Robert Wasson is a geomorphologist by inclination, but with wide interests in landscape evolution, pedology, catchment analysis and global change.  His undergraduate and postgraduate training in geomorphology was at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University respectively. He has taught at Macquarie University, University of Auckland, Monash University, and ANU and has carried out research in most of Australia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and New Zealand. One of his preoccupations has been historical perspectives on landscape processes, because most of these processes are manifest over time periods much longer than either human lifetimes or usual periods of observation.

Integrated systems 2: Water
by Professor Robert Wasson

Introduction
Why do we want integrated understanding?
Complexity
Implications of complexity
Capturing water
A frontier state of mind
A top-down view
Materials budgets
Causality, adaptation and reflexivity
Conclusions
Questions/discussion

Introduction

My task is to present to you an integrated view of a natural resource management issue, namely, water, to build on what we have heard from more thematic speakers who have been asked to deal with environmental issues in sustainability, economic issues and social issues. But of course, we have all actually dealt with pretty well all of the issues, to varying degrees of expertness. And I say that about my own presentation, because I am the living embodiment of an amateur in a number of areas where I need to be a professional, and I think that is one of the great challenges to us all, that we need to professionalise ourselves in many fields way outside our disciplinary comfort zone. So if I get it wrong, you understand why and you will be kind to me.

Why do we want integrated understanding?

It is fair to say that natural science has given us an account of what has happened, and that we really don't want just to continue auditing – we need to move beyond that. And of course natural science can do this and has done it very successfully without considering the motivations of people who change the environment. It is people who change things in a way that is uncomfortable for us – with the exception of the odd volcano and tsunami.

If, however, we want to change the 'what', we need to understand the 'why'. Why do humans do certain things? What are our behavioural motivations?

The 'why' means understanding ourselves as agents of change; our aims, motivations and methods. That is a problem squarely in the social sciences and in the humanities, in the academy, and in every single one of us as human beings outside the rarefied atmosphere of the academy – and I don't mean 'the Academy', I mean the academic world.

Therefore, we need theories of nature. 'Theory' is a very dirty word in political circles, but what it means is generalisation and understanding. We need theories of nature – we have some of those – and of social relations and meaning.

Natural science assumes causality, although that has been challenged recently by notions of nonlinearity, of chaos, et cetera. But nonetheless that is essentially how natural science works.

Social science assumes either causality of human behaviour, and therefore predictability of some kind, or a notion of free agency, with strong reflexive and creative capacities, and therefore low predictability. We as human agents reflect on what happens, on how we change and how we do things. Scientists deal with subject-object relationships; social science deals with subject-subject relationships. And that is a fundamental difference in the paradigms of the two fields of knowledge, and one of the reasons why natural science and social science and humanities don't talk to each other very easily.

The theories of interrelationships between nature, social relations and meaning that come from the natural sciences and economics tend to emphasise causality, while theorising from the other end, if you like, emphasises free agency and therefore heterogeneity. There are no generalities if you believe totally in free agency. This is a major problem for stitching together knowledge systems. I assume causality of some kind – in other words, I believe there are generic relationships (this is an article of faith as much as anything else) – but of course that is not the only position that could be adopted.

Complexity

The jargon normally runs well in front of understanding in many fields, and that is certainly true in complexity, but I think it is very helpful to think about the jargon and what it means. Human environment systems are complex, in the following ways. There are many independent agents and phenomena acting in a great many ways. The richness of these interactions allows for self-organisation, without any external forcings. One of the things we often do is see a change in the natural world, or indeed in the social and natural system, and look for an external cause. It may be internally generated, and there is no external cause. This is quite a challenge to those of us interested in causality.

Social and biological systems are adaptive. Some physical systems are adaptive as well. Social systems are also reflexive. We don't know very much about whether animal systems are reflexive, but they probably are – at least the higher animals. But human beings are, and it leads to some very complex feedbacks. These characteristics lead to dynamics in systems which are really very different from just complicated things, like computer chips.

