Doutes et croyances

Je viens de redécouvrir aujourd'hui cette citation de Henri Poincaré, que j'aime beaucoup:

"Douter de tout ou tout croire sont deux solutions également commodes qui, l'une comme l'autre, nous dispensent de réfléchir."

More humility

One last quotation I wanted to put from Paul Hawken:

"Our comfort and abundance is the foundation for the great differences we see in public debate and private discussions about the environment. From business and government, we are presented with the concerned but optimistic "so far, so good" assessment, a school of thought that biologist E. O. Wilson calls exemptionalist. This line of thinking relies on the ability of human beings to overcome ecological "laws" through invention, ingenuity, and gumption. For every problem presented by environmentalists, optimists have an answer: desalinization, fusion, deep-sea mining, space, and bio-engineering. Their conjectures are easier to swallow than the alarmist voices of environmentalists who say we are outstripping the earth's means to sustain the human species. Ever since the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote his "Essay on Population" in 1798, there has been a dispute as to when or whether humankind would exceed the capacity of the earth to provide our daily bread. Books such as Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb have enlivened the controversy, not only because they were based on research and science, but because the arguments were made forcefully and dramatically. The concept of doomsday has always had a perverse appeal, waking us from our humdrum existence to the allure of a future harrowing drama. Yet another view held by a small group of writers and journalists (very few scientists, however) proclaims that environmentalism is a hoax, that we have been unnecessarily frightened, that environmentalism is a delusional scam from the political fringes to coerce others into a liberal agenda. A large and anxious audience is quite ready to wake one morning and find that, much like the thermonuclear cold war, our environmental bad dream is over, the opposing sides having made peace, and that we needn't worry anymore.
The view I choose is this: The underlying principles informing such cautionary predictions are largely correct, while the timing and nature of humankind's destiny with earthly limits is still unknown. This means that the optimists who say we will be taken care of in the future will be correct for the time being, until the day they are wrong, when we will all be in big trouble. The environmentalists, warning of impending catastrophe, will usually be wrong with regard to specific predictions, but are right in principle. What does this tell us ? It suggests we find a path of existence that honors both camps; that recognizes limits while using our innovative capacity to invent and reimagine our world to increase eficiency, decrease harm, improve our existence. In other words, we need to create an economy and way of relating to our material world that is not an either/or argument, but a means to create the best life for the greatest number of people precisely because we do not know the eventual outcome or impact of our current industrial practices. In other words, we need an economy based on more humility."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "The inestimable gift of a future").

On education

"The task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives. There is no doubt also the need to transmit know-how but this must take second place, for it is obviously somewhat foolhardy to put great power into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them. At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom."

E. F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful.

Engagements

"Les mouvements du coeur ne sont suivis d'engagements réalistes que s'ils se nourissent à des connaissances."

François Châtelet, Introduction à Marx et Engels. Manifeste du Parti communiste.

Democratic capitalism

"the cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "The inestimable gift of a future").

It is good to remind ourselves of that. We can blame companies for polluting, exploiting workers, and other mischiefs, but often they do that because we ask for it: we care more about the price of the goods than about how the goods were produced and what impacts they have on the environment. Changes will come from people first. Use your power: be an informed and conscious consumer !

Sommes-nous l'espèce élue ?

"Je pense que l'humanité n'est pas nécessairement la favorite de la nature, que l'humanité peut très bien disparaître, que nous ne sommes pas une espèce sacrée, qu'il y a eu 10 millions d'espèces animales jusqu'ici et que 9 millions ont été éliminées. On n'est pas l'espèce élue comme on l'a cru pendant longtemps, la nature peut très bien se passer de nous, et elle ne nous éliminera pas, c'est nous qui pourrions nous éliminer. Et si nous nous éliminons, la nature ne sera pas particulièrement en deuil mais elle continuera à développer d'autres espèces, espérant que ces espèces seront plus en mesure de se préserver et de ne pas se détruire."

Hubert Reeves, dans Conteur d'étoiles, un film de Lolande Cadrin-Rossignol.
La première moitié de ce discours a été repris par les Ogres de Barback dans leur chanson intitulée "Pour tant qu'il y aura des hommes", qui m'a donné envie de regarder le film sur Hubert Reeves.

