We arrive at decisions as a result of necessity … or luck.
All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
Noble friends,
That which combined us was most great, and let not
A leaner action rend us. What’s amiss,
May it be gently heard: When we debate
Our trivial difference loud, we do commit
Murder in healing wounds: then, noble partners,
The rather, for I earnestly beseech,
Touch you the sourest points with sweetest terms,
No curstness grow to the matter.
The Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. The “burning river” became a major symbol of the environmental movement as the first Earth Day in 1970 approached.3 It was not the first time pollutants on the Cuyahoga had ignited, and steps were underway to address the problem.
The fire was in the industrial “flats” in downtown Cleveland where the river flowed into Lake Erie. Akron, 45 miles south and upriver, was another major source of pollution. Still further upriver, the Cuyahoga flowed through my hometown, Kent, Ohio. Kent started as a mill town powered by the river. By the late 1960s, people in Kent were aware of pollution but thought the river was beautiful. A dam and waterfall were the center of town, and the major park was on the river.4 In 1971, I was part of a team of fourteen undergraduates at Kent State University who studied the river within the boundaries of Kent, a five-mile stretch.5 That experience began the thinking that led to this book.
Members of our research team had been involved in organizing Kent State’s version of the first Earth Day, which we called “Project Earth.” Earth Day was on April 22, 1970, but events stretched before and after that.6 Project Earth was scheduled for May 6. It never happened. The campus was closed on May 4 after four students were killed and nine wounded by the Ohio National Guard.7 Studying a local ecosystem was a way to link science to our politics and ethics. The relationship between science and politics, facts (how the world is) and values (how we would like it to be), understanding and action, is the central theme of this book. The term “sustainability” would not come into common use until the 1980s (see Chapters 1 and 2). But the themes of sustainability – reducing stress on the environment while improving the well-being of humans and other species – were central to our thinking and engagement at Kent State.
Our study anticipated the arguments I will make in the book. It was highly interdisciplinary, looking at the hydrology, water chemistry and biology of the river, the opinion of the Kent community and the economics of the river in Kent. We knew the history of the area, including the displacement of Indigenous people by settler colonists. Standing Rock in the middle of Cuyahoga near the northern border of Kent was known as a site for deliberation by Native American communities.8 The abolitionist John Brown had run a tannery in Kent and the remnants of his building were in the middle of our study area, linking to the fight against slavery. Kent had been a site of fierce union struggles in the 1930s.9 In addition to that context, we also learned from the community. A survey we conducted revealed that the public in Kent loved the river, knew it had great potential for recreation and were eager for a clean-up and better public access.10 Those views became evidence in the struggle that led to the creation of the Cuyahoga River National Park.
Work on sustainability emphasizes being “place-based,” but “place” makes sense only by linking the local to the global.11 Our study showed the interplay between Kent and the larger political-economic system. We identified four major issues in our stretch of the river. The first had a local cause and a local solution – some practices at the drinking water treatment plant were unnecessarily degrading the river. The second – a lack of investment in public access to the river – could be partially solved by local governments but also required state and federal action. The third was that the flow of water in the Cuyahoga River through Kent was controlled by the City of Akron. Akron takes its water from Lake Rockwell upstream of Kent. In times when the Lake was low, Akron would cut the flow over the Lake Rockwell dam to a trickle, generating serious problems for the river ecosystem. The flow problems required a regional solution and federal assistance, including the eventual removal of the dam in downtown Kent. The most serious problems were the discharge of toxic heavy metals and hydrochloric and sulfuric acids used in industrial “pickling” of metals and electroplating. The companies generating this pollution were national, with publicly traded stock, so they were resistant to any local pressure to reform. This local place-based problem could be solved only by state and national policy change and enforcement. While we did not articulate it at the time, in each of these issues there is a tension between narrow self-interest and the larger public good. That tension is central to most environmental decisions.
Studying the Cuyahoga started my thinking about how to make decisions in the face of serious problems and important opportunities. Global environmental change has been transforming the planet. Long-standing problems of inequality, poverty, prejudice, and violence persist. Emerging robotic, nano, information, bio and cognitive technologies have immense potential for good and ill. To avoid catastrophes, to craft a better world, we will have to make good decisions, decisions that foster sustainability and justice. We need decisions that enhance human well-being and the well-being of other species and that reduce the stress humans place on the biosphere. In pursuit of that goal, I explore the concept of sustainability, and what we know about how we make decisions, and offer some thoughts on how we might do better. At the start of this journey, I acknowledge that my focus on justice, human well-being, other species and the biosphere reflects my values and that people differ in what they consider important.
