Knowing Systems and the Environment 35positions as both rational beings and as the ‘moral animals’ that we claim to be
(Wright, 1994). If we know that what we are doing is unsustainable in the long
run, and that we ought not to be doing what we are doing, then why do we con-
tinue doing it? If, in all conscience, we appreciate that it is somehow ethically
‘wrong’ to behave in a manner that threatens the ‘integrity, stability and beauty of
the biotic community’, as Leopold (1949) would assert, then why do we fail to
heed our conscience and behave otherwise? And perhaps most significantly and
irrationally of all, why, as knowledgeable and concerned citizens of the world, are
we continuing to ignore the sensible call to ‘learn our way out’ of the mess that we
ourselves are creating (Milbraith, 1989)?
The focus on learning here – on coming to know – is salutary: rather than
planning our way forward under circumstances where, as convention has had it,
we were confident of the end-state that we sought, we can only learn our way
towards the adaptive management of the resilient systems that are key to sustain-
able futures (Holling and Gunderson, 2002). The very notion of what it is that we
consider most worthy of being sustained in our lives, is, and will probably forever
remain after all, quintessentially contestable (Davison, 2001). In essence, our quest
to come to terms with sustainability and to design modes of development that lead
to environmental sustainability must start with learning what each other means
when we use those terms. As it is we, the citizenry, who are responsible for the mess
that we now perceive we are making of the world about us, so it is up to us col-
lectively to make-meaning through our learning as the basis for our collective
judgements about what we now need to do. In other words, it is to social forms of
learning that we need to now turn to inform the way by which, acting together, we
should manage our environments within the context of sustainable futures (Keen
et al, 2005). Social learning is central to the processes of the adaptive management
(Holling, 1978) which we need to employ in order to reduce both uncertainties
regarding matters of fact and disagreements about goals, objectives and values that
can all affect management decisions with respect to the search for sustainability
(Norton, 2005). A key complication here is that what each individual comes to
know, through learning, is very much a function of how he or she comes to know,
and this makes the search for communal meaning and thus consensual judgment
singularly difficult (Maturana and Varela, 1987). And this is then further com-
pounded by the communication limitations imposed by language (Norton, 2005)
and even more fundamentally by the apparent ‘taboo’ of Western culture that ‘tells
us it is forbidden to know about knowing’ (Maturana and Varela, 1987).
While it is our reluctance and/or our lack of capability to engage in social
learning or even to recognize its significance that arguably pose the greatest imped-
iments to our current dilemma, other factors also clearly contribute.
There is, for instance, the issue of the priorities that we set for ourselves, to say
nothing of our denial of the circumstances on the one hand, and of our addiction
to our current ways of life and the resources that we need to support these, on the
other (Griffiths, 2003). It is indeed as difficult to concentrate on the global green-
house gas emissions when one is trying to keep warm in a North American winter