2004 FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Session 1: Questions/discussion

Richard Grove: I am interested in Dr Dare's comment on Carolyn Merchant, because I think it is very important to the whole of this conference. He points out that Carolyn Merchant sees in a very pejorative sense the development of resource use strategies since the 17th century, as a direct product of positivist Newtonian thinking. Merchant sees it in an entirely negative way, that it gave rise to patterns of resource use that have landed us in the sorts of situations we are in now, which are not sustainable.

I would like to take a slightly more optimistic point on this, and simply as a comment. I think Carolyn Merchant was probably completely wrong, in that what Newtonian thinking did after the 17th century and we can show this through looking at the environmental history of resource use, which is a bit of a gap in this conference, incidentally is that increasingly after the 17th century you have a whole series of people being able to understand much better what the limits of resource use were and what notions of sustainability might be.

Perhaps rather than looking at the history of philosophy it might be more useful to take an empirical view of what the history of resource use strategies has been, but I would suggest that Carolyn Merchant's view as an environmental historian was a highly pessimistic one. What is perhaps more useful to focus on is this: Dr Dare also mentioned Wilhelm von Humboldt, but his brother, Alexander von Humboldt, laid the foundation for a very rigorous critique of the way in which industrial society was consuming resources in the 19th century. I think I am trying to say that a rigorous environmental history of the last 500 years would teach us something about the way in which these sorts of notions of sustainability have developed.

I think the danger in a conference like this is simply to see things in a presentist way. The last talk we had shows how important a historical analysis, for example of flooding, is. If you don't do the history you won't understand the present.

Arran Gare: I mentioned Carolyn Merchant because she was the only person on the history and philosophy of science who had addressed the issue of the relationship between population and the environment. She hadn't done that in very much detail, and I wouldn't like to be identified with her views not entirely, anyway.

When it comes to Alexander von Humboldt, he was part of this development of an anti-mechanistic way of thinking. I think he had a major contribution to the development of ecology. You can trace back the various people who formed ecology, and it almost all goes back to Alexander von Humboldt.

Richard Grove: It goes back a lot further than that, of course.

Arran Gare: Well, it might go back to Theophrastus, but the momentum really began with Alexander von Humboldt. He was aligned with people like Schelling and those who were trying to develop a post-mechanistic view of the world. Their prime concern was to explain how it was that knowledge was possible, and if you were a Hobbesian mechanical entity that would just not be possible. Kant argued that you had to be some kind of self-conscious entity. They took that position and said that Kant got it wrong because it would have to be social, and then they said, 'Well, how could nature be such that that kind of being could come into existence, could evolve from nature?' So they were trying to present a much more coherent world view than was developed by people like Hobbes.

What I am suggesting is that these fundamental divisions, which are really the basis for, I think, transdisciplinary thinking, should be teased out, appreciated, as rival positions. You need to look at the different sciences to see where the schools of thought line up. The main stream of economics is thoroughly Hobbesian-Newtonian-Cartesian, although there are rival positions within it. Marx's whole critique of capitalism was based on the influence on him of Hegel and Schelling, but he was writing a critique of political economy, not a work on economics.

The institutionalists, strongly influenced by Peirce, were part of this anti-mechanistic tradition. So were the ecological economists, who were arguing that the economists had to take into account the second law of thermodynamics. But it seems to me that these are just piecemeal approaches. The whole development of human ecology is thoroughly in this anti-mechanist tradition and it needs to be put forward as the framework for, I think, formulating our most important public policies. If you allow it to economists, we are going to end up just destroying the global environment.

Ian Lowe: I have a question for Cliff Hooker. Could you say something about integration in the policy area, where it seems to me that satisficing is well accepted but there are complications of different spatial and temporal scales, different cognitive domains and different priorities.

Cliff Hooker: The general problem of integration in that area is that there is no point in producing a strategic analysis which is quite unacceptable to the way the governance structure works, and the quick answer is something like this. Just as I think Professor Klein's argument, taken to its end conclusion, suggests that we should rethink rather carefully and radically the institutional structures of learning that is, universities for example around problems and capacities rather than disciplines, it seems to me the solution to your problem is to rethink governance structures so that multidisciplinary problems become thinkable in the processes of governance, rather than governance saying, 'No matter how the world changes or becomes more complex, you will please present your policy analyses in terms of the institutional processes we have in place.' That's the short answer.

We need a complex science of governance. We have a Neanderthal one, roughly.

