Management of place
It has been said that that it is perceptions which influence decisions in environmental management rather than the actual environmental factors which occasion them.
The particular way that groups and individuals perceive their environment and manage it involves their shared beliefs and values, ideologies and philosophies. These constitute an irrational element in perception and decision making.  The influence will not be measurable or predictable. It has been proposed to deal with it by regarding it as an 'indeterminate element' within a set of elements that can be determined. This means management decisions are made within a defined culture framework within which the decisions will take effect.  There is a screen of values through which the environment is perceived. 
Cybernetics has shown that there is only one way to manage a system, and that is via a control mechanism 'which operates by detecting data essential to the maintenance of the system's stable relationship with its environment...' The data can be resolved into a 'model or set of instructions' which ensures the normal day-to-day behaviour of a biological organism conforms to a norm The subjective response of humankind is to be regarded as a random statistical element in an otherwise predictable model that produces a deviation from the norm.  For a social organism such a model or template is the society's world-view, and in pre-industrial societies the main control was religion.
Religion governs the behaviour of tribal people, who do not treat their environment simply as a resource to satisfy short-term needs. Through animism and the like they sanctify it. The absence in industrial society of a religion which provides a goal structure enabling it to achieve a stable relationship with its environment drives that society towards discontinuity and disintegration.
Religion can ensure that society's basic structure is maintained.  It admirably satisfies cybernetic requirements. Religion encourages some order in differentiated and structured traditional societies. It gives the stability which the social ecosystem needs; it ensures that everyone can have a complete model of the environment and a corresponding strictly prescribed behaviour pattern.  Religion consecrates or sanctifies the generalities of a society's behaviour pattern.
Goldsmith, who is largely responsible for articulating the above view within environmentalism, forecasts that with increased industrialisation and increased recognition that a materialist paradise is unattainable will come
'a growing number of Messianic movements which will attempt to establish a new social order based on a new view of man's relationship with his environment. Many of them will adopt at least a facade of Christianity...'
In systems terms, religion will be re-established as a control mechanism enabling the social system to reach equilibrium and stability with respect to the environment.
There are several objections to these 'systems' views of man, society and nature. Some see them as dehumanising and grossly mechanistic, while others emphasise their essential determinism, placing man in too subordinate and dependent a role in relation to nature. 
Regarding the use of belief and value systems in environmental management, we are left with the following unresolved questions:
Can relationships between men, and within and between societies, and between man and nature, be precisely quantified and mathematically structured?
Can culture and values, emotion and irrationality be built into a predictive social model as mere 'degrees of randomness'?
Can religion and spirituality be regarded simply as a control mechanism holding a social system onto a particular course?
Are men and society qualitatively no different from cells or dogs?