Book Review

 

In Part 5 of Seeking Sustainability in an Age of Complexity Graham Harris tells us that: “Many societies have failed in the past because of environmental problems, but some have survived for long periods by being cognisant of, and responding to, environmental constraints. Whatever we face as a result of our unprecedented interconnection with the natural world, complacency is not a good strategy under the present circumstances.” “It is a race against time to see whether we can avoid past mistakes. Our rapidly increasing knowledge of environmental change is running hard up against cultural, institutional and personal constraints on our responses. Sustainability clearly requires an improved knowledge of the fundamental characteristics of the resources we are trying to manage, together with appropriate institutions to manage complex and emergent biophysical and social entities at local and global scales.” “If there is one message in all this it is that individuals can make a big difference. We can engage in social dialogues and improve our knowledge and capacity for ethical decision making. We can all get more involved in the policy debate. Those of us in resource-hungry Western-style economies can all live more sustainable lives, we can all adopt practices which reduce our ecological footprint and we can all, as Tim Flannery shows, adopt practices that will have only modest impacts on our lives but will have major impacts on energy consumption, the greenhouse effect and global warming.”

 

SEEKING SUSTAINABILITY IN AN AGE OF COMPLEXITY

GRAHAM HARRIS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS                  2007

PART V

Chapter 23: Avoiding Collapse

In his recent book Collapse, Jared Diamond has looked at the fates of many previous human societies. Many societies have failed in the past because of environmental problems, but some have survived for long periods by being cognisant of, and responding to, environmental constraints. Whatever we face as a result of our unprecedented interconnection with the natural world, complacency is not a good strategy under the present circumstances. Diamond catalogues the reasons for failure:

v  Failure to anticipate the impending environmental collapse because of surprise, an incorrect sense of place or other unexpected ecological interactions.

v  Failure to perceive imminent changes because of slow or imperceptible change, or a lack of evidence or a disagreement about what constituted evidence (there is a lesson here about climate change).

v  The application of apparently rational behaviour, often arising from the ‘tragedy of the commons’,

v  Irrational behaviour, greed, poor decisions and denial,

v  The application of unsuccessful solutions.

Many of these we have discussed here; the reasons for the past collapses of human societies are still with us. We are the first generation to realise the true nature and magnitude of regional and global constraints. The present nexus of increasing population, energy and resource demands, climate change and biodiversity loss, together with changing network architectures, increases the risks. Ecological surprise, hysteresis effects, uncertainty and debates about evidence are characteristic of the complex, non-linear world in which we live. The situation is further complicated by the existence of time lags and the perceptual problems of action at a distance. Lovelock takes a pessimistic view of our future prospects in his book The Revenge of Gaia. He sees a world driven towards irreversible warming by positive feedbacks. Whatever the future holds we are rapidly learning about the nature of the world, and the constraints to our possible responses to it, and it is a race against time to see whether we can avoid past mistakes. Our rapidly increasing knowledge of environmental change is running hard up against cultural, institutional and personal constraints on our responses. Sustainability clearly requires an improved knowledge of the fundamental characteristics of the resources we are trying to manage, together with appropriate institutions to manage complex and emergent biophysical and social entities at local and global scales.

The most important message from all the foregoing is that ethical system thinking is the key to the future. This is not a new idea. Indeed, it is an idea that was part of early religions. Respect for the system was what the ethical laws of the Jews were about centuries ago.

• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment makes it clear that the global system is now taking the strain for globalised economies and material progress.
• We now know that despite the entreaties of the ‘business as usual’ merchants this I simply not possible, even in the absence of any environmental problems.
• We are not there yet. I remain an optimist but it will need a quantum leap in our thinking; not incremental thinking, but some real shifts in knowledge, culture and values.
• The next 50 years are probably going to be critical as we reach (and hopefully pass through) a crunch point in natural capital as well as the projected ‘singularity’ in computing, information and telecommunications technologies.
• We have many examples of sustainable collective action to use as models; we can turn old institutional models into new, more appropriate systems of governance.
• Attention to inequalities and reconciliation of local and global interests is a high priority.
• As Diamond points out there is a race on in Western countries between the exponential increase on externalities and the exponential increase in knowledge and the will to act.

