the biophysical environment, both living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic), and the relationships among all living species and their habitats. The environment also mediates the relationships of the human environment, such as the communal, cultural and financial environment, with the biophysical environment. 

The essential aspects of environmental resource management are ethical, economic, social, and technological. These motivate principles and help build decisions.

The concept of environmental chances is significant in the concept of environmental resource management. Environmental resource management deals with many areas in science, including geography, biology, ecology, physics, chemistry, social sciences, political sciences, public policy sociology, psychology, and physiology.

ASPECTS 

Ethical

Environmental resource management policies are basically driven by conceptions of human-nature relationships. Ethical aspects engage the artistic and social issues relating to the environment and dealing with changes to it. 

“All human activities take place in the context of certain types of relationships between society and the biophysical world (the rest of nature),”

 Therefore, there is a great implication in understanding the principled values of special groups around the world. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought survive in environmental ethics: Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism, each covering an extensive range of environmental resource organization styles along a scale. These styles recognize

“…different evidence, imperatives, and problems, and prescribe different solutions, strategies, technologies, roles for economic sectors, culture, governments, and ethics, etc.” 

Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism, “…an inclination to evaluate reality exclusively in terms of human values”, is an ethic reflected in the major interpretations of Western religions and the leading fiscal paradigms of the industrialized world. 

Anthropocentrism looks at nature as obtainable only for the advantage of humans, and as a product to use for the good of humanity and to get better human quality of life. 

Anthropocentric environmental resource management is therefore not the protection of the environment only for the environment’s sake, but rather the protection of the environment, and ecosystem structure, for humans’ sake.

Ecocentrism

Ecocentrists believe in the inherent worth of nature while maintaining that human beings must use and even exploit nature to stay alive and live. Ecocentrists navigate this fine ethical line between fair use and abuse. 

At an extreme of the principled scale, ecocentrism deals with philosophies such as ecofeminism and deep ecology, which evolved as a reaction to dominant anthropocentric paradigms. 

“In its current form, it is an attempt to synthesize many old and some new philosophical attitudes about the relationship between nature and human activity, with particular emphasis on ethical, social, and spiritual aspects that have been downplayed in the dominant economic worldview.” 

Economics

Take a water harvesting system for example. It collects precipitation from the Rock of Gibraltar into pipes that initiate tanks excavated inside the rock. The economy functions within and is dependent upon goods and services provided by normal ecosystems. 

The job of the environment is recognized in both traditional economics and neoclassical economics theories, yet the environment was a lower main concern in fiscal policies from 1950 to 1980 due to emphasis from policymakers on financial growth. 

With the occurrence of ecological problems, many economists embraced the notion that,

“If environmental sustainability must coexist for economic sustainability, then the overall system must [permit] identification of an equilibrium between the environment and the economy.” 

As such, economic officials began to integrate the functions of the natural environment—or natural capital — mainly as a sink for wastes and for the condition of raw materials and facilities. 

BOTTOM LINE

Environmental management is a prerequisite for sustaining the growth of any business. Environmental management deals with concepts required to make sure that ecosystems are suitable for human development. 

References:

1. https://www.springer.com/journal/267
2. https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-environmental-management

Last Updated on October 23, 2022 by Magalie D.