Science, Philosophy and Sustainability

I feel I must begin with a comment on the Taylor and Francis/Earthscan pricing policy, which you can see above. Here is a book that would appeal to the sophisticated general reader, but it is priced for libraries only. This also applies to other Taylor and Francis books in the Books in Brief section - the book on character education is $165 and the handbook on sustainability is $240. This policy does not reflect that of other university presses, where this kind of book would be put within the range of the general reader. Even their paperbacks are overpriced. Having said all this, I would encourage you to request the book from your local library since it discusses a critical issue affecting much of our policy discourse: namely, the Cartesian dream of total prediction and control based on a mechanistic understanding of life and the planet and the omnicompetence of science and technology in relation to progress.

The idea of being 'masters and possessors of Nature' is usually traced back to Francis Bacon, but the authors show that it was indeed a based on the precision of mathematics allied to the understanding of bodies and the world through a mechanistic metaphor as found in Descartes. We are brought up to believe that all problems have solutions and that human ingenuity and effective institutions 'will sooner or later fix everything.' We can now clearly see that this is not true, especially since we have many of our historic unresolved problems like war, hunger and inequity, added to which are more modern challenges of environmental damage, terrorism, migration and progressive ageing. Hence we arguably have a situation where 'the rate at which some solutions are found cannot match the rate at which new problems emerge or old problems exacerbate.' In non-systems language, this is partly due to unforeseen side-effects and a lack of understanding that many problems are in fact non-linear and 'wicked.' Nevertheless, we continue to believe as a society that we can innovate our way out of crises and continue to have confidence in the problem-solving power of science. This volume argues that the belief in predictions and innovations has no rational basis, but is rather a dream about power and control in the face of uncertainty. Jerry Ravetz even suggests that far from being masters and possessors of nature, we should see ourselves as disruptors of natural systems.

The nine contributions to this volume begin by explaining the Cartesian dream and look at its fallout in a number of different areas including the Challenger disaster, epidemics, techno-sciences, the Internet of things, genetic digital networks, geo-engineering, imaginative numbers and the limitations of mathematical modelling - always in a context of uncertainty that is acknowledged at an intellectual level but not fully understood in terms of its implications. Here the authors scrutinise the narratives by which we live, including those of growth, evidence-based everything, innovation everything, and responsible research. In analysing the Challenger disaster, it is not sufficient to isolate the technical aspects, since the context is lack of communication in NASA as a whole - and more generally between the humanities and sciences. There is an interesting chapter on biomedicine as a Cartesian project that has assumed the status of an ideology 'discrediting and excluding all other paradigms of understanding health' and creating structures of orthodoxy, intolerance and dominance. Readers will be familiar with this in various different fields. It also impacts our understanding of causality with the complementary perspectives of holism and reductionism.

Applied to the techno-sciences, the vocabulary is one of building blocks and information codes whereby we are capable of engineering anything (note the metaphor). Fern Wickson suggests that we should favour a relational ontology consistent with an ethic of care, as in deep ecology, with an emphasis on flourishing in the Aristotelian sense. The essay on the Internet of things asks how smart we really want and need to be. Again we are treated as complex machines that need optimising in order to achieve the most efficient functioning, and we are implicitly encouraged to hand over our agency and control of our lives to machines. Technically minded people sometimes feel that this kind of progress is as desirable as it is inevitable, but it has to be measured against maintaining a humanistic outlook. These developments are also driven by economic developments and shareholder value.

Geo-engineering incorporates the same underlying assumptions of our capacity to predict and control. I had not realised that there was an IPCC expert meeting on this topic in June 2011. Paula Carvelo picks through the vocabulary and its assumptions, including the remark that there could be substantive unintended effects across national boundaries. Attentive readers will recall that I reviewed a documentary on this topic – Look Up - in the December issue. The main two forms are carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). Although governments deny it, there is ample evidence that SRM is already occurring, creating artificial cloud cover and, more seriously, acid rain. The IPCC report remarks that there could be a substantial offset of global temperature rise using this technique, but were it to be terminated, there would be a resulting rapid increase in surface temperatures. In other words, once this process has been initiated, it would/will be hard to stop - and it is almost certainly a contributor to global dimming. Although the language used is objective, there are very considerable uncertainties both in terms of systems and the limitations of existing knowledge.

The last two chapters analyse imaginative numbers by showing how numbers regarded as authoritative at the time have been proved completely wrong by subsequent events. So the question arises: what did the original number actually mean? Often, it is used as a justification for policy decisions - so 'the numbers are important not because they are true, but because we believe them.' Another example is the re-evaluation of oil reserves during the 1980s, which had no firm evidential basis. Culturally, this raises the question of what Alvin Weinberg calls 'trans-science' to describe questions that can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science. So far as mathematical modelling is concerned, we need to check the model against the assumptions on which it is based, and the authors provide a suitable checklist including questions of uncertainty, sensitivity analysis and asking if the model actually addresses the right question. Overall, this is an excellent study that should be required reading for think tanks and policymakers. I will end with an amusing anecdote quoted near the beginning of the book where a weather officer in the US Army Air Corps established statistically that his month-ahead weather forecasts were no more reliable than a roll of the dice. After he had informed his superiors of this fact, the commanding general said that he was well aware that the forecasts were no good, but 'needed them for planning purposes.' Need one say more?