Implications of complexity

What are the implications of this complexity, for example in river catchments? I argue that a top-down view of river catchment systems must be the analytical starting point, not a view taken from a detailed understanding of every imaginable process that operates in a system and then trying to build from the bottom. And I do not see any value in the highly parameterised, detailed process models of these systems.

I think that management will be best served by synoptic views supplemented by local groundings. We have already heard from Peter Cullen, from the knowledge brokers, that local communities, need to ground in their local community. That is an entirely understandable reaction.

Causality is a difficult issue, therefore, in amongst this, because not all changes have a clear external driver or cause. The cause may be in the internal feedback system. Adaptive and reflexive characteristics mean that human-environment relations change through time

Capturing water

The early settler experience in Australia was of a highly variable climate. Towards the end of the 19th century we began to capture water, to develop our economy through irrigation and other methods and nation-building began. There was a large racist component to this development, I might add, of keeping our northern neighbours at bay. We had to keep the north White – and the south, for that matter. Australia is the most variable place in the world hydrologically, only just ahead of southern Africa, and so we store more water per reservoir and per capita than any other country in the world. This means that what we have done is to extremely effectively starve our rivers and wetlands and estuaries of fresh water. We have also developed agricultural systems which have impoverished our water quality. The larger the amounts of captured water, the less for rivers, wetlands and estuaries, hence the current activity to return water to the environment which Peter Cullen spoke of.

A frontier state of mind

A frontier state of mind is still with us. Much of the history of Australia and the transformation of its water resources has been at the frontier. Frontier populations see endless possibilities. It is common around the world. When Polynesians arrived in the Pacific Islands they must have seen endless possibilities, because they used up almost everything immediately. And we have done the same thing in this continent.

Access to almost free natural resources reinforces this buoyancy and optimism that is characteristic of human beings, which is a very positive force in many ways but also a negative force. Driven by the state (that is, the political entity) and economic opportunities, water was captured and land converted to agriculture, with little regard for the consequences, in the frontier period. It is interesting, if you read environmental history – and Tim Bonyhady's wonderful book, Colonial Earth, published last year, documents it – that from the very beginning of European settlement of this country there were attempts by the state to control our environmental vandalism, but it hasn't really worked very well.

So the frontier state of mind gives meaning to nature as a source of raw materials. This is where meaning is crucially important. Most of our decisions are based upon our feelings and upon our value systems, not upon rational and careful and objective analysis – that's the way we are, as a species.

The frontier still exists in Australia. Just have a look at Queensland. And while this mentality is fast dwindling, the social forces that have driven frontier expansion have abated very little. It is still here. We are struggling to establish a non-frontier or 'settled' view, if you like, of natural resource management. And so the current debate, most recently expressed just last week in the property 'rights' over water and compensation for allocations to the environment, is a clash between the frontier and settled mentalities and meanings. By the way, the debate is always about rights, not rights and responsibilities.

Remember the role of the state. The state often drives a lot of the processes which we view to be damaging. For those of you who don't remember this episode in Australian political history [as shown in visual presentation of a cartoon]: Malcolm Fraser is Prime Minister, John Howard is prone in front of Malcolm Fraser – I'll let you draw your own views on that – and over here we have Charles Court, the then Premier of Western Australia, as the bulldozer. This was the nature of state relations at that time, and it drove an awful lot of natural resource decision-making.

A top-down view

So what does a top-down view mean, analytically? The long-term availability of resources and the critical factors in resource degradation can be assessed using a budgetary or mass balance approach, which is one that has been used by the Land and Water Audit, I think quite successfully. So my only equation is this one, which is a simple balance equation which you can apply to many, many materials and energy. And you can identify the sources of, for example, phosphorus and then come to conclusions about the significance, the strength of those sources and target your management appropriately, rather than doing it by assumption, prejudice, et cetera.