Following the logic of George E. P. Box in the epigraph, I suspect much of what I have to say will be wrong.12 But I hope that even my errors will advance your thinking. That is the nature of the scientific enterprise. We offer ideas and evidence. We discuss them. Better understanding emerges from the discussion. Our understanding always evolves. Little that I say is original. I am building on large intellectual traditions and most of my contribution, such as it may be, comes from rearranging those traditions. As Jean-Luc Godard seems to have said: “It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.”13
I.1 The Plan of the Book
My goal in this book is to explore how understanding both decision-making and sustainability might help us make better decisions. Chapter 1 engages the idea of decisions that shape our impacts on the environment and on well-being. Chapter 2 reviews how the concept of sustainability emerged and how it relates to the idea of growth. Chapter 3 reviews three major approaches to understanding individual decision-making. Chapter 4 asks how we can distinguish between facts and values. Chapter 5 proposes criteria for good decisions. Chapter 6 identifies sources of conflict that make it hard to make good decisions. Chapter 7 examines the relations between gradual progress and radical transformation. Chapter 8 focuses on how we might make better decisions as individuals. Chapter 9 examines how we might structure public discourse to yield better group decisions. I have tried to structure each chapter so that it can be read on its own. As a result, a number of key issues are revisited in multiple chapters.
There are six ideas that shape what follows in this book: cultural evolution and the need for diversity, altruism versus self-interest, the need to be explicit about facts and values, the importance of moving across disciplinary boundaries, the idea of deliberation and the importance of a critical assessment of society. The arguments in the chapters that follow are based on them. I hope that will be obvious as you read through the chapters, but I thought it would be useful to make them explicit here.
I.2 Six Perspectives
I.2.1 Cultural Evolution
Most of human behavior, and certainly most of our decisions, are substantially influenced by culture – what we learn from others. Culture is our dominant mode of adaptation. As Henrich puts it, culture is “the secret of our success” – where success is meant in the simple and problematic sense that we have become a dominant species in Earth’s biosphere.14 Understanding cultural evolution is essential for understanding social change, and thus for seeing how we can move towards a just and sustainable future.
The cultural evolution perspective I use has five key elements.15 First, culture is viewed as the information we acquire from others, whether by direct teaching, by observing or by discussion. The culture of a group can be thought of as the rules that shape decisions and influence actions. Some of those rules are written in laws or in the formal procedures that tell us what to do and how to do it. Other rules are more informal: values, norms and beliefs held by members of the group.16 Different people hold different views and individual views change over time. We can define subpopulations based on their values, norms and beliefs (e.g., conservatives, liberals), or we can define subpopulations based on demographic characteristics (e.g., gender identity, race/ethnicity, age, place of residence, social class) and examine their subcultures.
Second, cultural change is driven by social learning and selection that favors some values, norms, beliefs and practices over others.17 Box I.1 provides two examples of the process of cultural evolution. Culture influences our decisions and shapes our actions. In turn, other individuals, human and nonhuman, as well as the nonliving parts of the environment, respond to those actions. That response creates a form of selection. If I get a strong positive reaction from my peers by saying climate change is a serious issue, that strengthens my belief in climate change and encourages others to take climate change seriously. If I get a strong negative reaction, I am likely to let go of that belief, and so will others who observe the negative reaction.18 Over time, the content of culture evolves from these selective pressures. Some elements of culture become more legitimate, others less so. And individuals (influencers), social movements and organizations work very hard to shape cultural change in directions they favor – a key element of ever-changing preferences in music and art but also of political change as the powerful try to shape culture to serve their interests. So, I define power as “the ability to influence the situation so as to ensure that others behave as desired, that is, the ability to influence the rules upon which others act.”19 (While I focus on individuals, organizations and movements also shape cultural evolution; see Box I.2.)
In the United States in the early 1960s, the honorific for adult women, Miss or Mrs., signaled their marital status. But all adult men, married and unmarried, were given the honorific Mr. Starting with the new wave of the women’s/feminist movement in the late 1960s, Ms., an honorific for women that does not signal marital status, became common. Ms. had been in the dictionary for centuries. What changed was the norm that it, not Mrs. or Miss, should be used for adult women. Gender-neutral pronouns were also promoted in the early 1970s. I was captivated by a novel, The Cook and The Carpenter, that used gender neutrality in writing, in particular the pronoun thon (“that one”), to show deep gender biases in our thinking.21 But while Ms. became standard, “thon,” which has been in dictionaries since the 1930s, did not catch on, nor, at first, did other gender-neutral pronouns. In the last two decades, the singular, gender-neutral “they” has become common to respect the preferences of nonbinary, transgender and gender-nonconforming people. These continuing changes are an example of cultural evolution actively promoted by a social movement. New norms about pronouns do not transform gender relations or end discrimination and bias, but they do reduce some microaggressions and can help many people feel a bit more accepted and acknowledged. And they raise our awareness of issues around gender identity and that awareness can facilitate further change.
