Nature and Bureaucracy

This book questions how bureaucracies conceive of, and consequently interact with, nature, and suggests that our managed public landscapes are neither entirely managed nor entirely wild, and offers several warnings about bureaucracies and bureaucratic mentality.One prominent challenge facing scientists, policymakers, environmental activists, and environmentally concerned citizens, is to recognize that human influence in the natural world is pervasive and has a long history. How we act, or choose not to act, today will continue to determine the future of the natural world. Western-style management of nature, mediated by economic rationality and state bureaucracies, may not be the best strategy to maintain environmental integrity. The question is, what kinds of human influence, conceived of in the widest possible sense, will produce ideal environments for future generations? The related question is, who gets to choose? The author approaches the problem of analyzing the mutual influence of human and natural systems from two perspectives: as an objective scholar investigating bureaucracies and natural systems from the outside, and over the last decade as an inside practitioner working in various roles in federal land management agencies developing policies and regulations involved in the control of natural systems.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of natural resource management, policy and politics, and professionals working in environmental management roles as well as policymakers involved in public policy and administration.

"David Jenkins is an environmental bureaucrat distrustful of bureaucracy, and a scholar who recognizes both the potential and the limits of scholarship and science. He knows that there is no undoing the human shaping of nature, and yet he has written a hopeful book in the midst of ruins."Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Emeritus, Stanford University"In writing this book, David Jenkins has done something I would have guessed was not possible. He writes with the understanding and humility of a scientist, the emotional power of an artist, and the heresy that only an insider could imagine, to outline a philosophy of humanity’s place in and impact on the global ecosystem. Reflected in these chapters is our path to a sustainable future. And he has done this with a book on bureaucracy."David Carrier, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah"In Nature and Bureaucracy, anthropologist and public servant David Jenkins paints a devastating portrait of the ways in which bureaucracies tasked with administering public lands subvert their own missions. By turns candidly personal and trenchantly analytical, Nature and Bureaucracy is the brilliant product of Jenkins’ long career in the US Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘Traditional Bureaucratic Knowledge’ supplants traditional ecological knowledge; ‘efficiency,’ quantitative targets, and simplification obscure the complexities of forests, rivers, fish, and wildlife. With cases ranging from salmon to wolves, Alaska to tallgrass prairie, logging to recreation, the book will be of interest to anyone interested in reading a provocative, insider account of how ‘nature’ is administered in the US today."Judith Shapiro, Director, Natural Resources and Sustainable Development Program, School of International Service, American University

David Jenkins has 12 years of experience working in U.S. land management agencies. Prior to that he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bates College and conducted research at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. His research publications span a range of topics, including myth, social organization, kinship, exchange networks, museums, ethnographic photography, environmental values, endangered species, resource exploitation, subsistence fisheries, autobiography, and the use of mathematical models in anthropology.