A New Vanguard for the Environment: Grass-Roots Ecosystem Management as a New Environmental Movement

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By this: publisher
In this Subject: Ecology ,&nbsp; Economics
By this author: Weber E. P.

Author: Weber E. P.

Source: Society and Natural Resources, Volume 13, Number 3, 1 April 2000 , pp. 237-259(23)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

The emergence of hundreds of rural, place-based, grass-roots ecosystem management (GREM) efforts across the United States constitutes a new environmental movement that challenges the fundamental premises of existing natural resources and public lands institutions. This article establishes GREM as qualitatively distinct from prior American environmental movements and as a fundamentally different approach to the environmental problematique, which relies on decentralization, collaboration, citizen participation, and a holistic worldview that seeks to simultaneously promote environment, economy, and community. GREM is compared with the three major American environmental movements preservation, conservation, and contemporary along several dimensions: ideology, movement character, preferred institutions, and approach of each to science, technology, and the question of limits to growth. While not all aspects of GREM are new, it is a grand synthesis that borrows readily from past movements, adds new ideas and approaches to environmental management, and transforms the whole into a distinctive movement worthy of study.

Keywords: CITIZEN; PARTICIPATION; COLLABORATION; CONSENSUS; ENVIRONMENTAL; MOVEMENT; FOLK; KNOWLEDGE; GRASS-ROOTS; ECOSYSTEM; MANAGEMENT; IDEOLOGIES; INSTITUTIONS; NATURAL; RESOURCES; PUBLIC; MANAGEMENT; SUSTAINABLE; DEVELOPMENT