Technological change is also an evolutionary process. Starting about 9,500 years ago, the Indigenous people of the North American Great Lakes region may have been the first to make copper tools (arrowheads, knives, axes) and art.22 But after about 4,500 years, copper was not used much. Why was copper abandoned? The copper in the area is exceptionally pure and thus rather soft. The arrowheads and other tools made from it are not much better than well-crafted stone tools and are much harder to make.23 Climate change – a dry period – probably made efficient tools very important. Using stone rather than copper saves time and effort. Copper was gradually abandoned except for art and awls, where even the soft copper is better than stone. Technological and environmental change were intertwined and shaped in part by context – the kinds of copper available. Giving up copper was not a step backwards but just selection favoring the best tools when resources were scarce.
“US formally withdraws from Paris agreement”
“U.S. officially rejoins Paris Agreement on climate change”
“GM announces electric Chevy Silverado pickup that can go 400 miles on a single charge”
These news stories seem to be saying that the US government and GM are making decisions. Why do I focus on decisions by individuals? Aren’t the decisions that matter those by organizations: governments, corporations, social movement groups, churches and so on?26 As consumers, some of us decide to buy a car with low greenhouse gas emissions. A state government can impose standards on all new cars, a car rental company can insist on low emissions from the hundreds of thousands of cars they buy each year and car manufacturers can decide to produce vehicles that emit less.
It can be convenient to talk about the United States or GM making a decision. The term “organization” implies something that we think of in ways very similar to the way we think about people.27 And in many legal systems, including in the United States, organizations that have been created by “incorporating” have legal rights; they are “juristic persons.” So, talking about decision made by organizations seems natural.
But until major decisions are turned over to artificial intelligence, people make the decisions even when, for convenience, we say a government or a corporation does. Before an important decision is reached there is usually discussion. Even in a dictatorship, the dictator will have a circle of advisors.28 Politics is the actions, including discussion, trying to influence decisions. There may be very clear rules about who makes the decision, about the criteria they should use, about who they should consult with and how. There are always informal flows of information making connections outside of the formal organization. For governments, we call these policy networks, and they include members of the legislature and the executive branch of government but also lobbyists, political commentators, social movements, experts and ordinary citizens who try to make their views heard.29 Similar networks exist within and between private corporations, and there are many links between governments and corporations as they try to influence each other. And even within a corporation with a formal chain of command determined by legally binding written rules, we cannot understand decision-making without taking account of the individuals involved and informal networks both within and stretching outside the formal organizational structure.30 So, while it is sometimes useful to think of the California state government or National Rent a Car acting as if they were a person, we have to be careful that approach doesn’t mislead us.31
Thinking about organizations reminds us of a key point of the evolutionary perspective: individuals are always embedded in larger structures. We live in networks of others who we observe and learn from, who observe and learn from us, with whom we share resources and have conversations. Just as decisions by organizations involve individuals, individual decisions are embedded in larger structures that nearly always include organizations.
Social movements are special social networks that include organizations, strongly committed and active individuals and those less active but supportive of the movement, who may or may not be members of movement organizations. Movements are one of the most important ways that cultural change occurs. Movements influence how we think about issues and are key to struggles to bring about changes in policies in government, corporations and other organizations. Throughout the book, I will refer repeatedly to the environmental movement and movements to promote social justice and overcome bias – they are central to what has happened and to change in the future.32
The term “institution” is used to describe not only the networks interacting to produce decisions, including the organizations, but also the formal, written rules and the informal rules – the norms – that shape those interactions.33 Cultural change in those rules can have important consequences for both human well-being and the environment. So, moving towards sustainability is often talked about as changing institutions that shape both individual and organizational decisions.
Political economies are sets of institutions that shape how members of societies act, and thus what happens in response to those actions. In evolutionary terms, they are selective regimes, albeit ones that can be reshaped by the actions of those with power.34 Terms like “capitalism,” “communism,” “fascism,” and “socialism” are very broad descriptions of types of political economies; real political economies will always be complex hybrids of these abstractions. Ostrom emphasized distinctions across governance by markets, by central governments and by communities in order to make the point that in reality there are no pure forms – all governance mechanisms are a hybrid that involve aspects of all three.35 We can ask what kinds of decisions are degrading human well-being or the environment, and how those decisions are being and might be shaped by institutional arrangements. We can then try to change institutions to do better. I will return to this in Chapter 9, but note here that invoking the abstract terms for “isms” in political conflict often generates more heat than light and makes it harder to find solutions.36
Change also happens as we learn from new groups, as we generate new ideas and sometimes from errors in copying others. These processes constantly generate variation within a group. Then, selection acts on this variation, favoring some values, beliefs, norms and practices while suppressing others. This overall process – variation and selective retention – is evolution. The same general mechanism applies to the evolution of culture, to genetic evolution, to the selection of algorithms in genetic programming.20 Evolution is a very general process, but the details are very different for culture, genes and algorithms.
