Home Object Activities Contact Who's Who How to Join NSF How to support NSF What's on
Nature and Society Editorial - June-July 2006 Years ago the American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote The March of Folly, a book about various famous cases in which governments or other powerful people persisted in pursuing a course of action that was in their own worst interests. At the time the Vietnam War was the modern instance of this ancient folly. Now we have the Iraq War, the War on Terror and the head-in-the-sand attitude towards climate change and other environmental-disasters-in-the-making. One criterion Tuchman insisted on for qualification in The March of Folly was that the behaviour should have been seen as folly by some others at the time, and the folly pointed out to those engaged in it. If it is only in hindsight that the actions can be seen as counterproductive, then they do not qualify as folly. When, for instance, one community discovered how to irrigate their fields and increase their productivity this was eminently sensible and very clever. When many civilisations in the Middle East did the same thing, and in turn caused salinisation, ruining their land and creating a desert, this was not wise. When modern civilisations do it, it is downright folly. We have been warned. There have only ever been two countries that have got away with intensive land use for a prolonged period. China and Egypt managed it because they were endowed with quite exceptional resources. The Chinese had a great depth of fertile loess soils; Egypt had the annual flood of the Nile, which brought new, fertile soil from far places. Both countries have succumbed to modern folly. Egypt dammed the Nile, so its fields no longer get their annual increment. Chinese cities have started expanding across more fertile places and highways also bury good soil under bitumen. Over-extraction of ground water is threatening their future. One definition of stupidity is ‘doing the same thing and expecting different results’. Prohibition in America showed that it was stupid to ban alcohol: the law was widely flouted, more alcohol was consumed than before and there was great growth in criminal activity and violence. Looking at that experience showed that something similar was likely to happen if other drugs were banned. They were, and the experience repeated itself. Despite the death penalty in some countries the drug scene is flourishing along with the criminals who control it. Yet the lead taken by some jurisdictions to implement harm minimisation programs is not followed. We must be tough on drugs however counter-productive that is. As well as continuing with tried and truly failed policies there is a strong tendency in many countries to copy policies that are failing, or have already failed, in other countries. Why are we so doomed to continue making the same mistakes? Keith Suter asked this question in the Canberra Times last January, and suggested that maybe a course in stupidology would help to solve the problem. He suggested that instead of cases of best practice, we should study the worst cases to find out what went wrong. It’s a good idea, but it has been tried. After all Jared Diamond wrote Collapse, and other authors have written similar books, but readers read them and do not think they are relevant to our current situation. Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, his Massey Lectures published a couple of years ago, pointed out that because we keep thinking it cannot happen to us, that we can save ourselves by technology, we are actually doomed by hope. “Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.” There are many new and impressive energy conserving or electricity generating ideas around, but they will not save us unless we use them and, at the same time, cut down on total demand. If we keep on demanding more of everything, more people, more water, more goods, then we are doomed. Wright says that “the reform needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.” How to achieve this change is the challenge. Trying to convince people is very difficult; it is better if they make the decision themselves. This is the rationale behind the Futures Forums program that NSF is running. It lies behind the proposal by Bob Douglas for the establishment of Life Centres (page 4, this edition). When people discuss the current state of our society, and of the natural world and our place in it, and seek knowledge about all of this, they should be able to see that we cannot keep going the way we are. If enough people are convinced of the need for changes in their own behaviour and of the whole of society, then they can influence government and business policies. Until this knowledge permeates society right up to government, we cannot hope for meaningful change. Jenny Wanless June-July 2006 edition accessible here
|