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Environment Forum Web Site
PAPERS ON ENVIRONMENT
AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Paper presented at the plenary IEF Symposium
Consumer Citizenship Network
Third CCN International Conference
Hedmark University College, Hamar, Norway
15-16 May 2006
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SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS FOR COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY
Arthur Lyon Dahl
Geneva, Switzerland
POWERPOINT PRESENTATION (450kb)
ABSTRACT
Our
present consumer society is pressing against planetary environmental
and social limits, with trends that, despite some progress, are still
unsustainable. The scientific monitoring and assessment of the state of
the planet document the dangers to humanity and provide indicators of
the need for consumer citizenship. A first challenge is making this
objective scientific information accessible to all citizens. Each
person needs to understand the relevant facts both of the world
environmental situation and of the consumer choices that impact on that
situation. This requires universal education in the basic scientific
skills of thinking in terms of cause and effect, evidence-based
evaluation and individual experimentation. Personal experience of the
reality of scientific information is an important first step towards
commitment and consistency in sustainable consumption.
The science of sustainability has long faced a major challenge of
communications because of the long time lags between damage done to
global environmental systems and the evident consequences in terms of
changed systems behaviour or lost services. Scientists trying to bring
their observations to the attention of the public are too often seen as
either crying wolf or playing Cassandra. For instance, from the early
Club of Rome report on the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) to its sequels Beyond the Limits (Meadows et al. 1992) and the thirty year update (Meadows et al. 2004),
the message has become ever more pressing and the impact on political
and economic processes just as marginal. Only recently has the recent
evidence of accelerating climate change, and the imminent threats of
energy, health, water and food crises begun to produce significant
reactions, at least in some forward-looking countries. However the
major centres of power and population have perspectives that are too
short term to take any notice. Public education on these issues has
either fallen behind, or never begun.
It is no wonder that motivating individual consumers to commit to new
forms of behaviour and to build those commitments into a more
sustainable lifestyle consistent with their beliefs is an even more
difficult challenge than getting governments to adopt declarations and
action plans for sustainable development. This is one reason for
launching the UN Decade of Education of Education for Sustainable Development
(2005-2014). For commitment to be lasting, it needs to be founded in
both an intellectual understanding and an ethical, emotional or
spiritual motivation, with each reinforcing the other.
One of the challenges to changing behaviour is the attitude fostered by
the consumer society that we can have anything that we want and that we
should be free to do anything that we like, provided only that it does
not obviously hurt other people (and that we can afford it, if
necessary on credit). Advertising tries at great expense to encourage
us to consume without limit. Yet sustainability will require
fundamental changes in life-styles, making choices, refusing
temptations, voluntarily sacrificing some things in order to preserve
other, perhaps less tangible values or possibilities. If we are to
outgrow the mentality of spoiled children always wanting new toys, a
significant transformation will be required, and that is the goal of
consumer citizenship.
To motivate change founded on commitment and consistency requires two
kinds of knowledge, which might broadly be labelled scientific and
ethical, religious or spiritual (Dahl 1996; Dahl 2004).
The latter provides a framework of values and a definition of our
individual and collective purpose as human beings and members of
society, and is the subject of a separate presentation.
The rest of this paper assumes that this ethical dimension is
adequately developed to balance and give an interpretive framework to
our scientific understanding.
Scientific knowledge gives us an understanding of the world around us.
That world is our physical environment, and provides the requirements
of life and the resources for our economic development. It also defines
the physical limits to that development and the risks that
environmental damage can represent to our health, well-being and future
survival. The place given to scientific knowledge in society and the
way scientific understanding is viewed and valued are critical to its
impact on behaviour.
