On March 9, Georgia Tech professor Dr. Bryan Norton stepped up to the lectern at the Center for the Arts and issued an unsettling proclamation.
"Environmentalism is dead," he said.
The professor was a special guest and a participant in the "Greener Shade of Blue" lecture series, which focuses on UB's commitment to global environmental concerns.
Norton, a philosophy professor at the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, offered insight from his latest book, "Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management." In it, the author explores a holistic method of dealing with environmental concerns and issues.
According to Norton, the age of ideological environmentalism, consisting of the unexamined commitments and beliefs empirical disproof, has passed. Norton proposed that the 21st century has ushered in a post-ideological mindset, based on an experimental proactive approach to environmental problems.
"If by environmentalism we mean concerns with protecting natural landmarks," Norton said, "biological diversity, systems that are productive to vital resources, then surely environmentalism is not dead."
The past 40 years have seen a debate between the two major schools of thought in environmentalism, ethics and economics.
Environmental ethicists believe that environmental problems are inherently moral problems whereas environmental economists prefer to minimize the moral value and treat them as economic goods, according to Norton.
Norton explained ethicists as following a "chunk and sort" method, in which they attribute intrinsic value to the environment, and economists as using "chunk and count," which affixes a price to the environment.
To deal with environmental issues at hand in this new age, Norton proposed a new perspective that combines ethics and economics. Adaptive management reformulates the problem and accepts the idea that people value nature in pluralistic ways, which include both ethical and economical reasons.
"If we're going to talk about environmental problem(s), we need to take into account values, because you don't have a problem until you have a value at risk," he said.
According to Norton, rather than separating science from ethics, he suggested that a discussion about the environment must embody both facts and values, thus avoiding the reductionist perspectives taken previously by ethicists and economists.
Adaptive management is made up of three major principle: experimentalism, multi-scale modeling and place orientation.
Instead of focusing on "chunks" of values, adaptive ecosystem management depends on "development paths" consisting of a set of choices based on goals to pursue with projection into the future Norton believes.
Part of the approach asks what has to be done today in order to achieve the ultimate goals of the community in a longer time frame. One of the advantages to this process is that it takes into account intergenerational goals, and asks a community what it values and would like to preserve he believes.
Norton, an expert on the topic of ecosystem sustainability, said that sustainability depends on what a community would like to preserve, taking into account the social and political landscapes. Sustainability is a measure of opportunities versus constraints, and a community must decide which opportunities it would like to protect.
"Community values won't go away, but we are shifting from the metaphysical and refocusing from why to what is important for us to measure," he said.
Norton's new approach is not without fail however, and there are many logistic barriers to implementation.
"The biggest hurdle is that ecosystems have their own shape, and they tend to be not the same as the political landscape," Norton said.
Norton said the most crucial factor necessary for adaptive management to be successful is patience, because it is a process that will take years to see the long-term benefits.
"It's not going to be easy," he said. "It's a very complex problem and people always want solutions tomorrow, but what we need is a community sense that it will work eventually."
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
