Systemic Management: Sustainable Human Interactions with Ecosystems and the Biosphere - Softcover

Fowler, Charles W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019956759X ISBN 13: 9780199567591

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Systemic Management describes a holistic, objective, and universally applicable form of management, providing a framework for addressing environmental challenges such as global warming, emergent diseases, deforestation, overpopulation, the extinction crisis, pollution, over-fishing, and habitat destruction. Its goals are the consistently sustainable relationships between humans and ecosystems, between humans and other species, and between humans and the biosphere. This book presents a convincing argument that these goals, and the means to achieve them, can be inferred from empirical information. It describes how comparisons between humans and other species reveal patterns that can serve to guide management toward true sustainability, i.e. ways that are empirically observed to work in natural systems. This objective approach has rarely been possible in conventional management because sustainability is invariably undermined by conflicting human values.

Systemic Management is presented as a specialized process of pattern-based decision-making that avoids the inconsistency, subjectivity and error in current management practice. It clearly demonstrates how mimicking nature's empirical examples of sustainability can circumvent anthropocentric tendencies to overuse/misuse human values in management, and illustrates the science best suited for achieving sustainability through examples of research that address specific management questions.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles W. Fowler earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1973, has taught at five universities, and currently holds academic positions at two in addition to his position as Systemic Management Studies Program Leader at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center (NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service [NMFS]) in Seattle, WA. His 29 years with the NMFS includes service as chief U.S. scientist to the North Pacific Fur Seal Commission, and as scientist on the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission.

Review:

"This is an extraordinarily important book; it calls for a major conceptual shift away from how we currently view our relationship with the biosphere and forcefully makes the case that this shift is necessary...the book is well written and its case extraordinarily well supported by a myriad of
examples and by an enormous reference list."

--John Emlen, Northwest Science 2009

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 019956759X
• ISBN 13: 9780199567591
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312