During the early 1980s, there was an increasing focus on environmental and biosphere changes caused by human activities. Despite doomsayers being viewed as overtly pessimistic by the early 1980s, environmental issues became more highly publicised, which in turn fuelled political acknowledgement. As a backlash against the ecocentric philosophers of the 1970s, anthropocentric arguments became a significant discourse during the early 1980s (Hay 2002).
According to Dryzek (1997) the distinction between the two decades could not have been more distinct, with the arrival of the 1980s as the era of cornucopia, or denial of environmental limits. The term cornucopia encompassed unlimited natural resources, unlimited ability of natural systems to absorb pollutants, and unlimited corrective capacity in natural systems. The BRP, however, did not align with denials of environmental limits and continued with a precautionary approach centred on research. Other scholars including Lockwood (2007) suggest that this description of the 1980s is too negative, arguing that the largest expansion of Australia’s protected area network occurred during this decade. However, the rapidity of protected area expansion arguably may have been an opposite and balancing response to heavy-handed development which Dryzek (1997) describes. Clearly, two opposing and equally important modalities were in co-occurrence: development on the one hand and conservation on the other.
This plurality was reflected in the BR lexicon concerning resource management and ecological community. Engel (1987) suggests that the two value-laden languages competed with each other. What the languages represented were the two distinct themes of humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature, which could be traced back to the beginning of the conservation movement. At this time the language of resource management dominated. The language of BRs, along with most other United Nations and national government literature regarding the environment, reflected the resource discourse. Words such as management, production, control, objectives and systems were common, where ‘the basic image of this language is the management of nature as a resource or means for sustainable human economic development’ (Engel 1987: 23). Engel therefore suggested that the exclusive reason for biological conservation was for utilitarian purposes.
However, the discourse of ecological community was also present, at a deeper level, typically stressing the importance of local community representation in decisions affecting reserves, the equitable sharing of benefits by local communities, and the integration of cultures and bioregions (see (Gregg and McGean 1985; Batisse 1984; Halffter 1981). Krugman and Gregg (1988) argue that the WNBR thus became concerned with developing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to integrate conservation and economic uses of ecosystems locally; to serve as hubs for regional
73 cooperation on scientific and educational activities; and contribute information for addressing multi- regional and global environmental problems.
Concurrently, the fight to defend the intrinsic value of wilderness continued throughout the 1980s. Hay (2002) proposed that wilderness-inspired environmentalism, from the outset, faced political challenge as proponents essentially argued against the public-good.27 By suggesting that wilderness contained intrinsic value, without reference to its use-value for humans, a fundamental notion was challenged.28
Wilderness provided the centre-stage for a battle waged over a longstanding assumption within western thought: the planet and its bounty were the domain of human beings, with all other entities having little or no moral standing. Hay (2002) considers that the keystone of the environment movement may well be to defend the existential interests of other life forms. If true, the environment movement found firm establishment in the ethically-centred debate for wilderness in the early to mid 1980s.
Wilderness, or the variously contested meanings of nature at this time were well represented as the core zones of BRs. The designation of a core area signified the import of ecological communities, but also recognised the more abstract opportunity for entering into a dialogue with the natural order: a place to re-establish a sense of the human belonging in the ecological community. Buffer and transition zones provided different examples of community, perhaps through that of the garden, farm or town, each symbolising mixed communities of humans, animals and plants (Engel 1987).
The term sustainable development entered the international conservation lexicon in 1987, triggered by the Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Lafferty (1998) iterated a widely held belief that the Brundtland Report was the first internationally sanctioned document attempting to elaborate a concept of physical-biological-social maintainability, attached to the relationship between nature, human welfare and society. However, BRs had been enunciating the very same agenda throughout the 1980s. Sustainable development was defined by the Commission as:
… development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of
27 By arguing for purist wilderness, disassociated from humans. 28
Opposing discourses to globalisation were evident and provided the early and strong foundation for globalisation counter movements. These included an emerging ecological world polity, incorporating a sense of collective selfhood and solidarity, and imposed limitations on human society. Federalism, as the ideal of decentralised self-governing local polities, became more prominent within such discourses (Hay 2002). Other more religiously and ethically oriented discourses sought to disregard the global exchange economy and build more communally responsible patterns of human association. In this area of discourse, bioregionalism continued to grow as theory and practice, however, remaining place-specific rather than being recognised by the broader environmental movement.
