Paradigms and Ferrets

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Abstract
Protecting endangered species is a very complicated scientific task, requiring ingenuity and imagination. Yet the organizations to which we have given this task may be little suited to it. Examining the ecology of black-footed ferrets and their near-extinction under government management, the authors question the adequacy of traditional wildlife management approaches whose calculative rationality fails to respond to the often rapidly changing and precarious situation of an endangered species. They argue that a different, generatively rational approach is needed if species like the ferret are to survive. Such an approach would use available cognitive resources better than does the highly centralized approach which wildlife bureaucracies seem to favour. Such organizational checks and balances would provide less danger for blind spots in our perception of the environment.

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