J'adhère avec cette proposition de Hubert Reeves, plutôt que celle d'hommes religieux comme l'Abbé Pierre ou Teilhard de Chardin, pour qui l'homme est l'aboutissement de la création divine, parce qu'il me paraîtrait très incongru que le créateur de l'univers ait attendu des milliards d'années pour enfin aboutir à l'homme et n'en profiter que quelques millénaires, un éclair au regard de l'âge de l'univers. Cette croyance relève de la même logique que celle qui voulait que la Terre fût au centre de l'univers.
Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'Hubert Reeves est athée, car il dit dans ce film qu'il ne pense pas que l'univers soit apparu par pur hasard, et que lorsqu'il écoute Mozart ou Beethoven, il se dit qu'il y a quelque chose d'autre, mais sans pouvoir définir de manière plus précise ce qu'est ce "quelque chose d'autre". C'est exactement la position dans laquelle je suis aussi.

Tragedy of the commons

"Biologist Garret Hardin's now-famous metaphor for the deterioration or "tragedy" of the global commons begins with the notion of a pasture open to everyone in a given village. In such a situation, the herder who overgrazes the most benefits the most, and the person who grazes a herd that consumes only his "share" of the pasture's yield is effectively penalized. But eventually the entire pasture deteriorates. In this case, when overgrazing becomes the "rational" norm, you are punished for doing the right thing, rewarded for the wrong, and all suffer in the end. This outcome fulfills what philosophers going back to Aristotle have foreseen: "What is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it." Hardin's pasture, however, is not technically about a commons, but an "open access" system where anyone is free to take as much as they want. Commons have historically been extremely well controlled and regulated by the communities to which they belonged; not until colonization and industrialization have they been widely degraded and destroyed.
Nevertheless, the solution to Hardin's dilemma of a deteriorating open access system would be a pasture utility, one that operated independently of the specific grazing and herding needs of the villagers. The utility would be managed to maximize income from grazing fees, and therefore would have no economic interest in overgrazing, since any form of degradation would reduce the value of the utility to its owners. The pasture utility would monitor usage by grazers so that income was maximized. The utility would pay careful and constant attention to yield, growth, rotation, and fencing. The commons would not deteriorate under such a guardianship, and the natural predilection to overgraze would be thwarted.
The pasture utility is a useful model for a mechanism to guard our own commons, whether local or global. Such a utility can maximize the strenghts of both the private and public sectors, without succumbing to the failings of either. Utilities are hybrid enterprises because they combine two unusual features. First, they are regulated by their constituencies through public utility commissions or other forms of public sector input. In return for accepting regulation, they are given monopolies and are guaranteed a certain level of profit. In other words, by allowing some form of public control, they receive a guaranteed return on their investment, a relationship that allows them to create and execute long-term projects, and attract capital while paying low interest rates."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Pink salmon and green fees").

An example of such a utility would be the Earth Atmospheric Trust (see also this post) for the global commons that our atmosphere is, and where the utility members would be every person on Earth !

Strategic planning

Below is the fundamental argument I made to myself long before reading Paul Hawken's book, that made me choose my position regarding global warming even if, as a scientist in an Earth science, oceanography, I know too well that the models that are used to predict climate have too coarse resolutions and sometimes questionable parameterizations of the unresolved processes:

"From a strategic point of view, the choice is clear. Whenever you are faced with two different paths, each with its uncertainties and unknowns, the cardinal rule in strategic planning is to take the path that allows you to shift to the other path should your initial decision prove wrong. As futurist Peter Schwartz advises in his book The Art of the Long View, choose the option that gives you the most options in the future. Even granting status-quo defenders their argument that we know too little about global warming to warrant changing from a hydrocarbon- to a solar-based economy, even granting them their dream that technology will come up with ingenious ways to solve many of the problems with the innate toxicity of hydrocarbons, maintaining the present course is a mistake.
If we continue on the same path and find out forty, fifty, or one hundred years from now that the scientific projections about global warming were correct, it may be too late to mount an effective counter-strategy. On the other hand, if we choose to make the transition to an economy that runs on perpetual solar income and we later find out the CO2 buildup was less a problem than anticipated, we are still ahead on every count. We have eliminated hundreds of billions of tons of pollution from the air, ground, and water, and improved health worldwide. We have engendered a myriad of new, safer, and friendlier technologies to replace those deposed. We have not poisoned the planet or our bodies with the toxins produced in a hydrocarbon-based economy. We have created hundreds of thousands of new companies and many more jobs than we lost, while moving toward a world whose work and money are infused with meaning and vision, toward a just and constructive future. Plus we will still have all of the coal and oil that we didn't burn up, extending the life of current reserves far into the future of humankind."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Pink salmon and green fees").

Good design

Here is the follow-up on the previous post.

