Such evaluations can range from the individual species to populations, communities, ecosystems or the landscape scale. Ecological evaluations can range from inventories of local plants and animals, determinations of reproductive success of particular species, levels of contaminants in organisms, kinds and levels of effects, and environmental impact assessments, to very formal ecological risk assessments for a chemical or other stressor.
While remediation, restoration, and NRDA, among others, are often conducted separately, it is important to integrate them for contaminated land where the risks to ecoreceptors (including humans) can be high, and the potential damage to functioning ecosystems great.
The objective of this paper is to explore the meanings of these assessments, examine the relationships among them, and suggest methods of integration that will move environmental management forward. These include determining status and trends of biological, physical, or chemical/radiological conditions, conducting environmental impact assessments, performing remedial actions should remediation fail, managing ecosystems and wildlife, and assessing the efficacy of remediation, restoration, and long-term stewardship. Thus, a new, ecologically sensitive, and more comprehensive approach to evaluating ecological change would include an examination of the metaphors that motivate the models used to describe environmental change.Įnvironmental management: Integrating ecological evaluation, remediation, restoration, natural resource damage assessment and long-term stewardship on contaminated landsĮcological evaluation is essential for remediation, restoration, and Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA), and forms the basis for many management practices. An adequate, interdisciplinary approach to ecological valuation, requires a re-framing of the evaluation questions in entirely new ways, i.e., a review of the current status of interdisciplinary value theory with respect to ecological values reveals that neither of the widely accepted theories of environmental value-neither economic utilitarianism nor intrinsic value theory (environmental ethics)-provides a foundation for an ecologically sensitive evaluation process. This reflexive building of ecological models is introduced through the transformative simile of Aldo Leopold, which shows that learning to "think like a mountain" involves a shift in both ecological modeling and in values and responsibility. Reflexive modelers are ecological modelers who believe it is appropriate for ecologists to examine the motives for their choices in developing models this self-reflexive approach opens the door to a new way of integrating values into public discourse and to a more comprehensive approach to evaluating ecological change. The positivist view of science cannot capture the essence of environmental sciences because the recent work of "reflexive" ecological modelers shows that this requires a reconceptualization of the way in which values and ecological models interact in scientific process.
Beyond positivist ecology: toward an integrated ecological ethics.Ī post-positivist understanding of ecological science and the call for an " ecological ethic" indicate the need for a radically new approach to evaluating environmental change.
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