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Perspectives
A proper study of mankind... ■
Ever since hunter-gatherers decimated mammoth populations and used fire to create favourable landscapes, people have changed the face of the Earth. Now there is a new twist. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leave no wriggle room: humans are a force of nature, capable of altering, probably irreversibly, the surface of the Earth, its flimsy troposphere and its ozone layer – the conditions in which we have evolved and on which our further existence is predicated. Crop pollination, food, drinking water, stable climate and everything else that sustains the web of life on which we and other life forms depend are vulnerable to collapse through these anthropogenic changes. For those from an Enlightenment tradition who believe in the human ability to develop knowledge to make the world a better place, this raises big questions. Can we adapt tools forged to create wealth and use them for sustainable development? Is ever-increasing wealth the only viable measure of progress? Is it possible to have global governance that protects our future? Can individuals really be rational and modify behaviours accordingly? I was brought face to face with these issues over 18 months spent as one of many authors working on the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
Profile Niels Röling is an emeritus professor of communication and innovation studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Among his interests are policies and strategies for fostering innovation in subsistence farming.
40 | NewScientist | 17 January 2009
(IAASTD), which set out to assess how agriculture might help to feed the world without destroying it. It brought together scientists, farmers, industry, government, NGOs and others in an unprecedented dialogue. Unsurprisingly, the parties found it hard to listen to each other. One of the things this exercise brought home to me was how poorly we understand humans as agents of planetary change, how little of what we do know is widely shared, and that this knowledge is scattered across disciplines that appear distant to governance. I began to ask if we needed a new discipline, one that could go beyond the work of thousands of ecologists, climatologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, neuroscientists and the like. I decided to appropriate the name “anthropogenics” for my dream discipline, although I gave the word a broader remit than the adjectival dictionary entry I found, which relates to “environmental pollution and pollutants originating in human activity”. My anthropogenics would be an “adaptive” science, in that it would focus on a more effective and less destructive coupling of humans and their environment, while its study of behavioural and social dynamics would be concerned with drivers such as an awareness of interdependence in resource use, rather than individual greed. Anthropogenics would also be a praxiology – a science that informs decisions and action. Crucially, it would only work well as a truly democratic science, shaped not only by academics but by all who have to live by it. From where we are now this may sound idealistic, but the Climate Change Knowledge
ZONE 5/REX FEATURES
Humans have become a force of nature. Whether this turns out to be truly terrifying depends on finding out how such a force might be harnessed, says Niels Röling
Network in the Netherlands is a good example of how such involvement can work. Here, city engineers, spatial planners, water authorities, local governments, city and business groups, and individuals, who used to operate on their own, have recognised that they need to work closely together to understand and mitigate the vulnerability of the low-lying Netherlands to climate change. At the heart of anthropogenics, then, would be a synthesis of what we know about our ability to sacrifice private for public good, to take less and give more, and of research into game theory, social psychology, anthropology and evolutionary economics. It will challenge the key western assumption that human behaviour is necessarily selfish. A close understanding of how institutions determine individual behaviour might even curb the enthusiasm for “methodological www.newscientist.com
showed that human societies can create institutions to manage collectively competing claims on common resources. Underlying such institutions is an acute awareness that individuals can only reach their particular goals if others can reach theirs. The centrality of interdependence is a good example of why anthropogenics would be an adaptive science: ecological imperatives inform the behavioural outcomes and vice versa. The question is whether agreements like these can also be made in more complex societies, and in a world in which a handful of countries are disproportionately responsible for climate change. We also need to learn how to manage common resources sustainably. Perhaps the contours of anthropogenics become clearer if we compare our response to climate change with the way we tackle dangers to our health. Understanding chronic diseases,