Bryan Furnass: Thinking is a very painful process, and that is why most people don't bother with it. We have been talking about thinking in terms of external information being sorted in a very logical way and then coming up with a consensus about integration. I agree with Cliff, integration is very difficult, but the brain is doing it all the time. We think we only use our brains by logical thinking, but humans aren't really rational beings at all. Intuition is a much more important side of innovation. We have heard about Archimedes and the Eureka principle. There was the accident of Fleming finding a culture plate after going away for the weekend if he hadn't had a holiday we might not have had penicillin. There are all sorts of other intuitive ideas scattered through science, and they sometimes take some time to develop. In other words, they occur during leisure.

So I have two questions, perhaps, to Cliff. One is: do you think we don't pay enough attention to intuition as a valuable source of scientific inspiration? And the second thing is: perhaps we don't give enough time to doing nothing. There are a lot of ideas that come when we are doing nothing. Most of the best questions in this conference will probably come when we are riding home on the plane.

Cliff Hooker: I am sure both of us can respond. Two quick comments, one as an anecdote. When I returned to this country after many years of teaching and researching in North America, the biggest difference I noticed to my creativity was the fact that over there the summer holiday occurs outside of Christmas and you can actually get away for a month, as I used to do just take a canoe into the wilderness and vanish. When I came back I had a huge burst of creativity that lasted the year until I could go away again. Here the summer holiday is at Christmas. You are never away anywhere for very long. And my relaxation time until intuition makes free play is about three weeks, and it needs to be outside of human symbols. Hence the 900 km Bibbulman Track. So yes.

The other comment, briefly, however, is that civilisation has been possible only because we have invented public mechanisms that allow scrutiny and systematic improvement. So, whilst we need intuition, we can't rest with it. It has to be 'disciplined' is not the right word systematised, made public and examinable and arguable. That is what I was trying to examine.

Arran Gare: I am entirely in agreement with you on the importance of inspiration. I think that creative thinking that creates new perspectives, enables things to be integrated, is something that the logical positivists, the analytic philosophers really leave out. They have no place for it, whereas if we think of people like Schelling and Peirce, they are the ones who argue for the centrality of that. Peirce argues for abduction, and inspiration is absolutely central to it. So, if you are striving to get that transdisciplinary framework, it has got to be based on creative thinking that will involve a lot of intuition.

Lionel McKenzie: I think my question or comment is addressed to both speakers as well, but it really comes from a history and philosophy of science perspective. I could perhaps quote Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes how difficult it is to change scientific thinking. He used the concept 'paradigm shift', and he focused on the 16th century and the difficulty that Galileo had, even in trying to promote the Copernican view of the universe, as threatening him with burning at the stake. So this really comes back to the question of dealing with paradigms of knowledge and how difficult they are to change, particularly when we move out of the scientific area.

At present in Australia it seems we have a paradigm which says that economic growth depends on population growth, and any impact on the environment can be managed through technical innovation. That is the dominant paradigm. There is another, competing paradigm which says that population growth is inevitably going to bring environmental degradation and there is no way that it can be managed by technological or engineering means or any other adjustments we may be thinking about.

The question is that when you are allowing your thinking to be dominated by one paradigm or you move to another, it is still going to be very unsusceptible to rational discourse, disciplined discourse, information or argument mapping all of these things are sooner or later going to come up against the limits of paradigms, and perhaps we should be more conscious about their power and the way in which power is used to maintain them, before we can actually progress this discussion. Perhaps you would like to comment on that.

Arran Gare: I entirely agree with you. It is one of the main points I was trying to make that you have probably made a lot better. As to the importance of appreciating these, work has been done since Thomas Kuhn on the whole issue and he had actually, before he died, abandoned the concept of paradigm because he thought it was too vague. It simultaneously involved a number of things: the conceptual frameworks, the kind of tacit knowledge that Polanyi talked about, the way in which institutions embody a particular way of thinking. So, if you don't go along with a way of thinking, you just get expelled.

But I think that what is required of people is the ability to appreciate that there are these fundamentally different frameworks of thinking and to learn how to move between them, and then what is involved in choosing between them. It is not something that you can solve by deductive logic. The dialecticians argue that they dealt with the problem, but I don't think that it is as formal as that. It actually involves giving a place to stories; this is the argument of MacIntyre. But anyway, I entirely agree with you.

Cliff Hooker: Just a brief comment. Formal argument mapping is not the only tool that we use to improve our processes. I move across paradigms my whole educational life. One of the things you can do to get people talking is to build an integrative model and say, 'Look, your kind of interactions I can put in, and yes, you are right, under those conditions it works that way. Your kind of interactions I can also put in there, and under other conditions it works your way. But hey, once we've got both in there, you'll see that there are ways that the world can be in which neither of yours dominates. There's a different kind of dynamics emerges. So can't we have everything involved? Put your input in.'

So there's another tool besides argument mapping: integrative model building. And there are others.