There is no such thing as a free lunch
We want change, but our governments keep doing the same thing. In many cases governments exert stronger control to ensure things stay the same. The irony here is that, over time, the more our leaders attempt to hold things the same, the more things change and slip out of their control. That’s the nature of complex systems. (Part 3 in our series on change.)
The sirens of BAU (Business as Usual) are singing a seductive song that everything will be okay if we just apply a bit more technology, a bit more efficiency and a lot more optimism. Well, the wheels are starting to come off ‘spaceship Earth’ yet the siren song is still being sung, to great applause. Consider the latest offering: Hannah Ritchie’s ‘Not the End of the World: How We Can be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet’. It’s a Pollyanna potion we should think carefully about before taking.
To quote a much (over) used aphorism, ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ It sums up our approach to sustainability. I call this the ‘green button syndrome’, and to appreciate it, think of the world as a photocopier. It’s also a good way of understanding our policy response to mass coral bleaching.
Political leaders tell us not to worry; today’s problems can always be fixed up tomorrow. We can have our cake and eat it. But what if our actions today produce irreversible changes in the way the Earth system behaves? Maybe ‘waiting for tomorrow’s solutions’ is not the rational thing to do. Quentin Grafton reflects on the consequences.
If you accept that humans are not in control, that you can’t hold nature in some mythical ‘optimal state’, that good resilience thinking is all about understanding the variability of the natural systems around us and living within those constraints – if you do all these things then you are acknowledging complexity and demonstrating ‘humility’. So, do you want to save the world? Justice, truth and humility is the path you need to tread.
A resilient world would acknowledge our dependence on the ecosystems that support us, allow us to appreciate the limits of our mastery, accept we have much to learn, and ensure our people are well educated about resilience and our interconnection with the biosphere.
For all the value and insight that comes with resilience thinking, it has collected some unfortunate baggage along the way. It can be clunky when it comes to implementation, and our political and corporate leaders are quick to hide behind the notion of resilience as a way of shirking responsibility.
There are limits to how much a complex system can be changed and still recover. Beyond those limits the system functions differently because some critical feedback process has changed. These limits are known as thresholds. Sometimes it’s easy to cross back over to the identity you want, sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes it’s impossible. The concept of ‘thresholds’ is central to understanding the resilience of your system.
Why is climate change so difficult to solve? Because it’s a complex problem and complexity is something humans don’t deal with well. Our political leaders will tell you they are in control, and that they have a plan, a simple solution that solves the problem of climate change without anyone having to change. Simple solutions never solve complex problems but they can make them worse.
Don’t treat climate change as a simple problem. It’s not. It’s complex, and it won’t be solved with simple solutions. If you’re in any doubt about this, have a look at what’s happened over the last two decades.
The cost in believing in these silver bullets (above and beyond that they won’t work) is a failure to acknowledge what the real problem is, a diversion of resources away from solutions that do address the challenge, and the loss of critical time.
The challenge then is not to better define the biophysical truth and expect politicians to change but to reform our governance such that it responds appropriately to ecosystem decline and collapse. For this to happen we need demonstrate to voters why that biophysical truth is important to the values they help dear and why they must hold our politicians to account.
At the very time we should be placing a premium on trust and cooperation to help us navigate the choppy waters ahead, our political leaders seem instead hell bent on ramping up prejudice and tribal fear. Populism and nationalism seem to be winning formula, trust seems to be the victim.