Scientists: Smart tech, not-so-smart decisions threaten civilization

We have the technology we need to resolve the world’s most pressing environmental and sustainability problems. Unfortunately, we don’t have the human smarts to do so.

Whether it’s our unsustainable energy path, out-of-control financial systems or climate change, the facts keep telling us in ever-stronger terms that we need to change, and quickly. The louder the facts speak, though, the more stubbornly many people dig in their heels and refuse to listen.

The old-fashioned way of describing that problem is, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” A more academic way to put it is “motivated reasoning” … the tendency to sift through evidence not to establish the real facts, but to reach a conclusion one already believes.

“This tendency toward so-called ‘motivated reasoning’ helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, ‘death panels,’ the birthplace and religion of the president, and much else,” notes science writer Chris Mooney. “It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.”

In light of that, what are we to do with yet another loud alarm raised by some of the world’s top scientists about the unsustainable course we’re on?

“(H)umanity’s behavior remains utterly inappropriate for dealing with the potentially lethal fallout from a combination of increasingly rapid technological evolution matched with very slow ethical-social evolution,” writes a team of 20 leading scientists, all past winners of the Blue Planet Prize, considered to be the Nobel Prize of the environment. “The human ability to do has vastly outstripped the ability to understand.”

As a result, the team writes, our civilization is faced with “a perfect storm of problems driven by overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, the use of environmentally malign technologies, and gross inequalities.”

In theory, we have the knowledge and tools at hand for solving all these problems. The obstacle, though, is motivated reasoning … in this case, global society’s addiction to “the irrational belief that physical economies can grow forever.”

“(T)he perpetual growth myth is enthusiastically embraced by politicians and economists as an excuse to avoid tough decisions facing humanity,” write the Blue Panel Prize laureates. “This myth promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the cure for all the world’s problems, while it is actually (as currently practiced) the disease that is at the root cause of our unsustainable global practices.”

The scientists behind this new paper — including NASA climate scientist James Hansen, Gaia Hypothesis originator James Lovelock, UK government science adviser Sir Bob Watson and International Union for the Conservation of Nature director-general Julia Marton-Lefevre — offer a variety of recommendations for moving beyond the myth of perpetual growth. In addition to the usual suspects of carbon capture and storage, better pricing of goods and services to account for environmental costs, improved planning to fight biodiversity loss, etc., they call for better governance that’s more inclusive, and allows for greater decision-making power at lower levels where knowledge about local problems is best.

That last part includes listening more to the world’s poor, particularly women, who are finding many innovative grassroots solutions to the problems of poverty, food security, energy, water and more. Not surprisingly, considering Lovelock’s participation, the team’s recommendations go beyond science alone to deliver a Gaia-inspired message:

“Without devaluing the tremendous contribution of such grass root action and while showing them the respect and recognition they deserve there is an urgency now to bring them into mainstream thinking, convey the belief all is not lost, and the planet can still be saved. New ideas have been put into practice as a result of collective grass root action that have lessons we can learn from if only we have the humility and ability to listen.”