Matching standards to performance. The effective environmental manager must be aware of the mandates and professional standards that they and their programs are accountable to, as well as be able to demonstrate the performance and achievements of the programs they manage. Knowing your lateral operational limits and performing effectively and efficiently is not only critical to the career trajectory of the environmental manager but, more importantly, requisite for them to protect human health and the environment.

Chapter 1 introduces the book's key concepts: utopianism, speculative fiction and the Anthropocene. I start by defining utopianism in terms of the "education of a desire for alternative ways of being." The chapter then shows that the current climate crisis necessitates a fundamental reorientation of our cognitive and affective frameworks. This can only be achieved, I maintain, with the help of various kinds of social dreaming, spurred by theory building and storytelling. In a second step, I discuss the background against which my analysis proceeds – the Anthropocene. In a concise fashion, different interpretations of, and objections to, the basic premise of a "human planet" are reviewed. Third, the chapter outlines the disciplinary perspectives informing this approach: political theory, utopian studies and the environmental humanities. Another section covers the book’s methodology and explains two central ideas behind my case selection: constellation and plot line. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the ensuing argument.

Chapter 4 deals with one of the most prominent themes in contemporary utopianism: the notion that science and technology can somehow be harnessed to elevate humanity beyond the current impasse. My argument entails that ecomodernism – the proposition that scientific and technological progress will exert a thoroughly positive impact on the Anthropocene – should be understood as a distinctive type of social dreaming. I analyze this constellation by first reconstructing various theoretical defences of ecomodernism. The chapter thus demonstrates that ecomodernism constitutes a broad movement in which both right- and left-wing defenders of scientific and technological progress have found ideological homes. In a second step, I embark on a reading of what is the most systematic endeavour to fictionally work through the profound contradictions and ambiguities of an ecomodernist response to climate change: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. Robinson’s oeuvre involves a meditation on how an optimistic response to the Anthropocene could organically grow from within the status quo, thereby eschewing both fatalistic resignation and arrogant hubris.

A goal without a plan is just a wish. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, c. 1940

Strategic planning and diffusion of innovations. The effective environmental manager must be able to conduct strategic planning and be able to diffuse innovations into the communities and regulated entities that they work with. Strategic planning is a skill not often taught to, yet often expected of, managers. And getting people to try new ways of doing this is not easy and requires effective planning to accomplish. You can develop the most effective solution possible for a problem but if you cannot diffuse it, i.e., get stakeholder buy-in, and do not create a plan to support it – logistically, operationally, or otherwise – then it will not work.

Situational analysis – i.e., understanding the situation. The successful environmental manager must be able to effectively analyze complex and often conflicting information, directions, and stakeholders when managing the environment. This skill we call situational analysis. This is a skill that requires the environmental manager to analyze and translate the management factors in terms of a situation summary – which issues, legal trends, specific laws, jurisdictions, policy participants, policy processes, barriers to communication are applicable – and make management recommendations to address the situation. This is an “everyday” or field skill that managers should use; however, as you will note in subsequent chapters, it is also closely related to strategic planning. It is a skill equally important to public, private and not-for-profit environmental managers in terms of regulating pollution, complying with regulations and understanding those you wish to influence.

Resource development in unconventional oil and gas plays is sometimes accompanied by unintended earthquakes, known as induced seismicity. To date, the largest such induced events have been the September 2016 5.8 MW Pawnee earthquake in Oklahoma, and the December 2018 5.2 MW earthquake in the Sichuan Basin. These earthquakes were triggered by different industrial processes, namely saltwater disposal (Pawnee) and hydraulic fracturing (Sichuan Basin). Current models indicate that such induced earthquakes occur by activation of a pre-existing fault system due to some combination of increased pore pressure, a change in fault-loading conditions arising from poroelastic effects, or precursory slow fault slip. This chapter provides a tutorial and review of basic underlying principles of induced seismicity and an overview of regulatory measures, along with several current research themes including tools for screening risk and forecasting maximum magnitude. These concepts are illustrated by case studies from the USA and western Canada.