The modern paradigm of science, since Western civilization gave up the
concept of the "renaissance man" able to do everything well, is one of
specialization bordering on elitism. Scientists are "men in white lab
coats" (female scientists are rarely acknowledged in the popular image)
who use inaccessible language that needs to be translated for the
general public. Admission to this fraternity requires a lengthy
initiation ritual called a Ph.D. where one learns the arcane language
of one's specialization, with standards maintained and the purity of
the field ensured by processes of peer review for publication and
promotion. The concomitant of this image is the tendency to leave
science to the experts, and to see it as something beyond the reach of
"normal" people. This also accentuates the challenge of translating
scientific knowledge for popular consumption, and raises a barrier to
the use of science to change values and behaviour.
This was not always the case in human societies, and there is no reason
why it has to be this way. Many traditional cultures and indigenous
peoples accumulated wisdom about their environment and resources over
generations, including explanations of natural phenomena like weather
and disasters, the uses of plants and the behaviour of animals and
fish, particularly those used for food, that are today in the realm of
science (Dahl 1989). Often this knowledge was
held by village or tribal "experts", the master of the yams, village
healer or master fisherman, and was added to and passed down from
generation to generation much as science is today. Unfortunately since
this knowledge, although based on close observation and understanding
of nature, was often interpreted in a cultural or intellectual
framework very different from our own, it was labelled by missionaries
and colonial administrators and educators as "magic" or "superstition"
and discredited, if not actively stamped out. This process of
"modernization" unintentionally deprived many people and their cultures
of their sense of connection with and responsibility for the
environment, and interrupted the maintenance and transmission of this
valuable knowledge accumulated over many generations. However the
example shows that there is a much wider human potential to understand
and use science than is developed in Western society.
Today people have spread to every corner of the planet and are trying
to live in a great diversity of local environments. Change of all kinds
is accelerating, requiring a variety of approaches to adaptive
management in different environmental situations. The "expert" approach
to science will never be able to respond to all the present needs of
humanity, and only the wealthy few have access to scientific solutions
to their problems. Even in those countries with a strong scientific
establishment, science is too divorced from daily life to have a
significant impact on behaviour. Many people lack the powers of
critical scientific thinking, and believe in, or are sometimes
manipulated by, very unscientific or unsubstantiated forms of
knowledge. There are even movements against science in some
industrialized countries. For both these reasons, the approach to
science and its role in education for sustainable development must
change.
The solution lies in freeing the essence of science from the
unnecessary detail and making the scientific method available to
everyone. Skills such as understanding experimentation and cause and
effect, thinking in terms of process and systems, evaluating evidence
objectively, questioning hypotheses and assumptions, and more generally
investigating truth rationally and independently, should be available
to everyone at an appropriate level of understanding. For example,
people such as resource users can easily learn to do their own local
environmental monitoring, observe changes taking place, and adjust
their behaviour or resource use accordingly, perhaps with some outside
scientific assistance in the interpretation of the results. Even for
complex systems such as coral reefs, simple monitoring methods have
existed for more than 25 years (Dahl 1981) and are a well-established part of global scientific monitoring programmes (http://www.reefcheck.org/). In Australia, school children take part in local water quality monitoring (http://www.waterwatch.nsw.gov.au/, https://www.streamwatch.org.au/).
Giving people a direct personal experience of scientific reality opens
them to a better understanding of scientific evidence and explanations
at all levels, and provides a basis for science to have a real impact
on values and behaviour.
To make science accessible to everyone will also require new kinds of
scientific institutions in every community, able to support this new
model of participatory scientific investigation and use. Fortunately
the revolution in information and communications technology is
eliminating one traditional barrier to the generalization of science:
the limited access to the store of scientific knowledge. Whereas before
one had to have access to a good academic or research library with the
necessary books and journals, today access to knowledge is limited more
by the complexities of technical language and by concerns over
intellectual property than by physical access. The day will soon come
when everyone will have ready access to as much scientific information
as they can absorb and use. The challenge is more how to present and
structure scientific knowledge in new ways that make it more accessible
and useful in meeting global, national and local challenges of
sustainability.