• Yield = [S₁+S₂+S₃.. S_n] – [N₁+N₂+N₃.. N_n]
  where S₁ to S_n are sources of materials such as nutrients (phosphorus, nitrogen, organic carbon, potassium, sulfur) and N₁ to N_n are sinks or stores of materials.
• Sources of phosphorus are: sewage, dust, rainfall, river beds, vegetation (including crops).
• Yield is: the difference between sources and sinks, and therefore free to leave a catchment.

Here is an example of the sort of thing you can do for, in this case, sediment, by working out where the major sources are, the major sinks, and what comes out at the bottom of the system.

Management of water quality in this system means management of gullies and channels; economic analysis means analysis of appropriateness of management interactions, at least as a starting point.

So you can see that this top-down, synoptic view, allows you to make decisions about optimal management systems, rather than doing it from the bottom up, where you take forever to get to the top by measuring every imaginable process, many of which will be quantitatively insignificant.

So the National Land and Water Audit has come out with some conclusions which I think are really worthwhile outcomes of that exercise. But the conclusions need to be tested. Nonetheless the groups doing that work should be congratulated. Here is one of the results of their work, on phosphorus output from Australian rivers, using a budget approach, a synoptic, top-down approach.

Materials budgets

The materials budget approach also has a longstanding history in economics. I am aware of a paper in 1970 by Alan Kneese, Robert Ayres and Ralph d'Ague, who put together a very convincing argument for using this as a basis for ecological economic analysis. It seems that we are still stuck with the externalities argument, but if you internalise externalities in such budgets you actually do yourself an enormous favour.

The implications of this approach for economic analysis are being seen through the CSIRO Futures Program, in particular. The use of input-output models, a static tool but nonetheless a useful one, are needed. Some of this analysis is underway in this country, but we need a lot more of it.

Causality, adaptation and reflexivity

But remember that we are reflexive creatures, and causality and adaptation are part of the deal. While these relationships change through time, at a particular time there are really quite complex feedback systems.

If you look just at the centre of the following diagram, if you take the levees-only policy of dealing with flood containment on rivers, you have flood losses at the top, which are largely economic losses; this produces public pressure for action, which produces levee construction or enlargement of levees – in many places, including Australia. Nyngan is the case study for this one. Levee construction actually increases river height when the river goes over-bank, so the flooding actually is worse as a result of the levees – a paradoxical result. Probability of disastrous flood goes up; the actual hazard goes up; the actual risk goes up; the flood losses actually go up as a result of levee construction. This is a positive feedback loop.

This is a technique of analysis of the interactions between meaning, behavioural variables, if you will, the biophysical world, the flooding world, and the institutional reactions by government and by individuals to a particular problem. And that doesn't even make the connections that Peter Cullen was talking about, from flooding out to erosion or whatever else you may be interested in.

But this approach, I would argue, is what we need for many systems, the approach that I believe we actually need to take to start building simple views, simple models. The diagram is actually not that complicated, when you spend a few minutes looking at it. And it is the sort of thing which enables you to knit together the three pillars that we have heard a lot about today: the social, the economic and the environmental. You can do this with community groups, and they catch onto the idea very quickly. They build their own models quite quickly, and we have had some experience of that sort of work.

Conclusions

I am going to now do what you should not do in any talk, and that is to make conclusions which have very little to do with what I have actually said before. But I want to do this because I want to raise another issue that I think the four academies need to take on board.

The first one does come from what I have said. Many of the tools for integrated analysis exist, but we have serious institutional problems, we have serious schisms, if you like, between the various elements of our institutions. Take, for example, the splitting of environment from resources in the federal bureaucracy. That would have to be one of the dumbest things you can do, if you accept that the links between environment and resources are the two sides of the same equation.

Some analysis has been done using an integrated approach, but not a lot. I congratulate those groups such as the Audit people who have pulled together a lot of biophysical material in an integrated fashion, as a good start; the CSIRO Futures Group, which is pulling together things in a stocks and flows model and other frameworks to do this sort of work; and the 41 PhD students who do this every day of their lives in my own Centre. They are doing this sort of analysis, there are a lot of groups around the country who are doing this sort of work, but is it going anywhere? Is it feeding into an institutional structure and framework which actually informs decision-making and takes us forward?

