THE COMING CHANGE IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION PARADIGM

摘要

Human beings have long regarded nature as a hostile power, as both an unpredictable and alien force. Securing food and shelter was an arduous and indeed often dangerous task. More recently, with the growth in human population and the emergence of powerful technologies, we have started to regard nature as a material resource to be exploited for substantial gains. Exploiting nature was the main goal of military conquest and of industrial and commercial development. With the overexploitation of certain resources, a new way of viewing nature has arisen, based largely on nonutilitarian premises. This view emphasizes the importance of wilderness for aesthetic appreciation and sees nature as an antidote to human activities, as a model of harmony. Alongside these philosophical or cultural motivations, the scientific approach to nature has also been developing a view that divides nature into inventories of objects for classification and description. The scientific foundation of environmental management is a recent development, and attempts at environmental protection were based on separating selected areas from human interference. This notion of environmental protection motivated the initial creation of reserves and national parks. Such conceptions have been key to conservation in the twentieth century, with nonutilitarian motives to a great extent shaping the general approach. Because agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, industry, urbanisation and trade exploited nature and visibly disturbed and impoverished biodiversity, their expansion was considered hostile to conservation. Prior to an understanding of such basic ecosystem processes as energy flows, material cycles and their ecosystem control mechanisms, as well as of the transfer of information (e.g. the mechanisms of evolution), there was no ground for reconciliation of human economic activity with environmental protection. Environmentalists claimed that economic activity, for instance, farming, and environmental protection are inherently contradictory. Therefore economic activity and environmental zones should be territorially separated, implying that wilderness can be protecteded only in areas shielded from human economic activities. Such convictions shaped the paradigm of environmental protection for the first three quaters of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the ninth decade of this century, it was recognized that there was a need to change this environmental paradigm (IUCN 1980, Clark and Munn 1986, Brundtland 1987). The reasons for this change will be discussed below, together with some of the implications that this change has on the formulation of a new paradigm. But first a short analysis of modern trends in ecology will be presented.