Acquired habits
Addressing the interaction of scientific development with official policy, Laszlo Miklos, Slovakia's former minister for environment, and now UNESCO professor for sustainable development, stresses that science needs to be "well ahead of politics" but "not so far ahead" that policymakers fail completely to grasp important knowledge. Research teams, he says, need good interpreters and translators in order to communicate the latest scientific developments; and the same is true for policymakers sharing this knowledge within their own circles.
Another problem, according to Miklos, is that sustainable development as a concept lacks, at this point, scientific validity. Developing a translatable 'inter-science' language for sustainable development will require unprecedented levels of cross-sectoral cooperation. Physical and biological branches will have to link with economics, politics and, ultimately, the social sciences to take the necessary steps forward. "We need research, education, new methods and cooperation," said Miklos, "but of course we also need good people."
Dennis Meadows, US-based emeritus director for policy and social science research. Meadows has been putting the same thought-provoking question to audiences for years: "In the next few decades, human population is likely to do one of three things: one, it will continue to rise as it has been doing; two, it will level off to a point of near zero-growth/zero-decline; or, three, it will at some point begin to drop precipitously. What do you think will happen?" Two or three decades earlier Meadows believed that population would continue to grow. Why, then, does he now believe that population will at some point relatively soon begin to decline precipitously? "We simply are not in a sustainable situation," he says.
The professor shares three key "insights" crucial to the understanding of building a sustainable future. The first is that the knowledge needed for sustainable development is in the social sphere, and not in new technologies. "Cultural change is what's needed," says Meadows. "We already have the knowledge." The second insight is that change needs to happen soon. "We don't have 30-40 years," he warns. The third insight is that no tools — no matter how innovative or potentially effective — will work if governments and economic schemes continue to be programmed for short-term growth.
Meadows also points to a difference between 'easy' and 'hard' problems. Hard problems, for example, demand solutions that, despite being fundamentally correct, prove detrimental in the short-term; thus it is easy to understand why politicians caught up in election cycles seldom take this kind of approach.
Wolfgang Sachs, senior scientist at the Wuppertal Institute and a deeply influential figure in Europe's green and ecological movements, believes that science badly needs the humanities in order to affect the great conceptual changes that will be necessary for a sustainable future. He points out that the words 'ownership,' 'production' and 'consumption' stress the meeting of individual needs, while 'access,' 'provision' and 'use' are terms with far greater social resonance. He also suggests that we need to reconsider our notions of speed, slowness and space if we are to grow toward 'cosmopolitanism' and begin to see the world as a community of people, not as a battleground for competing interests and rival nation states.
Descriptive-quantitative sciences are valuable or course, Sachs argues, but they also tend to have too pervasive an influence, largely because "people tend to see numbers as an indicator of truth." One product of purely descriptive science that has had harmful consequences, according to the German scientist, is cost-benefit analysis; in other words, when the goal of a given formula is to come up with a purely numerical outcome, other intangibles (human and animal life, for example) tend to be inadequately considered or overlooked completely. "What really counts in life can't be counted," Sachs quotes from another German scientist of some renown, Albert Einstein.