“The basis is still selfinterest, but collective not individual”
individualism”, the tendency to explain collective things such as the marketplace as a necessary outcome of individual choices. The explanations generated by my new baby would inevitably differ markedly from those of existing research because they would not be based solely on innate behavioural and social variables but on human behaviour in context. Norms of behaviour, organisations, laws and the extent to which we unwittingly subscribe to a competitive society are all examples of institutional choice and design. Yet the current institutions we appear to have such difficulty giving up clearly do not serve the long-term goals of human survival. The underlying basis of anthropogenics is still self-interest – but of a collective rather than individual kind. Serving a collective selfinterest is not as outlandish as our self-image makes us believe. Admittedly, game theory’s www.newscientist.com
Beautiful but environmentally deadly objects of desire are going to be hard to give up
prisoner’s dilemma scenario appears to show we often opt for short-term, individual gain, even if everyone would be better off long-term by cooperating. But much research challenges such a simplistic reading. Take the famous 1981 paper The Evolution of Cooperation by political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, in which they showed there was plenty of scope for cooperation under a variety of conditions. The assumption that “rational choice” always leads to self-interested actions also underlies the “tragedy of the commons”, the prediction that common resources such as planet Earth will inevitably be degraded and destroyed. Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University, Bloomington, and others
such as lung cancer, where risk factors are affected by behaviour, is the task of biology. Epidemiology establishes the prevalence of behaviours such as smoking, while social science studies the cultural, behavioural and social dynamics that lead to risky behaviours so we can intervene through laws, education and so on. Epidemiologists and clinicians then assess the impact of our interventions. Climate change has successfully put anthropogenic change on the global agenda, resulting in demands to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But this is like calling for bans on smoking, or issuing warnings about overeating or having unprotected sex, without taking into account the human or social dimensions. How can we ask the world to, say, give up flashy gas guzzlers if we don’t understand the complex interplay between the psychology/ physiology of car ownership and driving or the economic, social and psychological effects of stopping a region from making gas guzzlers? Global society is structured to support unsustainable exponential growth rather than the adaptive, cyclic management of ecological processes. The transformation of the resulting edifice and of the livelihoods of millions dependent on it may be too much for the deliberative process that anthropogenics assumes will occur. But we don’t know. The IPCC has done its job. Now we have to find out whether we can do something about its conclusions by understanding our human reach – and whether we can curb it. ● 17 January 2009 | NewScientist | 41
A proper study of mankind... ■
Ever since hunter-gatherers decimated mammoth populations and used fire to create favourable landscapes, people have changed the face of the Earth. Now there is a new twist. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) leave no wriggle room: humans are a force of nature, capable of altering, probably irreversibly, the surface of the Earth, its flimsy troposphere and its ozone layer – the conditions in which we have evolved and on which our further existence is predicated. Crop pollination, food, drinking water, stable climate and everything else that sustains the web of life on which we and other life forms depend are vulnerable to collapse through these anthropogenic changes. For those from an Enlightenment tradition who believe in the human ability to develop knowledge to make the world a better place, this raises big questions. Can we adapt tools forged to create wealth and use them for sustainable development? Is ever-increasing wealth the only viable measure of progress? Is it possible to have global governance that protects our future? Can individuals really be rational and modify behaviours accordingly? I was brought face to face with these issues over 18 months spent as one of many authors working on the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
Profile Niels Röling is an emeritus professor of communication and innovation studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Among his interests are policies and strategies for fostering innovation in subsistence farming.