One important element of this process is the rapid development of
environmental observing systems, data collection mechanisms and
statistical services able to generate and deliver indicators of the
multiple processes at work affecting all the dimensions of
sustainability. Building on the planning of the Integrated Global
Observing Strategy Partnership (http://www.igospartners.org), governments are now assembling a Global Earth Observation System of Systems at the planetary level (http://earthobservations.org/).
At the same time, work is progressing to develop indicators of
sustainability useful to guide policy-making, management and action at
the national, local and individual levels (Moldan et al. 1997; Hak et al. 2006).
These information tools give simplified representations of data, trends
and thresholds that can increase understanding of sustainability
challenges and measure progress (or the lack thereof). The ecological
footprint, for example, gives individuals, communities or countries an
immediate measure of their relative impact on the earth (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/). There are a number of new composite indices that help to compare most nations' environmental vulnerability (http://www.vulnerabilityindex.net/), environmental sustainability (Esty et al. 2005) and environmental performance (Esty et al. 2006)
and thus to raise awareness of the effort needed to move in a new
direction. Indicators are one way to communicate scientific information
quickly, widely and effectively, as these few examples show.
The goal of this process of scientific education and information
delivery should be to provide all consumers with an objective
scientific representation of the world environmental situation in
dynamic interaction with human society and the economy. It should also
enable each community to self-determine its own local environmental
situation and sustainability, and thus reinforce the local sense of
responsibility for its management. Together these should support the
capacity to think globally and act locally. There should also be
scientific information on the linkages between consumption patterns,
lifestyles, consumer choices, and social and environmental
sustainability.
Empowering consumers with science is one essential component of
commitment, as it demonstrates the necessity for action in objective
terms. The continuing reinforcement of that scientific understanding
through participation in scientific processes, whether local
environmental monitoring or investigation of consumer choices, will
also reinforce consistency. When scientific knowledge is combined with
the emotional commitment that comes from an ethical or spiritual
framework of sustainability values, people will become effective change
agents for sustainability.
REFERENCES CITED
Dahl, Arthur Lyon. 1981. Coral reef monitoring handbook.
South Pacific Commission, Noumea. 21 p. Reprinted as SPC/UNEP, Coral
reef monitoring handbook. Reference Methods for Marine Pollution
Studies No. 25. UNEP, 1984. 25 p.
Dahl, Arthur Lyon. 1989. Traditional environmental knowledge and resource management in New Caledonia. In R.E. Johannes (ed.), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: a Collection of Essays. IUCN, Gland and Cambridge. 64 p. http://islands.unep.ch/dtradknc.htm
Dahl, Arthur Lyon. 1996. The ECO Principle: Ecology and Economics in Symbiosis. Zed Books Ltd, London and New Jersey, and George Ronald, Oxford. 174 p.
Dahl, Arthur Lyon. 2004. Science and values as complementary foundations for consumer citizenship.
First International Conference of the Consumer Citizenship Network
(UNESCO, Paris, 1-2 March 2004) Workshop 9: Science and Society. http://www.bcca.org/ief/ddahl04a.htm
Esty, Daniel C., Marc A. Levy, Tanja Srebotnjak and Alexander de Sherbinin. 2005. 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index: Benchmarking National Environmental Stewardship. Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, New Haven. http://www.yale.edu/esi/
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Hak, Tomas, Bedrich Moldan and Arthur Dahl (eds). (in press 2006). Measuring Progress Toward Sustainability: Assessment of Indicators. Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, SCOPE. Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth. Universe Books, New York.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen Randers (1992). Beyond the Limits: confronting global collapse, envisioning a sustainable future. Chelsea Green Publishing Co., Post Hills, Vermont. 300 p. *
Meadows, Donella, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. 2004. Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Chelsea Green Publishing Co., Post Mills, Vermont.
Moldan, Bedrich, Suzanne Billharz and Robyn Matravers (eds). 1997. Sustainability Indicators: A Report on the Project on Indicators of
Sustainable Development. Scientific Committee on Problems of the
Environment, SCOPE 58. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
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