"In any endeavor, good design resides in two principles. First, it changes the least number of elements to achieve the greatest result. Second, it removes stress from a system rather than adding it. Bad design is pinning our hopes for environmental and cultural survival on a change in human consciousness and behavior alone, because we therefore depend on the highest number of uncontrollable elements--people--to undergo a great change. Likewise, bad design is having to institute several hundred thousand rules and restrictions under the jurisdiction of the government and expecting business to know them all, much less obey them.
Good design makes things easier and simpler. Good design seems natural, unaffected, and appeals to common sense. Good design for the commercial system accounts for and appeals to the innate behavioral modes of both governance and commerce. Let governance govern with a minimum of intrusion and with a genuinely "conservative" approach; let business be business at its best: humane and creative and efficient.
One of the ways to further this goal is to invert the old values and reverse the traditional cost-price incentives. We need a predictable and consistent market that recognizes the true, full costs of doing business and reassigns them to the marketplace, where they belong. We require a market economy that rewards the highest internalized cost, an economy in which business prospers when it is responsible both socially and ecologically. We need business to thrive by exceeding regulatory standards rather than by challenging or circumventing them. Businesses should literally compete to be more ecological, not only on moral or ethical grounds or because it is "the right thing to do", but because such behavior squarely aligns with their bottom line. In short, we must design a marketplace that obviates acts of environmental destruction by making them extremely expensive, and rewards restorative acts by bringing them within our means. If we do this, environmental restoration, economic prosperity, job creation, and social stability will become equivalent."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Restoring the guardian").

The guardian and the commercial

"In her book Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs proposes that society can be viewed as encompassing two moral syndromes, the "guardian" and the "commercial". Jacobs argues that the guardian system, or governance, arose in territorial and hunting societies, cultures that guarded their boundaries, were suspicious of outsiders, and were deeply protective of their possessions. The guardian system is conservative and hierarchical, adheres to tradition, values loyalty, and shuns trading and inventiveness. The commercial system, on the other hand, is based on trading, and functions well when it is open, trusting of outsiders, innovative, positive, and forward-thinking. It values collaboration, contracts, initiative, and optimism.
Jacobs' thesis is that, ideally, society should separate these two functions as completely as possible. Trouble ensues when the two systems become confused about their roles and take on the functions--and therefore the behavioral traits--of the other. The virtues of one system become vices when exercised by the other. When the guardian syndrome--governance--intrudes with its hierarchical, bureaucratic assumptions into the realm of commerce, it founders, because it is no match for business in quickness and creativity. The S&L* fiasco in this country resulted directly from business's outwitting governance. Instead of insisting that industry create its own insurance system for depositors, government guaranteed that protection directly and thereby gave private institutions every incentive to choose the riskiest investments for depositors' money. [...]
Of course, the opposite situation also occurs, in which business attempts to take on the role of guardianship and governance. Every time it tries to do so, we suffer. In the context of the arguments of this book, the process might be described as follows: Business assumes the role of guardianship viv-à-vis the ecosystem and fails miserably in the task; governance steps in to try to mitigate the damage; business tries to sabotage this regulatory process and nimbly sidesteps those regulations that are put on the books; governance ups the ante and thereby becomes a hydra-headed bureaucratic monster choking off economic development while squandering money; business decries "interference in the marketplace" and sets out to redress its grievances by further corrupting the legislative and regulatory process in an attempt to become de facto guardian, if not de jure.
In the political arena, this struggle plays out in virtually every industrialized country in the world as the classic two-party schism of liberal and conservative. When liberals are in power, they understandably propose controls and regulations on business; in the more extreme forms, liberal thought tries to unite the guardian and commercial responsibilities with the guardian role predominant, producing socialist enterprises of marginal efficiency. When conservatives are in power, they attempt to reverse the regulations and give business carte blanche, invoking pious homilies to the free market and human enterprise, creating the future seeds of backlash, while avoiding the real issues of health and habitat. Conservatism has its own radical school of thought, wherein guradian and commercial roles are united but with commercial powers in the primary role. This experiment has not been tried in quite so thorough a fashion as the socialist ideology, but if it ever were attempted on a wide scale in the industrialized West, the fate of the ecosystem would be sealed.
Guardianship and commerce are trapped in a positive feedback loop, and neither is likely to solve the problems of ecological degradation and scarcity when reacting only to the excesses of the other. All of us suffer the consequences. When patterns of behavior in business repeat themselves again and again, as they do, and when the reaction of governance is another round of regulations, we would do well to consider whether "bottom-line" blame should be placed on "unruly" business or "incompetent" government, rather than on the design of the system within which they function."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "Restoring the guardian").

* I think it stands for the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States (but I can't tell for sure since there are no notes in the book for that).

About how to improve the design of the system, see next post.
Note the description of the guardian (represented by the liberals) as conservative and traditional, and the description of the commercial (represented by the conservatives) as trusting of outsiders and innovative. Don't you think the names given to the political parties should have been switched ?