40 | NewScientist | 17 January 2009
(IAASTD), which set out to assess how agriculture might help to feed the world without destroying it. It brought together scientists, farmers, industry, government, NGOs and others in an unprecedented dialogue. Unsurprisingly, the parties found it hard to listen to each other. One of the things this exercise brought home to me was how poorly we understand humans as agents of planetary change, how little of what we do know is widely shared, and that this knowledge is scattered across disciplines that appear distant to governance. I began to ask if we needed a new discipline, one that could go beyond the work of thousands of ecologists, climatologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, neuroscientists and the like. I decided to appropriate the name “anthropogenics” for my dream discipline, although I gave the word a broader remit than the adjectival dictionary entry I found, which relates to “environmental pollution and pollutants originating in human activity”. My anthropogenics would be an “adaptive” science, in that it would focus on a more effective and less destructive coupling of humans and their environment, while its study of behavioural and social dynamics would be concerned with drivers such as an awareness of interdependence in resource use, rather than individual greed. Anthropogenics would also be a praxiology – a science that informs decisions and action. Crucially, it would only work well as a truly democratic science, shaped not only by academics but by all who have to live by it. From where we are now this may sound idealistic, but the Climate Change Knowledge
ZONE 5/REX FEATURES
Humans have become a force of nature. Whether this turns out to be truly terrifying depends on finding out how such a force might be harnessed, says Niels Röling
Network in the Netherlands is a good example of how such involvement can work. Here, city engineers, spatial planners, water authorities, local governments, city and business groups, and individuals, who used to operate on their own, have recognised that they need to work closely together to understand and mitigate the vulnerability of the low-lying Netherlands to climate change. At the heart of anthropogenics, then, would be a synthesis of what we know about our ability to sacrifice private for public good, to take less and give more, and of research into game theory, social psychology, anthropology and evolutionary economics. It will challenge the key western assumption that human behaviour is necessarily selfish. A close understanding of how institutions determine individual behaviour might even curb the enthusiasm for “methodological www.newscientist.com
showed that human societies can create institutions to manage collectively competing claims on common resources. Underlying such institutions is an acute awareness that individuals can only reach their particular goals if others can reach theirs. The centrality of interdependence is a good example of why anthropogenics would be an adaptive science: ecological imperatives inform the behavioural outcomes and vice versa. The question is whether agreements like these can also be made in more complex societies, and in a world in which a handful of countries are disproportionately responsible for climate change. We also need to learn how to manage common resources sustainably. Perhaps the contours of anthropogenics become clearer if we compare our response to climate change with the way we tackle dangers to our health. Understanding chronic diseases,
“The basis is still selfinterest, but collective not individual”
individualism”, the tendency to explain collective things such as the marketplace as a necessary outcome of individual choices. The explanations generated by my new baby would inevitably differ markedly from those of existing research because they would not be based solely on innate behavioural and social variables but on human behaviour in context. Norms of behaviour, organisations, laws and the extent to which we unwittingly subscribe to a competitive society are all examples of institutional choice and design. Yet the current institutions we appear to have such difficulty giving up clearly do not serve the long-term goals of human survival. The underlying basis of anthropogenics is still self-interest – but of a collective rather than individual kind. Serving a collective selfinterest is not as outlandish as our self-image makes us believe. Admittedly, game theory’s www.newscientist.com
Beautiful but environmentally deadly objects of desire are going to be hard to give up
prisoner’s dilemma scenario appears to show we often opt for short-term, individual gain, even if everyone would be better off long-term by cooperating. But much research challenges such a simplistic reading. Take the famous 1981 paper The Evolution of Cooperation by political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, in which they showed there was plenty of scope for cooperation under a variety of conditions. The assumption that “rational choice” always leads to self-interested actions also underlies the “tragedy of the commons”, the prediction that common resources such as planet Earth will inevitably be degraded and destroyed. Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University, Bloomington, and others
such as lung cancer, where risk factors are affected by behaviour, is the task of biology. Epidemiology establishes the prevalence of behaviours such as smoking, while social science studies the cultural, behavioural and social dynamics that lead to risky behaviours so we can intervene through laws, education and so on. Epidemiologists and clinicians then assess the impact of our interventions. Climate change has successfully put anthropogenic change on the global agenda, resulting in demands to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But this is like calling for bans on smoking, or issuing warnings about overeating or having unprotected sex, without taking into account the human or social dimensions. How can we ask the world to, say, give up flashy gas guzzlers if we don’t understand the complex interplay between the psychology/ physiology of car ownership and driving or the economic, social and psychological effects of stopping a region from making gas guzzlers? Global society is structured to support unsustainable exponential growth rather than the adaptive, cyclic management of ecological processes. The transformation of the resulting edifice and of the livelihoods of millions dependent on it may be too much for the deliberative process that anthropogenics assumes will occur. But we don’t know. The IPCC has done its job. Now we have to find out whether we can do something about its conclusions by understanding our human reach – and whether we can curb it. ● 17 January 2009 | NewScientist | 41