This leads to my last conclusion, that the impediments in the academic world lie in rigid disciplinary education. What we know now from studies of sustainable development, is that there is no hierarchy of disciplinary privilege, we need it all – and a perception that there are very poor job prospects for those who undertake interdisciplinary studies. Of those 41 PhD students I just mentioned, we know from the history of my Centre that all of them get jobs in one form or another, but they are often worried about what the future holds because of the nature of disciplinary training, education and employment. This is a really serious issue. If for the future we are to have people who can think in the way that we are all struggling to achieve, we need a different educational system and structure.

Questions/discussion

Question: I particularly like your last point. I am a science teacher and I have been working in my own State for a number of years to look at the notion of a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary science. That is not to take away the value that each of the disciplines within science provides, but there seems to be a reluctance from the schooling sector, because there seems to be a great deal of pressure from the tertiary sector in terms of entrance to universities for students to have background in specific disciplines. So partly it's a comment; but secondly it's a question, as to how do we get universities to work more closely with the schooling sector to ensure that we start to break down some of those barriers?

RW: Your question is a really important one. I find it really quite surprising that academics are actually a lot more conservative than they lay claim to. Trying to change academic structures is like moving mountains. In the ACT system, which I am familiar with because I have lived here for a fair while, the high school system is actually not strongly disciplinary. There are some disciplinary trends, components, within it   – which are important. And I'm not decrying the importance of strong disciplinary training at all, but I view that as almost skills training. The real education comes in problem definition, problem solving, in an interdisciplinary framework. And it isn't just in this business of sustainability; it could be in anything.

Forty-five per cent of the undergraduate students at the ANU are double-degree students. They've already worked out that they don't want just one degree. They're way ahead of us. Why isn't the university catching up? Well, that's a subject for another debate.

I think that the universities have to shift a long way if that dialogue that you are talking about is to occur in a realistic fashion. I think we could do it. As long as we don't try to throw away the disciplinary baby with the interdisciplinary bathwater, which is the trick, then I think we can do it. But I think universities have actually got to shift and catch up with the schools.

Question: Your distinction between the natural and the social sciences in the way in which we see the world, and the kind of linkages that are possible, I think are very interesting. My question to you is: Can you give us some good news, from your cases or from the work you do, about changing community attitudes and a greater willingness to take on board the kinds of things you are talking about – seeing things systemically, or in terms of systems, but also a readiness to actually sacrifice certain things and change in order to cope and adapt to what is the changing reality?

RW: I am going to assume that in your question the word 'community' refers to both academic communities and 'real' communities, non-academic communities. In the academic community I see slow and gradual change, in pockets, in this country – rapid change in other countries, frankly, where there has been a rather more proactive triggering of change by new funding arrangements. We still seem to be stuck with rather antediluvian arguments about setting priorities, et cetera.

It seems to me that it is the students who are driving this change, as I was trying to imply earlier. The postgraduate students, in this particular case, are driving the change. They are developing integrated frameworks; they are developing new models of the interactions between these phenomena which don't depend upon the understanding of each component separately but doing it in one go. And these characters are not afraid of standing up at a podium like this and making a big blunder – well, some of them aren't – by describing the social sciences in some way and the natural sciences in another. They are prepared to have a go, because they are driven by problems, they are not driven by disciplinary preoccupations and allegiances. So they are free to think in this fashion, as long as we, the greying brigade, don't force them into moulds that they should not be in.

In the general community, the wider community, I think it is actually very difficult for an awful lot of, for example, landcare groups or catchment groups to find the time and the energy and, indeed, the money to do the sort of systemic analysis that we, the academics, view as being really important. Some of them do it brilliantly, and they're way ahead of us, and make comments about some of the models on offer, rather like the comments I made: these things are dumb, they really are crazy sorts of things to do. Somebody asked the question, 'Do we need more complex models?' What we need desperately is simpler and simpler models of the world, be they conceptual models or mathematical models.