Third, evolutionary thinking is grounded in population thinking, a core idea of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.24 Population thinking sees large patterns, including social structure, generated by the actions of individuals. But those large patterns in turn shape individual action. It is a holistic way of thinking about humans and their interactions with each other, with other species and with the biosphere. But unlike some systems-based approaches, population thinking doesn’t assume “the system” has a reality distinct from the parts.25 Box I.2 examines how population thinking links individual decision-making with decision by organizations like corporations and governments.
Fourth, cultural evolution takes place in ecosystems filled with humans and other species as well as the physical environment – coupled human and natural systems.37 The ecological theorist G. Evelyn Hutchinson titled one of his books The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play.38 I think of the cultural evolutionary play in the human ecological theater. Change and structure are inextricably intertwined, and one cannot understand one without considering the other. Everything we do as humans has effects on other species and the environment, and other species and the environment are constantly influencing us, even when we are not aware of it.
Finally, a cultural evolution perspective draws attention to the vital importance of diversity. Selection requires diversity. This is true in genetic evolution, where genetic diversity is essential for coping with change.39 In cultural evolution, having multiple values, beliefs and norms – multiple perspectives – engaged in a discussion is essential for evolution in the face of social, technological and environmental change. Without such diversity, there is no basis for adaptive response to changes and no chance for hybrid ideas. Even in small groups, diverse ideas seem more important for problem-solving than the overall level of expertise, although both matter.40 When we move from individuals to organizations, markets or democracies, diversity remains important, although power and social structure can influence the degree to which diversity facilitates problem-solving. My emphasis on diversity is driven not just by a concern with fairness but also by an understanding of the importance of diversity for finding effective solutions to complex, rapidly changing and very pressing problems.41
The evolutionary perspective is a powerful tool for understanding change and the relationship between individuals and larger structures. Evolution can hone marvelous adaptations, and paying attention to evolutionary processes will help us develop better approaches to a just and sustainable future. But the scientific power of evolutionary explanations does not imply that the outcome of the evolutionary process is always ethically desirable.42 Understanding evolution can help us make decisions that guide us towards the future we want. But desirable outcomes are not “natural” or inevitable. The next two sections elaborate on these points.
I.2.2 Altruism versus Self-Interest
Do we act from narrow assessment of what matters for ourselves and close family members? Or are we often altruistic, taking account of the effects of our decisions on other humans, on other species, on the biosphere itself? The contrast between altruism and self-interest, and the scope of altruism, is a central theme in evolutionary theory and in nearly all the social sciences.43
It can be hard to maintain altruism in a social group. If you bear a personal cost from being altruistic (and that is really what we mean by altruism), there will be selection against acting altruistically. If altruistic actions benefit the larger group, then that benefit might outweigh the costs to you. So, when do the benefits to the group from altruism outweigh the costs to the individual? When can altruism towards those who are not close kin persist and even spread rather than being selected out and disappearing? For genetic evolution, the general answer is: only under very special conditions, such as among bees and ants.44 Cultural evolution proceeds differently than genetic evolution, and altruism can persist and spread via cultural dynamics.45 But cultural evolution can also favor homophily (sometimes called “tribalism”) – situations where we are more attentive to, and trust more, those we resemble.46 I will argue this tendency is a major obstacle to making good decisions. Unfortunately, the assignment of similarity and difference is often based on arbitrary cues such as physical appearance, religion or social class, or accents and other language patterns. So, cultural evolution can support caring for the well-being of others but also racism and other prejudices.
I.2.3 Explicit about Facts, Values and Ethics
I use the term “facts” to mean beliefs about the state of the world, “values” to refer to what each of us sees as important and “ethics” as the rules we favor when values are in conflict, either in a decision by a single individual or across individuals. A long-standing debate in the social sciences and philosophy asks whether facts can be distinguished from values.47 Chapter 4 examines the issue in detail. But to preview, I follow the position of pragmatist philosophers from John Dewey forward: For practical purposes, it is possible to distinguish facts from values and is often useful to do so. I view science as a powerful tool for assessing statements of fact.
Like any aspect of culture, science evolves. Science is always uncertain and always influenced by values and by power and biases. If we are careful about restraining those influences, we can come to understandings that are useful for decisions. For the last 500 years or so, much of the work we label “science” has emerged from Europe and its settler colonies. That science was driven by the needs of colonialism, capitalism and militarism, as well as by the hope of advancing human well-being and by curiosity. Earlier, what we call science was much more global. In the twenty-first century, the Western dominance in science is transforming into a planet-wide network, which has strong implications for what is studied and how it is studied.48 As I will emphasize throughout the book, science is often necessary but often not sufficient for learning the facts we need to make decisions. All human cultures have evolved sophisticated understandings of their environments. Joining those understandings with those that emerge from science is crucial for dealing with most sustainability decisions. In engaging these multiple perspectives, we also should appreciate that making a distinction between facts and values is not the only way of assessing what matters in decisions, although it is usually a good strategy.
