36 Ethics and Systems Thinking
or has to drive to the shops in the mall or to the school in the suburbs or to church
on the Sabbath, as it is to be concerned with the integrity of the proverbial swamp
under the duress of fighting off the equally proverbial alligators. As the human
population moves inexorably towards the ten billion mark, and upwards, it is suf-
ficiently difficult to see how the quest for ever-increasing production of food can
be sustained for instance, or how the growing demand for energy resources can be
met in a rapidly ‘globalizing’ and modernizing world, without also having to worry
about sustaining the environment writ large into an indeterminate future.
We are also victims of the priorities that are set for us by others who have their
own motives and motivations for so doing, be that short-term economic gain or
political expedience or the machinations of the cultural politics in which environ-
mental discourse is now conducted (Hajer, 1996).
Then there is the matter of the abdication, by us as a civil society, of our
responsibilities for public judgement through our deferment, in decisions regard-
ing the public good (Giddens, 1979), to the expertise of the scientists, economists
and the policy makers, and to the officers and institutions of governance. After all,
a perfectly rational defence for this can be raised with respect to what Fuller (1991)
refers to as ‘cognitive authoritarianism’ where the rationality of thinking for oneself
‘diminishes as the knowledge-gathering activities of society expand to the point of
requiring the division of cognitive labour into autonomous expertises’. The clear
downsides of this phenomenon, however, relate both to the eventual loss of the
capacity of humans to participate in any discussions and decisions about the ways
by which we should live our lives through sheer lack of practice (Yankelovich,
1991) and to the essential hegemony that an instrumental technical rationality has
come to assume over other rationalities, especially in ‘developed’ capitalist societies
where questions of ‘how’ have come to supersede those of ‘why’ (Habermas, 1979).
These two latter positions echo the equally somber view of Toffler (1984) that the
‘political technology’ that has emerged along with modernization has not been
particularly adaptive, leading instead to ‘a mismatch between our decisional tech-
nology and the decisional environment’ that has been characterized by ‘a cacopho-
nous confusion, countless self-canceling decisions, noise, fury, and gross ineptitude’.
Under these circumstances it is difficult to disagree with Dietz and his colleagues
that devising ways to ‘sustain the earth’s ability to support diverse life, including a
reasonable quality of life for humans, involves making tough decisions under
uncertainty, complexity, and substantial biophysical constraints as well as conflict-
ing human values and interests’ (Dietz et al, 2003).
It is this claim that provides a clue to perhaps the most significant answer to ques-
tions about our seeming lack of commitment to ‘learning our way out’ of the
enduring, self-inflicted crisis of our relationships with the world about us. While
environmental scientists, systems ecologists, social ecologists, economists, sociolo-
gists and other ‘experts’ have indeed come to know a very significant amount
about ‘natural’ and ‘social systems’ ‘out there’, as a civil society we still know very lit-
tle about how we can collectively come to make knowledgeable decisions and judge-
ments about what we need to do to change the way we live our everyday lives. In