Questions without answers

The discourse of nature that by now invades every aspect of our daily lives both emphasizes and conceals the dilemmas of complexity. Yet, in spite of the fashionable status to which ecology has ascended along with the exploitation of environmental issues to market everything from cars to baby food, the very remarkability of the phenomenon reveals behind itself more than meets the eye. The environmental debate is a symptom, a signal which on closer inspection discloses the existence of something else. What, then, does it have to say to the inhabitants of a planet which today is the home of a global society?

It certainly tells us about the great dilemmas which today characterize our lives: we cannot choose between nature and technology; we try to abide by the rules of ‘environmental correctedness’ but we cannot reduce our consumption standards; we all are potential NIMBYs (‘not in my back-yard’) when our immediate environment is concerned.

Uncertainty grows on a par with the increasing complexity of the systems in which we inextricably live, and decisions are responses through which we seek to reduce the degree of uncertainty present in our fields of action. Decision-making – the process which enables us to take action – is, however, also an attempted evasion, a denial and a concealment of the dilemmas that lie beneath the decision itself.