Brownfields aren’t bad because they hurt people, they are bad because they are not productive- the affirmative’s attempt is one of managerialism, making ecological capitalism inevitable

Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentality. While voices in favour of conservation can be found in Europe early in the 19th century, there is a self-reflexive establishment of this stance in the United States in the late 19th century. From the 1880's to the 1920's, one saw the closing of the western frontier. And whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist code, there is a spreading awareness of modern industry's power to deplete nature's stock of raw materials, which sparks wide-spread worries about the need to find systems for conserving their supply from such unchecked exploitation. Consequently, nature's stocks of materials are rendered down to resources, and the presumptions of resourcification become conceptually and operationally well entrenched in conservationist philosophies. The fundamental premises of resource managerialism in many ways have not changed over the past century. At best, this code of practice has only become more formalized in many governments' applications and legal interpretations. Working with the managerial vision of the second industrial revolution, which tended to empower technical experts like engineers or scientists, who had gotten their degrees from agricultural schools, mining schools, technology schools like the one I work at, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which prides itself as they say on producing the worker bees of industry. Or, on the shop floor and professional managers, one found corporate executives and financial officers in the main office, who are of course trained in business schools. Put together, resource managerialism casts corporate administrative frameworks over nature in order to find the supplies needed to feed the economy and provision society through national and international markets. As scientific forestry, range management, and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an ethos of battling scarcity guided professional training, corporate profit making, and government policy. As a result, the operational agendas of what was called sustained yield were what directed the resource managerialism of the 20th century. In reviewing the enabling legislation of key federal agencies, one quickly discovers that the values and practices of resourcification anchor their institutional missions in a sustained yield philosophy. As Cortner and Moote observe, the statutory mandates for both the Forest Service, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and the National Forest Management Act, and the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, for example, specifically direct these agencies to employ a multiple use sustained yield approach to resource management. More often than not, however, these agencies adjusted their multiple use concept to correspond to their primary production objective -- timber in the case of the Forest Service, grazing in terms of the Bureau of Land Management. Although sustained help is not specifically mentioned in the legislated mandate of agencies such as the National Parks Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for maximum sustained yield of a single resource - visitor use in the case of the parks, water supply in the case of water resources. So the ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output system. The mission statements of sustained yield pushed natural resource management towards realizing the maximum maintainable output up to or past even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course caused wide-spread ecological degradation, which leads to the project of rehabilitation managerialism.¶ The acknowledgement of ecological degradation is not tremendously difficult. Indeed, the will to manage environments arises from this wide-spread recognition back in the 19th century. One obvious outcome of building and then living around the satanic mills of modern industrial capitalism was pollution of the air, water, and land. As it continued and spread, the health of humans, plants, and wildlife obviously suffered, while soils and waters were poisoned. Yet the imperatives of economic growth typically drove these processes of degradation until markets fell, technologies changed, or the ecosystem collapsed. At that juncture, business and government leaders, working at the local, regional, and national level, were faced with hard choices about either relocating people and settlements in industry to start these cycles of degradation anew, or maybe rehabilitating those existing economic and environmental assets to revitalize their resource extractive or commodity producing potential. Rehabilitation management then is about keeping production going in one way or another. Agricultural lands that once produced wheat might be turned to dairy production or low-end fibre outputs. Polluted water courses, poisoned soils, and poverty-stricken workers can all be remobilized in environmental rehabilitation schemes to revive aquatic ecologies, renew soil productivity, and replenish bank accounts. The engagements of rehabilitation management are to find a commodifiable or at least a valuable possibility in the brown fields of agricultural excess and industrial exhaustion. Even after decades of abuse, there are useful possibilities that always lie dormant in slag heaps, derelict factories, overused soil, polluted waterways, and rust belt towns. Management must search for and then implement strategies for their rehabilitation. Such operations can shift agricultural uses, refocus industrial practices, turn lands into eco-preserves, and retrain workers. But the goals here are not return ecosystems to some pristine natural state. On the contrary, its agendas are those of sustaining the yields of production. Of course, what will be yielded and at what levels it is sustained and for which environmental ends all remains to be determined. On the one hand, the motives of rehabilitation management are quite rational, because these moves delay or even cancel the need to sacrifice other lands, air, and soil preserves at other sites. Thus nature is perhaps protected elsewhere or at large by renewing industrial brown fields in agriculturalized domains for some ongoing project of industrial growth. On the other hand, rehabilitation managerialism may only shift the loci and the foci of damage, rehabilitating eco-systemic degradation caused in one commodity chain, while simply redirecting the inhabitants of these sites to suffer new, albeit perhaps more regulated and rational levels, of environmental contamination in other commodity chains. If one doesn't want to rehabilitate what has been ruined, one can then perhaps get into restoring it.¶ So a restoration managerialism is a recognition that lies at the root of many environmental problems that has sparked a reaction so intense that many called for going beyond rehabilitation and returning to some status quo anti. The call is first stop exploiting nature's endowments, and then move towards restoring those sites in systems that have been most abused. Ecological restoration, however, is a very tricky proposition, because what is to be restored? How will it be reclaimed? Who must revive what has been damaged, and exactly which prior state of existence is to be privileged as the state of restoration? Most appeals for restoration are made on aesthetic grounds. But restoration management has also developed more macrological engagements for maintaining the integrity of the earth's carrying capacity. In this respect, restoration managerialism focuses upon mobilizing all of the biological, physical, and social sciences to address the major economic and political affects of current environmental problems. Their resourcifications allow ecosystem managers to infrastructuralize all of the earth's ecologies in the name of an almost complete restoration for some biomes, bioregions or biosystems. The earth becomes, if only in terms of contemporary technoscience, an immense terrestrial engine. Serving as the human race's ecological support system, it has, with only the occasional localized failures (as restorationists like to say), provided services upon which human society depends consistently and without charge. As the environmental infrastructure of technoscientific production, the earth then can continue to generate these ecosystem services or their derivative products of natural systems, but only if they are restored. So this complex system of systems is what must survive, and its outputs include of course what we know: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, the capture of solar energy, the conversion of that solar energy into biomass, the accumulation, purification and distribution of water, the control of pests, the provision of a genetic library, the maintenance of breathable air, the control of micro and macro climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species, development of buffering mechanisms in eco-catastrophes. And, at the end of the day, some aesthetic enrichment to make it all seem worthwhile. Because it is the true capital stock of trans-national enterprise, the planet's ecology requires such highly disciplined treatment in order to restore some of its original capacities, and then guide perhaps its subsequent sustainable use. Restoring as much or as many as possible of these ecosystems is very important, because it might even bring back some almost extinct ecosystems to enlarge our existing carrying capacity. That in turn leads to another engagement, which is renewables managerialism.