Natural Resource Management

Origins

The emergence of a rational, systematic management of natural resources can be traced back to the phase of accelerated industrialization of the late nineteenth century. In a period of unprecedented industrial growth, the pressures brought to bear on the supply of raw materials and natural resources by an unrelenting demand intensified the need to rationalize their utilization, so as to eliminate an increasingly costly waste and to allocate them more efficiently. This coincided with a broader tendency toward rationalization, a general social pattern identified by the sociologist Max Weber that emerged in modern industrial [Page 591]societies in response to the large-scale reorganization of production, and whereby goal-oriented rationality was increasingly infused into the organization of social activities. Natural resource management was born at the conjunction of rationalization and its twin process of bureaucratization, which yielded the first bureaucracies to manage nature. Of course, there are huge variations in both the rates and degrees to which the different states became involved with questions of natural resource management—the French state, for example, took a heavy hand in forestry management as early as the seventeenth century, when wood became a strategic resource at a time of accelerated, mercantilist (export-oriented) growth that relied primarily on maritime transportation (boats). These local variations aside, overall it took a certain kind of state, the modern bureaucratic state, to steer the exploitation of natural resources toward principles of scientific management. In the United States, natural resource management was made a federal matter for the first time under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. At that time, principles of scientific management, which combined notions of rational management with in-depth scientific knowledge of the resource itself, were promoted by key figures such as Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the National Forestry service in 1896 and the Yale School of Forestry, who was supported by Roosevelt himself. In Europe, a similar concern with rational resource exploitation transpired around the same period, for example, at the International Conference on the Exploration of the Sea that assembled in 1899, with northern European countries sharing concerns around maritime exploitation. It was effectively one of the first international conferences on a natural resource management question, and there, too, science was entrenched as a basis for exploitation of the seas, laying the grounds for future arrangement for the management of collective resources.

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