On May 12, 2009, President Barak Obama issued Executive Order No. 13508 to address protection and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay is in bad shape and getting worse. Something more needs to be done, and the order proclaims "a renewed commitment" on the part of the federal government toward that end. Bravo! But how will the federal government approach the task? The order makes clear that the future of the Bay depends on two themes of governance: ecosystem management to establish the substantive context; and adaptive management to design the method of implementation.

There is no getting around the practice of ecosystem management for such an undertaking. Not a cubic millimeter of the earth's biosphere is untouched by the human species. Like it or not, this means that the entire enterprise of environmental law is an exercise in ecosystem management. Here, I use ecosystem management in its broadest sense. Any effort of environmental law to regulate human behavior toward the environment has at least as part of its direct or indirect motivation the goal of changing ecological conditions and managing that change, usually, we like to think, for the better. What is "better," of course, and how to make it so are normative questions we hammer out through political, judicial, administrative, and other legal institutions. But any way you cut it, this is what environmental law is about: changing something about some condition in the biosphere. Even "protecting" or "preserving" what we identify as "natural" or "native" about some spot within the biosphere fits in this realm--it is all ecosystem management. Fittingly, therefore, President Obama's Chesapeake Bay order includes provisions directing federal agencies to provide "decision support for ecosystem management."