"There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an area of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged."
These are not my words, but those of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, published in 1962. She was talking about pesticides, but these words hit me so hard I stopped and read them few times. It seems her words transcend time and circumstance.
In this respect, the world has not changed. We suffer terribly from tunnel vision when it comes to our own spheres of experience and influence. Take a problem, show it to to ten people with different specialties and you get ten different solutions to slightly different versions of the original problem.
So why is this a bad thing, and how is it relevant in the context of our modern issues? Take climate change as an example. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is too great, and this could lead to bad things. We have to balance this with the need to continue to produce energy. We turn to experts to help us. What is the result?
Physicist: Well these are the raw numbers: we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2020 and reduce global energy consumption by 40%. Off you go then.
Economist: By making the non polluting options cheaper and punishing those who pollute with fines we can rely on the market to remove the heavy polluters.
Politician: Well we have to make sure that we can afford it, we avoid impacting the public too much and we continue to be voted into power.
Oil Tycoon: We can keep using oil if we research carbon capture; and we can always invest resources in unconventional sources of oil like sands and shale to keep the world running.
So you can see the difficulties we have here. They all accept climate change is happening (for the most part - even if the oil tycoon fails to believe it, he still plays along now that he has no choice), but they see different problems. Due to different problems, we get different solutions.
The physicist is stating the problem exactly, but he misses that what he suggests may not be possible. The economist understands the problem, but defines the solution in terms of his knowledge. The politician is very concerned, but feels he has to juggle too many things, tries to please everyone and goes nowhere. The oil tycoon wants to stay in business.
These people need to talk to each other. The politicians have the power, but they simply cannot be expected to know everything to come to a completely informed decision. They turn to experts. Does this help? Well as we have just seen, the diversity of the experts chosen is as important as the quality of the experts.
Everything is connected in this field. The days of the expert are gone: time to herald the days of interdisciplinary thinking.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Penguin Classics. Quoted text on page 29.
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