The 1970s was a watershed decade for environmental protection in the United States. With the rush of new and diverse environmental laws, new complexities evolved for the management of federal lands and resources while ongoing challenges in environmental inequities were left unaddressed or dormant. The 1990s witnessed focused attention on two distinct and separate sub-areas of federal environmental policy, ecosystem management and environmental justice, to address these challenges and complexities. Both Federal Ecosystem Management, by James R. Skillen, and Failed Promises, an edited volume by David M. Konisky, are unique treatments of otherwise oft-written policy areas. While Skillen’s treatise is a historical narrative tracing the evolution
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For a multitude of reasons, the management philosophy became outdated and failures developed - the old paradigms were insufficient to meet the changing realities faced by federal agencies. By the 1990s, federal policymakers, land managers, and environmental scholars conceptualized and suggested a new paradigm - ecosystem management - to correct prior deficiencies in light of changing ecological, legal and political realities for federal land and resource management and its respective federal agencies. In Federal Ecosystem Management, James R. Skillen, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Calvin College, notes that the new paradigm of ecosystem management would address and correct prior failures through a three-pronged framework of land and resource management integration across factitious jurisdictional boundaries, amelioration of the conflict between biodiversity protection and economic development, and re-structure the process of federal management by making it more collaborative and less hierarchical. Skillen’s narrative traces the emergence of ecosystem management as official federal policy, how it was shaped into two distinct models by federal environmental …show more content…
Through a meticulous account of these arguments, Skillen focuses on a central characteristic of U.S. federal policymaking – striking balances between different and often competing principles, interests and objectives. In the case of ecosystem management, federal agencies found themselves trying to balance prior adherence to ingrained multiple-use principles with the rising paradigm of ecosystem management, while integrating scientific expertise of the ecology with pressure to incorporate direct public participation in the environmental policy process. Skillen wants the reader to come away knowing that these efforts often failed to fully implement ecosystem management as an overarching policy vehicle, yet the underlying principles of ecosystem management are still in existence today at the federal sub-system
For a multitude of reasons, the management philosophy became outdated and failures developed - the old paradigms were insufficient to meet the changing realities faced by federal agencies. By the 1990s, federal policymakers, land managers, and environmental scholars conceptualized and suggested a new paradigm - ecosystem management - to correct prior deficiencies in light of changing ecological, legal and political realities for federal land and resource management and its respective federal agencies. In Federal Ecosystem Management, James R. Skillen, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Calvin College, notes that the new paradigm of ecosystem management would address and correct prior failures through a three-pronged framework of land and resource management integration across factitious jurisdictional boundaries, amelioration of the conflict between biodiversity protection and economic development, and re-structure the process of federal management by making it more collaborative and less hierarchical. Skillen’s narrative traces the emergence of ecosystem management as official federal policy, how it was shaped into two distinct models by federal environmental …show more content…
Through a meticulous account of these arguments, Skillen focuses on a central characteristic of U.S. federal policymaking – striking balances between different and often competing principles, interests and objectives. In the case of ecosystem management, federal agencies found themselves trying to balance prior adherence to ingrained multiple-use principles with the rising paradigm of ecosystem management, while integrating scientific expertise of the ecology with pressure to incorporate direct public participation in the environmental policy process. Skillen wants the reader to come away knowing that these efforts often failed to fully implement ecosystem management as an overarching policy vehicle, yet the underlying principles of ecosystem management are still in existence today at the federal sub-system