Environmental Pragmatism, Adaptive Management, and Cultural Reform

In defending a problem-based strategy of ethics against cosmological strategies, environmental pragmatists have presented ecological management as a model of adaptive social learning. However, management frameworks appear incapable of critiquing and changing moral culture in the ways that seem necessary for confronting difficult sustainability problems. I show how a problem-based approach to sustainability challenges can create a productive relation between science-based management programs and cultural reform processes, if it admits roles for ontological arguments and attends to minority moral communities. In order to respond to the sustainability crises, ecological managers must become skilled participants in moral culture, facilitating the inventiveness of agents who can make moral inheritances support new strategies of action.