Environmental Mismanagement

Context: Eradicating black rats on Palmyra Atoll uncovers eye-opening indirect effects

A perspicacity and intelligence sufficient to the task of successfully and conscientiously managing our natural environment is quite positively anathema to administrative bureaucracies. There is in this a microcosm of a certain functional or instrumental narrowing of representation and behavioural engagement which institutional interdictions tend by reflex to inhabit and quite inadvertently reproduce. The truth, unpalatable as it may be to those who celebrate the endlessly barren repetition and grammatical blindsight of orthodox (environmental) management, is that these natural systems exist at a level of sophistication and complexity that almost entirely beggars the patchwork quilt of chaotic and self-validating bureaucratic processes which successfully percolate to ascendancy in and as human self-organisational systems. The central problem is that our own organisations unwittingly acquire and cultivate the methods and rationales by which their own reproductive, functional success is assured and in so doing almost entirely abstract themselves into narrow and fruitlessly uninspired bureaucratic grammars and machineries of ineptitude. This is a systemic problem and nowhere do we see effective Global solutions permitted to emerge.