The following report from Worldwatch Institute talks about how everything
is connected and attacking problems singly (one at a time) may never
produce a lasting solution. In the end it concludes we need a more
holistic approach.
This is a constant battle between those interested in one issue and
those who look at the whole. When should we work to save the whales
and when should we fix the economic pressures that are making whales
valuable?
The path stuff i've been ranting about takes care of this problem
by insisting that we build a trial "future vision" and then make
individual decisions using our "vision" as a base. Another key is
to accept that just about everything can change and focus on the
process rather than rigid definitions of what is needed. Anyway,
i think Worldwatch is moving towards these ideas and wonder if anyone
else has thought about it.
----
Wednesday, May 19, 1999
By Chris Bright
Environmental pressures are converging in ways that are likely to
create a growing number of unanticipated crises. Each of these crises
will demand some sort of fix, and each fix will demand money, time and
political capital. Yet no matter how many fixes we make, we've no
realistic expectation of reducing the potential for additional crises
-- if "fixing" is all we do.
The key to controlling that demon is to do a better job of managing
systems in their entirety. And whether the system in question is the
global trading network, a national economy, or a single natural area,
many of the same operating principles will apply. Here, in my view,
are four of the most important operating principles.
Monoculture technologies are brittle:
Huge, uniform sectors generally exhibit an obvious kind of efficiency
because they generate economies of scale. You can see this in fossil
fuel-based power grids, car-dominated transit systems, even in the
enormous woodpulp plantations that are an increasingly important part
of the developing world's forestry sector. But this efficiency is
usually superficial because it doesn't account for all sorts of
"external" social and environmental costs. Thus, for instance, that
apparently cheap fossil-fuel electricity is purchased with the
literally incalculable risks of climatic dislocation, with acid rain
and ozone pollution, with mine runoff, and in the countries that rely
most heavily on coal, with a heavy burden of respiratory disease.
Yet even when the need for change is obvious and alternative
technologies are available, industrial monocultures can be extremely
difficult to reform. In energy markets, solar and wind power are
already competitive with fossil fuel for many applications, even by a
very conventional cost comparison. And when you bring in all those
external costs, there's really no comparison at all. But with
trillions of dollars already invested in coal and oil, the global
energy market is responding to renewables in a very slow and grudging
way.
More diverse technologies -- in energy and in any other field -- will
encourage more diverse investment strategies. That will tend to make
the system as a whole more adaptable because investors will not all be
"betting" on exactly the same future. And a more adaptable system is
likely to be more durable over the long term.
Direct opposition to a natural force usually invites failure -- or a
form of success that is just as bad:
Even conservation activities can run afoul of natural forces. Take,
for example, the categorical approach to forest fire suppression. A
no-burn policy may increase a forest's fuel load to the point at which
a lightning strike produces a huge crown fire. That's outright
failure: a catastrophic "artificial" fire may consume stands that
survived centuries of the natural fire cycle. On the other hand, if
the moisture regime favors rapid decomposition of dead wood, the
policy could eliminate fire entirely. Without burning, the
fire-tolerant tree species would probably also begin to disappear, as
they are replaced by species better adapted to the absence of fire.
That's "success." Either way, you lose the original forest.
Sound policy often tends to be more "oblique" than direct.
Restoration of floodplain ecosystems can be a more effective form of
flood control than dams and levees, because wetlands and forests
function as immense sponges.
Since you can never have just one effect, always plan to have several:
Thinking through the likely systemic effects of a plan will help
locate the risks, as well as indirect opportunities. Every day, for
example, I ride the car pool lanes into Washington D.C., and my
conversations with other commuters have led me to suspect that this
environmentally correct ribbon of asphalt could actually increase
pollution and sprawl, by contributing to a positive feedback loop.
Here's how I think it may work: as the car pool lanes extended outward
from the city, commute times dropped; that would tend to promote the
development of bedroom communities in ever more remote areas.
Eventually, the new developments will cause traffic congestion to
rebound, and that will create political pressure for another bout of
highway widening. A more "system sensitive" policy might have
permitted the highway projects only when a county had some realistic
plan to limit sprawl. Car pool lanes might then have become a means of
conserving farmland, instead of a possible factor in its demise.
For environmental activists, "system sensitivity" could help locate
huge political constituencies. Look, for instance, at the potential
politics of nitrogen pollution. Since a great deal of the nitrogen
that is threatening coral reefs is likely to be agricultural runoff,
and since much of that runoff is likely to be the result of highly
mechanized "factory farming," it follows that anyone who cares about
reefs should also care about sustainable agriculture.
Obviously, the reverse is true as well: if you're trying to encourage
organic farming in the Mississippi basin, you're conserving Caribbean
reefs. The same kind of political reciprocity could be built around
renewable energy and forest conservation.
I don't know the answer and neither do you, but together we can
probably find one:
A system can have qualities that exist only on the system level --
qualities that cannot be attributed directly to any of the components
within. No matter how hard you look, for example, at the individual
characteristics of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and magnesium,
you will never find grounds for inferring the amazing activities of
chlorophyll -- the molecule that powers photosynthesis. There are
system properties in political life as well: institutional pluralism
can create a public space that no single institution could have
created alone. That's one objective of the "balance of powers" aimed
at in constitutional government.
It should also be possible to build a "policy system" that is smarter
and more effective than any of its component groups of policy makers.
Consider, for example, the recent history of the U.S. Forest Service.
For decades, environmental activists have accused the service of
managing the country's forests almost exclusively for timber
production, with virtually no regard for their inherent natural value.
Distrust of the service has fueled a widespread, grassroots forest
conservation movement, which has grown increasingly sophisticated in
its political and legal activities, and now even undertakes its own
scientific studies on behalf of the forests.
This movement, in turn, has attracted the interest and sympathy of a
growing number of officials within the service. Many environmentalists
(including this author) would argue that things are nowhere near what
they should be inside the service, but it's possible that what we are
witnessing here is the creation of a new space for conservation -- a
space that even a much more ecologically enlightened Forest Service
couldn't have created on its own.
It remains to be seen whether this forum will prove powerful enough to
the save the forests that inspired it. But in the efforts of the
people who are building it, I think I can see, however dimly, a future
in which the world's dominant cultures re-experience the shock of
living among forests, prairies, and oceans -- instead of among
"natural resources." After all, the forests and prairies are where we
came from and they're where we are going. We are the children of a
vast natural complexity that we will never fathom.
(Chris Bright is a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute,
senior editor of World Watch, and author of "Life Out of Bounds:
Bioinvasion in a Borderless World," W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.)
Copyright 1999, Worldwatch Institute
Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate, All Rights Reserved
