This will be a mulling, musing diary, rather than one positing a stance; asking more questions than providing answers.
I was driving in Canada last Sunday, listening to the fabulous CBC. I was especially fascinated by a twenty-minute interview with Farley Mowat, an 88-year-old true iconoclast, who has written some 45 books over the last fifty years.
During the conversation, he said some things that resonated with me since then, letting me question some fundamental presumptions I've had all my life.
Mowat's a naturalist, an environmentalist, and something of a witty, warmhearted, irreligious misanthrope. And one of the smartest 88-year-olds I've ever heard.
He was skeptical about Science, and especially about the specialization upon which it rests.
I've been a rational, science-driven guy all my life. I was raised by an evolutionary biologist and an audiologist, both with PhDs. I've always believed in expertise, and in the authority of knowledge.
What resonated with me was what I've been watching happen the last two years. Some of you may know that I'm Michael, one of the two ApocaDocs at apocadocs.com. We've gathered, over the last two years, 3100+ stories about the converging emergencies of climate chaos, species collapse, resource depletion, infectious disease, and biology breach, and then try to be funny about them.
It's a dirty job, and one that can be incredibly depressing. Humanity is doing a Thelma and Louise, flooring it toward the cliff.
Amazingly, even as the evidence piles up like ankle-deep canaries, the scientific community has been largely silent about anything more than their particular area of specialization. They're not talking about economic systems that are built upon ecosystem depletion, not raising their voices about the horrors they're watching unfold -- and even more rarely about the future that they can see developing.
Instead, they talk about their own, and only, specialization. The forester talks about forests, the climatologist about climatology, the marine biologist about ocean life, the geophysicist about ocean acidification... and they don't talk about interrelated systems that are leading us toward a chaotic, hideous, ugly collapse.
I can count on two hands (well, maybe toes, too) the number of scientists, over the last two years, willing to go on record talking about anything beyond their specialties. And even more rare is the scientist who speaks from both the heart and head.
One recently:
"The future is horrific," says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world's foremost expert on coral reefs. "There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world's marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct." (from the Guardian)
James Hansen, of NASA, is another of the rare straight-talking scientists. And he has been criticized from within the scientific community for fearmongering.
But they are the exceptions. Most of the specialists we've quoted over the last two years stay restrained, and within their little specialty.
Because that's the way scientific authority and respect works. Talking about possible implications is frowned upon. Within the scientific community, an hypothesis is supposed to begin a repeatable study, not something one does to predict the future.
Consequently, the cultural habits of science -- which is still the best way to understand the elements of our world -- may be doing a disservice to the world's future, in two ways.
First, it's fairly blind to interrelated systems, because interrelationships are hard to quantify and analyze. It's heuristic thinking, which humans can be pretty good at, except it's been mostly trained out of us by industrial-model schooling. Linear, specialist thinking (cause, then effect) is easier to test for. Systems thinking rarely gets you tenure.
Secondly, science has lulled us into a false belief: that science will be able to fix what we've fucked up. Take geoengineering: there's always some scientist or engineer saying "all we need to do is throw up a trillion mirrors up in space," or "build cloudmaking autonomous ships to wander the ocean, pumping out reflective clouds...." and that will fix "the global warming problem."
Y'know how stupid that is, heuristically? It addresses only one symptom, not the problem. Global warming is just a symptom of a terminal system. Excess CO2's meaner older sister is ocean acidification (carbonic acid is produced as the ocean absorbs CO2). Yeah, climate chaos is awful -- and if you want a sense of what we're looking forward to, see what's happening in Kenya -- but the oceans currently provide a third to a half of humanity's available protein. Screw that system up, and we're pretty well screwed. There is no geoengineering option for fixing ocean acidification.
The only way to "fix" what we're doing is a massive cultural change -- not a technology.
Farley Mowat, in that CBC interview, talked about wisdom, and perspective, and about speaking the truth as you see it. It's pretty clear to me, as I've been reading and recording those 3100+ stories, that the culture of science is doing very little of any of those.
That doesn't mean I no longer "believe in science." Science is still the best way to understand facts.
But I think the culture of science needs to wake up to its relationship -- and responsibility -- to humanity: to speak the truth as they see it, to provide perspective on the complex interrelationships of systems, and to work for a wiser world.