 

These issues go to the heart of how we might manage some of the great issues of the day:

q  Climate change – using a mix of market-based and other incentives to reduce carbon emissions and achieve greater energy use efficiency (infrastructure and financial capital).

q  Landscape and waterscape restoration in a regional context – using a mix of incentives to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services (natural capital). This will require finding efficient, profitable and constrained solutions to some complex issues.

q  Building from local and regional restoration work to achieve global outcomes – taking account of connectivity and networks of influence.

q  Finding new ways to monitor, evaluate and report progress towards a new set of ‘smarter’ targets, taking complexity and emergent properties into account.

q  Solving some of the institutional issues around adaptive management and the interactions between the various communities of interest and jurisdictions.

q  Finding new ways to discern and manage risk and resilience; finding techniques to assess the precariousness of the global situation.

q  Building regional community capacity support and longevity for restoration programmes (social capital).

q  Ensuring that individuals possess the necessary knowledge capital to be active and effective players in markets and society. Encouraging individuals to gain the necessary knowledge to take ethical decisions.

q  Rethinking the distribution of research funding to ensure a greater supply of ‘patient’ dollars for blue skies inquiry (knowledge capital and creativity) as well as brokering and building transdisciplinary teams to solve these ‘wickedly’ complex problems (science as social action).

The micro- and the macro-

Monitoring robustness and resilience

Recognizing constraints

Recursive complexity

Capacity

Individuals can make a difference

If there is one message in all this it is that individuals can make a big difference. We can engage in social dialogues and improve our knowledge and capacity for ethical decision making. We can all get more involved in the policy debate. Those of us in resource-hungry Western-style economies can all live more sustainable lives, we can all adopt practices which reduce our ecological footprint and we can all, as Tim Flannery shows, adopt practices that will have only modest impacts on our lives but will have major impacts on energy consumption, the greenhouse effect and global warming. It is not difficult to radically improve water and energy use efficiency at the individual level by installing quite simple conservation and reuse technologies. Cost-effective efficient and renewable energy technologies are now available, which can cut consumption in half. We can make a difference. This means that communities face a capacity challenge, to understand the issues better, learn more about complexity and uncertainty and be more adaptive and less risk-averse. This means bringing all views, values and skills to the table in a more deliberate process. We must search for solutions that work with the natural world rather than against it. We must search for new, more sustainable institutions and collective governance arrangements. After all it is the search for a particular kind of certainty and security that has, to some degree, brought us to the present situation. There are alternatives that are no less rich – in many ways – some based on older self-organised models of trust and collective action.

Creativity

• Social capital is critical; more and more, and aided by the new technologies, social capital is reaching across institutions, communities and individuals, breaking down old barriers between corporations, institutions, disciplines and social groups.
• I side with Handy: as far as possible reduce the power of the centre and fully empower the disciplinary and outlying units to make what accommodations with this new and complex world they find necessary.

 

The need for innovation

Perhaps one really important message for society that comes out of all this is the importance of investment in long-term ‘blue skies’ thinking at the present time. To find a way into this problem we should return to Bateson and his science that as yet has ‘no satisfactory name’. In a paper about the origins of postnormal science Tognetti writes:

The growing recognition of irreducible uncertainty, as is particularly evident in complex global problems that cannot be controlled and that have in large part resulted from just such attempts to control natural systems, has led to a new social context in which, according to Ravetz, ‘any science that assumes certainty and relegates the most urgent problems to “externalities” will be seen as increasingly irrelevant and bizarre.’

• The environment of radical modernism in which we now live requires new forms of issue and risk management.
• The evident problems with the ways in which science has been used in the management of BSE, foot and mouth disease and GMOs and the debate around climate change are excellent examples of the need to work in new ways.
• Secrecy, control and lack of transparency are changing to a more open acceptance of a variety of values and beliefs about the problems we confront.
• The extensive use of social dialogue is essential if we are to move in the direction of ‘stronger’ sustainability.

 

Science (knowledge capital) as social action

‘Stronger’ sustainability