We are in a period of rapid evolution in our understandings of how to incorporate multiple perspectives into decision-making, sometimes called “decolonizing science.” For example, Rebekah Sinclair uses Indigenous logics to remind us that when we speak of individual decision-making, the “individual” is embedded in and has been shaped by their culture and interactions with others.49 We also might make decision-making less anthropocentric by taking into account the interests of other species.50 In my discussion, I will emphasize the importance of contextual understandings, an approach intended to engage and learn from the ongoing thinking about decolonizing understandings and moving away from anthropocentrism.
I considered dropping the terms “facts” and “values” entirely to emphasize the tentative nature of “facts” and that the fact/value distinction, if used naïvely, is counterproductive. But I have found that, for many people, the terms “facts” and “values” link with their thinking and their experience in decision-making. So, the terms are useful for carrying forward a discussion that unpacks what constitutes a “fact” and the relationship of facts and values.
I will argue in Chapter 4 that science has developed some useful norms about how to decide what should be viewed as a fact; norms that, when working well, lead to understandings that are resonant with reality.51 But the process of science, and the tentative facts that emerge, are never perfect; the process is ongoing and often challenged by those with power who want to shape public beliefs. Keeping scientific assessment of facts as free from the influences of bias and power is a constant struggle. In Chapter 3, I will discuss the social psychological research that shows that, as individuals, we use both values and beliefs about facts in making decisions and that our values influence our beliefs, even, as in science, we have to struggle to moderate the influence of values and power on our assessment of the facts.
Economics and decision sciences have long been explicit about the distinction between a descriptive statement of how the world works and an ethical statement of what is best. Most economists and decision scientists support a utilitarian ethical theory, arguing that decisions should provide the greatest good for the greatest number. There are many other ethical theories, and some of them are deployed in policy analysis, as we will see in Chapter 5. But too often those calling for action on sustainability problems are not clear about the ethical theories that underpin their analyses.
Scientists who want to influence decision-making should be thoughtful and articulate about the ethical positions they advocate. People will differ in what is important to them, their values, and in the ethical theories they advocate to resolve value conflicts. For the discussion to progress, clarity about the ethical theories in play is essential.52 (That is not to say you must pick only one theory; in Chapter 5, I argue in favor of seven.) If we combine a descriptive theory of how the world works, values about what is important and ethical theories of how to weigh value differences across people and across outcomes, we may be able to produce sound prescriptive ideas about what we should do to make things better, to move towards sustainability.
I.2.4 Integrating across Disciplines
The Greek poet Archilocus said “a fox knows many things but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin drew on the metaphor to characterize scholarship – some scholars are interdisciplinary foxes,53 but others are specialist hedgehogs. Science probably advances most effectively when we have diversity in styles – both hedgehogs and foxes. The Rosetta Stone, looted from Egypt by Napoleon’s troops, was the basis for understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus gaining insight into an important ancient African civilization. Deciphering it required work by both the hedgehog Jean François Champollion and the fox, Thomas Young – neither alone could have figured it out.54
From the start, I have embraced interdisciplinary approaches. My Ph.D. is in ecology with a specialization in human ecology. I have always had joint faculty appointments in sociology departments and at least one other academic unit that focused on the environment. Given the urgency of the sustainability problems we face, we need to speed the cumulation of knowledge by integrating across disciplinary boundaries. One goal of this book is to provide links between perspectives so we can build a better-connected network that allows us to learn from each other.55
Academic disciplines are aggregations of theories, methods and research topics. Their boundaries come from the history of professional societies and university departments. Most social science disciplines were organized to address the problems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.56 Disciplines have built knowledge and honed methods for studying those problems. But disciplinary boundaries are often impediments to the flow of information and can retard the advance of our understanding. We need different configurations of research to address new problems, including sustainability.
We can learn a lot by treating disciplinary traditions with respect even as we develop a more inclusive perspective. Often critiques of a discipline address a stereotype rather than making a legitimate engagement with the core active thinking in the discipline. Even when I am critical, I hope that I am doing so with respect and with reasonable accuracy. One cost of my approach is that I cannot review in detail some of the rich and extensive literatures I engage. If a topic interests or seems important to you, take my summary as a starting point for delving into the references so that you can engage the subtleties of what is known and learn from emerging scholarship.
I.2.5 Deliberation
Jazz music is our art form that was created to codify democratic experience and give us a model for it. Jazz music was invented to let us know how to listen to each other, how to negotiate.
