August 2008

by Brad Severtson

 
Our connecting flight to Rio was cancelled and we faced a ten hour stay at the airport outside of Panama City earlier this summer. But I had found a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at the SeaTac airport the previous evening and so was not upset when my daughter vetoed a sightseeing trip to the canal. I had read a lot of Huxley in college and loved his historical novels, but somehow had never read this, his best known work directed at the future rather than the past. The future described is not one most of us would like to have. But the people in this society are, by and large, quite happy to be living in it. This was by design. This society was engineered to insure that the happiness of its citizens would be optimized. Never mind that this required separating people from the natural environment and drugging them. This was a society that delivered what people thought they wanted.
 
This sense of contentment distinguishes the Brave New World from the other rich vein of thought about the future that we would like to avoid. Much of the political thinking in the last fifty years has looked back to mid-century fascist and communist societies as exemplars of authoritarian regimes that would be quite unacceptable as our future. George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four most famously dramatized this scenario. Wars were used as a pretext for removing people’s liberty and they were intimidated into a submissive state by a sadistic oligarchy. This was a society that did not deliver what people wanted. This was also by design.
 
How do we act so as to bring about a future that we and our children consider worth having? How can we build a future that cannot be hijacked by oligarchs or collapse under the weight of our own misguided expectations? There are things most people say they want: liberty and a good quality of life, for example. When we get down to making actual plans, we basically have two domains to turn to: history and theory. We look to the past to understand where we have been and try to extract lessons applicable for our future. We also must develop theories about how the world works. These theories inform our morality, our institutions, our laws, our policies, and so all of our attempts to engineer the future. But the dominant theories which frame policy guidance today for the future are almost exclusively economic. Economics is our guide to the future.
 
The problem, or course, with applying any theory is that there are many forms of uncertainty that arise when you actually try to make decisions based on them. The most fundamental issue is determining the correct context for making a decision. How do we know we have understood the situation and selected the relevant theories?
 
For those of us concerned about the unprecedented pollution and degradation of our environment that has accompanied the massive economic growth since the Industrial Revolution, it seems that economists have failed to recognize that their theories are not scoped to the appropriate ecological contexts within which markets must function. This has resulted in certain pathologies. To cite what is perhaps the most obvious one: over 60% of the ecosystems that support life on earth are being used unsustainable. Puget Sound is one of these ecosystems – it has been severely compromised, for example, by the scouring and nonpoint source pollution impacts associated with storm water runoff.
 
There are many other sources of uncertainty that are relevant to assessing the ecological risks that accompany our actions. Much of the damage done to the environment, for example, occurs gradually over generations. Comparing data from different disciplines that use different measures and protocols is difficult. Many of the natural systems being studied are so complex that causal pathways are problematic and expensive to scientifically verify before critical resources are threatened. Yet the commercial engines of our market economies produce a steady stream of new products whose the impacts on the environment can remain uncertain for long periods of time.
 
So one of the most pressing issues we face now regarding our future is how to manage the risk due to the uncertainties associated with our theories about how our actions and policies are degrading the natural systems that sustain our life on Earth. The issue here is where the burden of proof should rest. The precautionary principle is a tenet that states if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, then in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. This principle has been adopted by the European Union to protect public health and the environment. In the US, on the other hand, the burden of proof falls on the party that wants to stop the potentially risky action. Unless they can demonstrate that it will cause harm, the action will be allowed. In this policy framework, uncertainty about impacts works in favor of taking the risky action. In the US, risk assessment can and has been used to promote deregulation. The default position should be that uncertainty becomes ground for additional caution.
 
Authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union have wrecked environmental havoc on the environment and failed to provide either liberty or good quality of life. People living under such regimes as outlined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have been not happy. People in the Brave New World, on the other hand, were happy with their engineered environment because they were conditioned to think within a utilitarian framework that is akin to our own economic calculus. Our inability to get beyond this framework leads us to obsess about GNPs and ignore taking precautions to limit the ecological impacts of consuming all the resources and products that we think we want. Although the so-called “war on terror” has revive our Orwellian fears, sometimes we must fear what we want as much as what we don’t want if we care about safeguarding the future.