The Politics of Ecosystem Management
by Hanna Cortner and Margaret A. Moote
Island Press, 1999

   This book has a richness and originality of thought to it that commends it to those who care about natural resources policy. Most books about natural resource policy have short half lives, either because scientific discovery and time have passed them by, or because so many works have a shallowness to them failing to reflect the prevailing political moods that made critical political events possible.

   This is a book that will keep a place on library shelves for many years, not only because of the depth of the references and bibliography, but because it tells in crisp directness and honesty the thinking that defines us as a representative democracy. It speaks to how we have used our Constitutional freedoms to manage and mismanage our natural resources to the point where many thinkers have come to seek refuge in an ideal of "ecosystem management" as a paradigm that modifies and strengthens our collective feeling about natural resources. Ecosystem management becomes a paragon, or driving force, for the way we deal with the concept of democracy.

The authors say at the outset:

"Our task is to place ecosystem management in a political context by asking whether, and if so how, ecosystem management could improve natural resource management by forging more effective political connections among humans, nature, science, and government."

   While Aldo Leopold dreamed his land ethical dreams and was disappointed that they did not come true, this book says that it is axiomatic that if we are to be kinder to nature as a means of saving our own species, then certainly this will lead to wiser and fairer political policies as we work with and try to be kinder to our fellow citizens.

   The book transports readers on an adventure through the possible social, political, economic and ecological play outs of what the acceptance of ecosystem management might finally lead to once the last card is played. It establishes idealistic platforms for wholesale changes in federal, state and local policies. However, political process and theory do not unfold in such Utopian ways. Major policy development evolves more slowly with a brutal, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back manner, than what the authors suggest.

   Though some people will feel threatened by this book, it will be an essential forest policy text, if only because of the richness of the sources it draws from, and the truth of the connections it makes to provide interactions between science, humanity and political idealism.

   For policy wonks who have passed beyond academe' it will be a lifetime information resource. But for those who long for less and less government in American lives; for those who believe land ownership is more sacred than the Constitution; for those who believe that the individual is more important than the community; this book will be a devil to be exorcised.

   No matter where professional policy polarizers may stand, this is a book that will be a frequently thumbed-through resource -- for verification, vilification, and erudition.