The real power of jazz and the inner vision of jazz is that a group of people can come together and create art, improvise art and negotiate their agendas with each other and that negotiation is the art.
Communication is a crucial part of cultural evolution. We learn by observing the actions of others and by trial and error, but we also learn by engaging in deliberation with others. Humans are exceptionally adept both at imitating others and in our linguistic ability. While language can be used to deceive and misdirect, it is also a powerful tool for understanding each other and for making decisions together. In Chapter 4, I argue that science is best understood as a process of cultural evolution where the rules that structure scientific deliberation move us to better understandings of reality. Chapters 5 and 9 offer a number of suggestions about how deliberation can be used to make decisions in the face of differing values. Overall, I suggest that deliberative approaches are the best way for moving forward towards sustainability.
The deliberative approach argues that good decisions are ones that arise from fair and competent discussions that engage all parties that are interested in or impacted by a decision. I will discuss the idea of fair and competent deliberation in Chapter 5.58 Briefly, fair means engaging all interested and affected parties so that they have an effective voice in the decision – fairness in process. It also means that the outcomes of the decision process are evaluated for how they differentially impact various groups, giving special attention to disproportionate harm to the most vulnerable – that is fairness in outcomes. Competent means taking careful account of both facts and values, including diversity and uncertainty about both.
Deliberative approaches to decision-making seem to have been used in many societies across much of human history, and Indigenous perspectives may have had great influence on Western thinking about democracy.59 In the quotes above, Wynton Marsalis invokes jazz performance as an example of this kind of deliberation, noting that the interaction is itself the essence of the outcome. My own engagement with deliberative theory started with the work of Jürgen Habermas, perhaps the most influential theorist of deliberation.60 But I soon turned back to the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who is a major source for my thinking not just about deliberation but about how to approach problems of facts and values in decision-making.61 The argument for deliberative processes in environmental and sustainability decisions arose in the 1980s.62 A comprehensive review of that literature by the US National Research Council in Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making concluded that:
When done well, public participation improves the quality and legitimacy of a decision and builds the capacity of all involved to engage in the policy process. It can lead to better results in terms of environmental quality and other social objectives. It also can enhance trust and understanding among parties. Achieving these results depends on using practices that address difficulties that specific aspects of the context can present.63
I will discuss the tradition of using deliberative approaches for sustainability decision-making in more detail in Chapter 9. In some cases, deliberation is used in policy analysis; in some cases, it is used in specific decisions; and in some, it supports ongoing management of ecosystems.64
Habermas and other theorists of deliberation argue about the governance of society as a whole rather than the specific decisions that aggregate into that governance. The argument is that a society is rational if and only if there is a public sphere where deliberative decision-making occurs. Feminist critiques of Habermas emphasize that most historical forms of the public sphere have favored the privilege of affluent white males over the interests of women, people of color, other disadvantaged humans and other species. In particular, Fraser has argued that in many contemporary societies it is easy for a political deliberation to be dominated by white male elites to the exclusion of others.65 She notes that those excluded, who are also often subject to discrimination and violence, create counterpublics, spaces for discussion where their experience and concerns are articulated. Such counterpublics can initiate strategies for social change. In my view, it is crucial that deliberative processes engage such counterpublics not only to ensure that the processes are truly fair and competent but also because these views and perspectives will speed the evolution of social learning.
I.2.6 Human Ecology: Structural and Critical
These five perspectives intersect in “structural human ecology.”66 Structural human ecology is not a specific theory but a “theory group” – a network of scholars sharing similar substantive interests, methods and approaches. The term “structural human ecology” was coined by Rosa to cover an evolving set of perspectives.67
York and Mancus propose a critical human ecology, allied with structural human ecology, to bring together Marxian and human ecological traditions.68 Marxism and human ecology share a grounding in materialist approaches – taking the world as more than a social construction – and both examine historical perspectives on cultural evolution. The idea of differential power across people, organizations and nations is part of structural human ecology but the critical approach emphasizes those forces. This book is a bridge between structural and critical human ecology. The term “critical” implies moving beyond a scientific description to make ethical judgments and, in the case of critical human ecology, judgements about sustainability.69
Ideas of justice and sustainability raised by critical human ecology help us imagine utopias. Utopias are societies that do not exist but that would be free of the injustices of contemporary societies, societies in which humans, other species and the environment would thrive.70 Do we get to utopia by a series of reforms or by a total transformation of society? Do reforms facilitate or block transformation? Voltaire popularized an Italian proverb on this issue: “In his writings, a wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of good.”71 I will discuss the issue of reform versus transformation in Chapter 7.