I see the future really in providing the strength and the motivation in the university sectors to undergraduate students and postgraduate students to free themselves of 19th century German positivism.

Question: I want to take the concept of interdisciplinarity which you so forcefully brought before us and remind you of a conversation we had 18 months or so ago. You were trying to persuade me that the interdisciplinarity of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University was a really quite unique strength for the nation, that agglomerated in that one small geographical area we had incredible brains across a wide series of endeavours. And also it happened to be in the national capital, so interfacing with decision makers was a little bit easier.

I want to remind the meeting that we have a fantastic opportunity for interdisciplinarity of the widest possible sort through the National Academies Forum. I actually know that when the four academies together opine on something, Canberra jumps to attention. When we had, for example, after the first climate change report, under Rupert Myers' chairmanship, that excellent symposium here, with the bureaucrats present, it materially affected what it was that they then took into the international arena. And out came something very sensible.

I reckon that Jim Peacock [the President of the Australian Academy of Science] ought to take advantage of this meeting and really extend it to a total National Academies Forum activity, and then bring the decision makers into the arena, because many of the things that we have canvassed here today are so transparently logical, almost obvious, that it is a terrific pity that we are just talking to ourselves.

RW: I agree with the latter part of your remarks. On the first part, yes, I was trying to convince you of that.

I was arguing that the Institute of Advanced Studies is an extraordinary body of brains, but we weren't using that collection of brains particularly effectively in the interdisciplinary endeavour. I think it is fair to say it is very difficult to do. I think CSIRO have shown how difficult it is to pull that sort of thing off, although they have had some success. And I think Peter Cullen's efforts in this area demonstrate the very real difficulty. I think it would be wrong of us to simply sweep under the carpet the paradigmatic differences between the disciplines and the paradigmatic differences between the metadisciplines. I think the differences between the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences are profoundly important.

I am the Director of a Centre where we have representatives of all of those disciplines and metadisciplines in the same building. The conversations that we have are fascinating and enormously enlightening, but often like ships passing in the night, because the assumptions from which those conversations are occurring are very rarely actually spelled out.

So on the question about the nature of these disciplines: I think we really have to confront this and accept that there are differences. That is where the conversation becomes really very important. One of the problems we face right at the moment is that because natural sciences tends to be very well organised because it is well funded (by comparison with social sciences and humanities), and it sees generics and causality as crucially important and therefore searches for generics, a lot of the so-called models of integrated understanding of the human-environment relationship are being driven from natural sciences. I think that is likely to come to grief.

For example, Aynsley Kellow was talking about sustainability not being the same thing as sustainable development. I think it would be a mistake for this group to miss that point. If the word 'development' is not in there, many of the supplicants, the congregation, will be lost, just as, if the natural sciences keep driving down the throats of everybody else their view of integrated analysis, they are going to lose the social sciences and humanitarians as well. It has got to be a proper 'trialogue' – not a dialogue, a trialogue.

Chairman: This morning we have had in this session three excellent talks. We have heard about the real need for a systemic approach to the science, we have heard about a real need for the multidisciplinary approach to the science. I would point out that one of the things that is a significant responsibility upon us in this community is to provide leadership in this issue. In order to provide leadership there are a couple of things you need.

First of all, you need to know where you want to arrive at, and I think we have to arrive at a very clear view of what it is we need, in order to provide leadership. Secondly, in order to be able to know how to get there, you have to know where you are at the moment, and that is the reason for a lot of the studies we are undertaking at the moment to provide benchmarks.

I think the final point that is really important to us all is that if you are to provide leadership, the people you are trying to lead have to know what you are doing, and that means that one of the most important responsibilities upon us as a community is to get this knowledge out there to the people to whom we are trying to provide leadership. There is no point whatsoever in claiming that we are providing leadership unless we get it out there and it has an impact.