74 technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs (OCF 1987: 43).29
Importantly for BRs, the Brundtland Report called for non-conventional protected areas. By this time there were already 260 BRs established in over 70 countries. In fact, the new ideology of sustainable development in the Brundtland Report had been advocated almost 20 years earlier at an intergovernmental level by the 1968 Biosphere Conference. This remained largely unnoticed until the late 1990s.
A shift was evident, from the directive of the MAB Program, the intergovernmental discussions on ‘sustainable development’ and the emerging environmental discourses around globalisation, that the human component of environmentalism was not to be ignored. Yet, the focus on this human component was no longer the doomsayer version. Rather it was an information-seeking, technologically-supported positivism suggesting that economic growth, along with conservation could co-exist. Davison (2001:15) argues that the 1980s:
… affirmed not the existence of ecological and social limits, but the ‘need’ to wrest control of our future from arbitrary ecological forces, placing our destiny squarely in the hands of progressive, efficient global managers. Our Common Future undermined limits to growth arguments by placing at the centre of the language of sustainable development the following questions: How is economic growth and technological expansion to be sustained?
Commensurate with these ideas, urban ecology and the eco-city movement arrived at a timely nexus in the late 1980s. Roseland (1997a) suggests that urban ecology debuted with the 1987 publication of Richard Register’s Eco-city Berkley, which discussed the ecological rebuilding of Berkley, USA. In fact, the discipline of urban ecology, and later of eco-cities, was the combined manifestation of a number of commensurate disciplines that had each been developing relatively independently, gaining particular relevance and support throughout the 1980s.
However, Pakulski and Tranter (2004) suggest, that by 1988 in Australia, the environment was not a major civil society concern. Rather, environmental concern was concentrated in a minority: young, educated city-dwellers. The role of the media was significant in changing the general perception of the environment. In 1989-90 a suite of incidences including oil spills, irregular weather patterns and toxic pollution reached front-page headlines of national newspapers. Moreover, the federal election campaign included environmental issues indicating that the political mainstream recognised the environment alongside the mainstay issues of health, education and defence. Suddenly, with environmental matters making headlines, issues that had been building for decades now appeared regularly in a variety of civil society arenas, for example as constituents of corporate reporting, best practice management and environmental accounting. However, such perception would soon change with coverage of the environment transitioning from sensational to mainstay.
According to Roseland (1997b), the following discourses became important during the 1980s, informing BRs and to some extent the WNBR and which remain today, significant in their own right.
75 First, appropriate technology, uses the best modern knowledge that is both ecologically compatible with its local setting and utilises minimal resources. The technology is human-serving, supportive of self-reliance and local community. Examples include passive solar design and roof-top gardens. Second, community economic development, concerned with communities initiating and generating their own solutions to their common economic problems and thereby building long-term community capacity and fostering the integration of economic, social and environmental objectives. Third, social ecology (as introduced in Chapter 1) involves the study of both human and natural ecosystems, and particularly the social relations that affect the relation of society as a whole with nature. It advances a holistic world-view, appropriate technology, reconstruction of damaged ecosystems, and creative human enterprise. Fourth, the green movement, with four pillars of ecology, social responsibility, grassroots democracy, and non-violence. These translate into questioning many assumptions about the rights of land ownership, the permanence of institutions, the meaning of progress and the traditional patterns of authority within society. Fifth, bioregionalism, concerned with deep connections to place and bioregional practice is oriented toward resistance against the continuing destruction of natural systems. Bioregionalism considers people as part of a life-place that is organised around a bioregion considered the right size for human-scale organisation, contributing to a natural framework for economic and political decentralisation and self-determination. Sixth, sustainable development, as defined in Our Common Future, gave credibility to the concept, representing a hopeful new approach to ethics, politics and economics.