If a critical human ecology is to influence decision-making, it must proceed from an understanding of how we make decisions. Here, Robinson’s advocacy of “backcasting” suggests a way of integrating utopian thinking with the kinds of analysis done in structural human ecology.72 A community can envision a future it wants and then work backwards to find a path towards that desired future. The approach requires identification of the obstacles in the way of the desired future. Those who understand structure, cultural evolution and decision-making can help find a path around the obstacles. Reality will never follow the path projected, but continued engagement can lead to adaptive governance towards sustainability.
I.3 The Contexts That Shaped My Thinking
The ideas that underpin human ecology and cultural evolution permeate my thinking and this book. The research I have done instantiated that perspective in problems of decision-making. The Cuyahoga River Project demonstrated the need for interdisciplinary work and showed that science can influence decision-making and that communities often have clear priorities about what they would like. Earth Day and the killings at Kent and Jackson State showed both the importance of diverse voices and the role power can have in blocking moves towards sustainability.
In the 1970s at the University of California, Davis, I worked with my first graduate advisor, Jim McEvoy, to develop methods to assess the social impacts of government decisions.73 In the United States, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 called for analysis of environmental impacts before government decisions were made; similar requirements emerged in many countries and for international projects.74 If a dam was proposed to provide hydroelectric power and prevent flooding, the logic of assessment says that before a decision is made all the environmental and social impacts of the proposed dam should be identified and analyzed to the extent possible and compared to reasonable alternatives, perhaps several smaller dams, as well as with the alternative of no dam construction. The hope was that requiring such assessments would clarify what was at stake and encourage consideration of what we would now call sustainability. There has been an understandable tendency to try to routinize these often complex, expensive and time-consuming analyses by using computer simulation models to project impacts. As we analyzed the potential impacts of a hypothetical dam in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, it became clear that the impacts that mattered most to those who would be affected were not captured by the models. The communities cared about lifestyle; the models projected employment and tax revenues. While such models might be useful, they can dominate the discussion, leading to “bad numbers driving out good paragraphs” in the analysis. This led to my interest in processes that engage interested and affected parties in deliberation with each other and with researchers. It was also at Davis that I began working on energy conservation with Jim Cramer, Ed Vine and others (see Box 8.1), leading to my interest in individual and household environmental decision-making.
The 1970s were a time of strong conflict about the increased use of nuclear power. Nuclear proponents wanted decisions made on what they held to be an objective basis – one that would largely disenfranchise voices of the public and social movements in favor of technical analysis and, in particular, risk analysis. The complexities of dealing with toxic pollutants also encouraged the use of risk analysis. I will discuss risk analysis in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6. Briefly, risk analysis usually produces quantitative estimates of how many lives will be lost under alternative decisions and often of the economic costs of the decisions. When analyses become highly technical, value assumptions can get buried and the voices of those interested in and/or impacted by discussion are ignored, just as they are when simulation models are the primary basis for impact assessment. Like the deliberative turn in impact analysis, many of us argued for embedding the formal analysis in deliberative processes engaging interested and impacted parties.75
In the 1980s, I was working at George Washington and George Mason University and was in daily contact with people working on risk issues for the federal government but also for law and consulting firms, corporate lobbies, environmental groups, labor unions and other organizations. Bob Rycroft and I studied the network of these “risk professionals.”76 Our work made clear that decisions emerge from an interplay of individuals and organizations, with individuals shaping but also being influenced by the organizations where they worked and by their contact with others in the system. It was population thinking applied to the policy system centered “inside the beltway” in Washington, DC.
These research programs shaped the thinking reflected in this book. As I will emphasize repeatedly, the bulk of evolution in my thinking has been dominated by scholars and experiences in the Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) and capitalist parts of the world, and that is typical of much research on decision-making. But voices of people of color, of the working class and poor, of people from the third world and of Indigenous people have long been a part of discourse on environmental issues – for example, they were central to the first Earth Day in 1970 – but have seldom been adequately engaged and empowered.77 We must also be attentive to gender identity and disability. My hope is that we can develop ways of making decisions that make use of science and of some of the ethical traditions I describe in the book but also better incorporate other perspectives, including other epistemologies and other ethical systems. Our thinking about environmental decision-making has become richer and more sophisticated in the half-century since Earth Day. I hope the next decades will see further evolution in ways that will help us move towards sustainability with fairness and competence.
I.4 The Triplets
In working on the ideas in this book, I was struck by how often triplets emerge. We expect dichotomies: thesis and antithesis, yin and yang, structure and power, nature and society, markets and governments. But it can be dangerous to describe the world in binary categories with everything and everyone forced into one of two categories. Triplets are common in thinking about human ecological systems. I suggest there are three major approaches to understanding decision-making: the rational actor model, a social psychological framework and a framework that emphasizes heuristics and biases. These are reviewed in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, I suggest that there are three major ethical traditions that dominate policy analysis and much collective decision-making: anarchism/libertarianism, utilitarianism and a deliberative approach.78 The triple bottom line – care about profits, the planet and people – is a common way of engaging sustainability (see Chapter 7). Ostrom discusses the triplet of government, market and community in environmental decision-making.
