This case study incorporates the different plans discussed in Chapter 7 and the diffusion of an environmental innovation. This is a case history demonstrating how change agents working with the EPA developed and implemented Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in schools in 41 states in 18 years and how, for more than a decade, School IPM became a national initiative. The case study first appeared in A Worm in the Teacher’s Apple: Protecting America’s School Children from Pests and Pesticides (Lame 2005)

Chapter 2 sets the stage for the analysis of my three cases, by delineating an account of utopianism that manages to withstand the objections raised by anti-utopian critics, both from the Left and the Right. I hold that these detractors miss their target insofar as they fail to acknowledge the actual complexity of utopianism. While utopias can, under specific circumstances, turn out to be impractical or dangerous, it is wrong to assume that this is necessarily and always the case. Drawing on groundbreaking work in utopian studies, I thus claim that anti-perfectionist utopias set into motion forms of social dreaming that productively educate our desire for things to be otherwise. The chapter then continues by investigating what can be considered utopianism’s paramount function: the production of estrangement. In a further step, I scrutinize the other two purposes that utopian visions of the Anthropocene cater to, namely galvanizing (eutopias) and cautioning (dystopias) an audience. Chapter 2 ends with an intermezzo elaborating on utopian practices – social experiments that perform collective life “against the grain.”

Be still and the earth will speak to you … Carl Moon – Navajo Nation, 1904

Matching legal authority to environmental goals. To develop and learn the language of the environmental management profession, with a specific focus on the terms and concepts of environmental law, to memorize the intent and major provisions of each environmental law, and to be able to compare and contrast the laws and their provisions for more effective and efficient diagnosis. Mastering this skill will enable the professional to better understand their legal accountability and the “arena” – i.e., the areas of operation and expectations of their work delimited by legal statutes – in which they are managing. In other words, to be able to respond to opposition and take advantage of opportunities.

Balancing internal and external resources. Environmental management is about people management. In thewe discussed managing employees that work directly for you, be they full-time or part-time employees. But often the environmental manager will also have to manage contract workers, meaning non-full-time employees that are often hired for a specific project or task and are not integrated into the functioning, culture, and fabric of an organization. Some contracts last weeks, while others last years, often filling a gap in the organization’s capacities for that specific project. Contractors can be a great asset by augmenting the capabilities of an organization, but they can also become intractable to manage, resulting in a host of factors for the environmental manager to monitor and manage.

Policy Entrepreneurship. The effective environmental manager must also be a policy entrepreneur and be able to surf. Policy entrepreneurship allows the environmental manager to either innovate new policies for more effective execution of their role or new practices to better carry out the policies they are accountable to. Surfing is the process by which the manager understands and can navigate the contexts they work within to recognize opportunities and set themselves or their organization up to catch the wave.

Identify, analyze and prioritize how environmental issues and legal trends impact your program, resource and political management. More specifically, how the environmental manager can protect their program by getting their “ducks in a row.” It is critical that the environmental manager know the key issues and legal trends in the profession to effectively accomplish their, and their institution’s, mission effectively and efficiently. Understanding these issues will allow the environmental manager to ensure they are not only complying with the law but also with the expectations and needs of the citizenry they serve.

One finger cannot lift a pebble. Hopi proverb

Leadership. Integrating and applying previous skills while taking calculated risks so as to inspire. Just as the effective environmental manager has to manage programs, resource distribution, and many other factors, so too they have to manage the experts they supervise, contract, or otherwise engage. The experts employed by the environmental manager may themselves be managers but most often they are charged with a specific function that they either have substantial experience doing, have a relevant academic or professional degree or certification for, or often both. The experts often know what the right thing is or at least the right process by which things ought to be done. It is up to the environmental manager to lead them to doing it and to manage the contexts such that their efforts are facilitated – i.e., to enable them by reducing distractions and barriers.

Science is the key foundation of everything EPA does. Science has defined the challenges, pushed the discoveries, it has operated as the foundation to design new solutions … it has been EPA’s professor, our prosecutor and our protector.

Navigating the environmental regulatory infrastructure to analyze and utilize governmental relationships. The environmental manager must learn the language of environmental management and how to communicate with their stakeholders, particularly when navigating the complex and often muddled infrastructure of the national to local environmental regulatory infrastructure. Communicating across stakeholders and integrating voices and perspectives from diverse participants, while being open and transparent with all processes, decisions, and action, is a key skill requisite of the effective environmental manager.

Think forward to be most effective today. Lessons and experience from the past should inform the decisions of today but those decisions must be made anticipating future conditions. The demand for the services and broad functionality of the environmental manager are only increasing. Thinking and planning for future contexts while considering the lessons, knowledge, and experiences of the past, all to produce the best practices for today, is essential for the effective environmental manager. Identifying, assessing, and orienting on future trends is critical to ensuring your program is operating with the most up-to-date and relevant technology and design; the environmental manager should embrace them and prepare for them.

Chapter 5 turns to a much bleaker vision of the Anthropocene: the widely shared suspicion that catastrophe is all but inevitable. In this part of the book, I attend to various dystopian visions of our climate-changed world, by first delivering a historical overview according to which the apocalypse's construal in public discourse has recently undergone significant transformations. Dystopias perform one major function in this context - they warn an audience about existential threats that are imminent, but whose true causes still remain concealed from public purview. In the case of climate change, we ought to distinguish more specifically, I suggest, between cautionary and post-cautionary narratives. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy navigates this divide by probing where grave dangers might erupt from within the status quo, without suffocating the desire for alternative ways of being and living. Atwood’s books are so insightful because they move back and forth between a storyline that traces how the environmental catastrophe came about and another one that unravels the surprising ways in which the surviving humans collaborate with other species to build a common future.

In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.