A climate of awareness

Sustainability is a privileged position in our jam-packed world. As Leapfrogging noted, the population bottleneck is a unique challenge. A shared awareness of global issues is essential for building the institutions that make sustainability possible. A climate of awareness looks at several ways of creating social awareness, from teaching ecology to building consensus on climate change.

The precursors of social change are difficult to pin down. Studying the process helps us at least to create the conditions in which change can happen. Everett Rogers devised a simple model that describes social change in a series of stages. Each of his stages is associated with a group of people. A person viewing online talks about sustainability would fall into his ‘early adopter’ category. Speakers in this four-part section offer ideas to further ecological understanding.

 

Ecoliteracy and education

Deepak Chopra - The Crisis of Perception
 “Science has spent hundreds of years making distinctions that don’t really exist. Biological organism, environment; mind, body.”

Ecologists study the connections between organisms and their environments. Ecology gives us another point of view in the ‘mastery of nature’ debate, the question of whether human civilization has meaning independent of the environment. Support for such a division appears in deep ecology, in wise use, and in paternalistic environmentalism. James Boyle pointedly calls it the ‘naturalistic fallacy’.

The disconnect between man and nature is not just a philosophical point, it is part of the basic human experience. Albert Einstein described our mental shortsightedness as an ‘optical delusion’. Deepak Chopra frames it for our time, calling it a crisis of perception. »

Fritjof Capra - The Systems View of Life
 “As our century unfolds, one of our greatest challenges is to build and nurture sustainable communities.”

While scientific literacy is important, something greater is needed to generate social awareness. We need a special set of tools to help us cope with the overwhelming scale of human culture. One solution to the crisis of perception is ecoliteracy. Fritjof Capra coined the term to describe our awareness of the ecosystem.

At the heart of ecoliteracy is systems thinking, a skill that can be taught to students at all levels. Fritjof Capra co-founded an institute that delivers programs for primary and secondary students. Modifying higher education to encourage systems thinking requires a more systemic approach. Some of the suggestions made by David Orr twenty years ago have still not found the broad support needed to implement them.

Systems thinking has a body of research behind it. As an interdisciplinary subject it has been slow gain status in the academic world. Systems thinking applied to the sciences is an emerging field of its own, a trend that E.O. Wilson calls consilience.

Not long after systems thinking was introduced it found an ally in video games. The website WorldChanging often writes about ‘serious games’, simulation games designed to teach. Will Wright is credited with the emergence of simulation gaming. He has consistently broken new ground by making educational video games that have wide appeal.

 

Science communication

As complex technologies become more integrated with people’s daily lives, there has not been a corresponding increase in scientific literacy.1 The resulting ingenuity gap is a serious challenge for science communicators. There has to be better knowledge translation so that the public recognizes where science can be used to make better decisions. To make public policy on climate change, biotechnology, or nuclear power there has to be a dynamic of trust between the public and the scientific community.

When controversial research is published there is not always a transparent debate within the scientific community. Matthew Nisbet and others have pointed out that the ethical aspects of new research are not well reported. Due to the lack of ethics discussion in the scientific journals there not enough authoritative sources for journalists to draw upon. The result is a broken public dialogue that Nisbet calls ‘the battle over knowledge’.

 

Opinion leaders

The project to build awareness about climate change is well underway. Getting to the point where people understand that immediate action is needed took the efforts of many scientists and a number of well known advocates.

According to Al Gore, the critical path for solving the climate crisis lies through the mind of the public. He recognized that the shortsightedness of businesses, politics, and the media can be traced back to a lack of awareness. Gore understands the art of consensus building. He has created a language to convey the urgency of the climate problem, which he now calls the ‘climate crisis’. He may not be charismatic, but no one criticizes his ability to stir up public opinion.

David Attenborough has been making natural history programs for as long as television has been around. He gained the public’s confidence through his work, and is now putting it to use through advocacy.

Following the success of Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo Dicaprio has lent his name to The 11th Hour (link to trailer). The 11th Hour is a groundbreaking film for its discussion of the moral aspects of sustainability. The film features interviews with dozens of sustainability experts.

The toughest challenge in producing films such as these is figuring out how to communicate the science. It can be difficult to dramaticize science, and doing so without undermining scientific honesty is even harder. Matthew Nisbet touched on this in the previous section when he talked about the popularized version of science getting ahead of the actual science.

 

Turning awareness into action

When it comes to sustainability for the climate, breaking from ‘business as usual’ will require social change within the current generation, not the next. Action on global problems can be elusive even when there is widespread awareness. Problems such as climate change or inequality in global trade take time to sort out, but there is no reason not to try and speed up the process.

We are not equipped to manage the planet as David Orr puts it. He writes, “What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities.” The previous sections hinted at how social norms affect public opinion. Fields such as public relations, propaganda, and marketing are all examples of special interests trying to create or influence social norms.

Robert Cialdini studies the types of messages that motivate the average person. He developed six “weapons of influence” based on real life situations where information is exchanged. The six points can be used to get the attention of people whose attention may be focussed elsewhere.

Going back to the social change model introduced at the beggining of the section, the innovators are a crucial but poorly understood group. Yochai Benkler studies the motivations of a particular group of innovators, the people who participate in modern social networks. If the creativity of innovators is properly recognized they can be encouraged to put their talents to use. Benkler is devoted to studying the incentive structures of productive social networks, of which Wikipedia is the most famous example.

 

References

1. There are not enough statistics over time to confirm this claim. Testing in OECD countries has just begun. [html]

 

 

 

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