I am not attributing any deep meaning to these triplets, although the number 3 has some interesting features. It is the last prime number before we hit the first non-prime, 4. Three objects produce three pairs of objects. Trinities appear in several world religions. But I see this as just an interesting coincidence and a sign that dichotomies are a bit too simple to capture important aspects of human ecology. As Ostrom’s work makes clear, moving from a binary to a triplet frees us to imagine more complicated hybrids and intersections.
I.5 Limitations
We need to engage a diversity of scholarly disciplines in decision-making. We also need many other perspectives. I bring perspectives from my personal experiences and from my research, both of which are strongly centered in my social position and are very US-centric.79 I have noted my analysis is grounded in Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) parts of the world that are mostly in a capitalist political economy.80 The amount of variation, the variety of contexts I have experienced and studied, is limited. The perspectives of those with different experiences and positions within the United States as well as those who bring understandings from experiences from the rest of the world need to be part of the conversation. Happily, efforts are underway to increase diversity in both the research literature and the deliberative processes that can help us make good decisions. Standpoint theorists such as Sandra Harding remind us of how essential such diversity of perspectives is for sound science. The approach echoes the Vulcan celebration of “Kul-Ut-Shan,” “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” (IDIC).81
Even when I disagree with an argument, I try to present its logic. The most obvious example is that I try to take seriously the rational actor model and the kind of utilitarian ethics closely associated with it in policy analysis and decision-making. I also try to take seriously libertarian offshoots of anarchist views. I am critical of these approaches, but by thinking carefully about them we learn how to develop better theory and more powerful and nuanced ethical stances. I do not want to minimize the damage that can be done by narrow ethical views and by the decisions they legitimate. I emphasize Ostrom’s admonition that there are no pure forms, and when rhetoric demonizes or canonizes it is often referring to something abstracted from reality – a stereotype or oversimplification that distracts us from serious analysis of serious issues. I have tried to follow the admonition of Lepidus in the epigram, disagreeing, but disagreeing gently, as I believe that approach more quickly advances the understanding we urgently need.
Finally, while I make frequent reference to the rapidly developing animal studies literature, most work on sustainability and decision-making has not gone nearly far enough to incorporate perspectives from animal studies.82 This is ironic since human life and our cultural evolution and biological evolution have always been in interplay with other species. Indeed, the first artworks by humans include representations of other animals, indicating their significance to us. There are at least two ways the animal studies literature can contribute substantially to sustainability decisions. First, it calls for us to broaden our ethical scope to move beyond anthropocentrism and include consideration of the well-being of other species, even trying to incorporate their voices in our deliberation, the idea of “Who Will Speak for Wolf?” Second, our scientific frameworks need to take account of other species as sentient beings with agency who actively reshape their worlds even as humans do. The cultural evolutionary perspective I advocate needs to better incorporate not just our interactions with other humans and with an “environment” but also our interactions with species, many of whom also have culture, with their own lives and interests. These themes appear throughout the book but I think far more has to be done to fully incorporate them into our thinking about sustainability.
I.6 Coda
We are faced with the necessity of making many decisions that will influence the future of the planet, including our species and the others with whom we share the biosphere. While we will need luck to avoid catastrophe, luck alone will not suffice. My goal is to encourage discussions that link thinking about sustainability with thinking about decision-making. Such conversations are underway, as are the decisions that are influencing the future. My hope is that, by expanding those conversations, we may learn to do better. To paraphrase Jerry Garcia: Things are happening, and we have to try to figure out what they are.83
In trying to figure out what is happening, several ideas guide me. Our decisions as individuals and in communities, organizations and governments and globally are shaped by institutions and culture that in turn are the result of both cultural evolution and by the exercise of power. In order to make better decisions, we need to shape the contexts in which we make decisions. The evolutionary perspective underpins what follows in the book, always tempered by an awareness of inequities in the power to shape decisions. I acknowledge the limits of our ability to make decisions. And I spend some time discussing the process of science. Science, for all its flaws at any point in time, seems to have developed a set of norms and institutions that tend towards self-correction in deciding how to describe the world, in what constitutes a fact. Making decisions about sustainability is more complex because we have to take account of both facts and of diverse values. But by identifying what might make for a good decision, and what gets in the way of good decisions, we may be able to shape processes that facilitate good decisions. We will make mistakes, but if we learn from those mistakes, we may be able to shape the evolution of decision-making in ways that support sustainability and are attentive to the voices of those interested in and impacted by our decisions. This view started with my experiences in Kent and has evolved to what you will read here.
