On September
24, 2009, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released its Climate Change
Science Compendium 2009, the final chapter of which
describes options for what UNEP labels “Systems Management.” Put simply, the
activities described call for a wholesale reconfiguration of major facets of
human life on Earth, including water (which is labeled a “natural” system),
agriculture, and forests (oddly enough, hardly any attention is paid at all to
industrial systems). Yet, strikingly, people are all but missing from UNEP’s
vision of what we need to do. It is as if they matter little more to the system
managers than the plants, animals, and terrestrial systems that need to be
managed.
Unfortunately,
the reality is that people matter a great deal to systems management,
especially when they decide they don’t like what’s being done to them or
they’ve been ignored by systems managers. Evidence of public discontent is rolling
in from communities throughout the United States and around the world. A
backlash is growing against the business of green energy, a business that seems
to have learned little or nothing from previous eras of public resistance to
the siting of large industrial facilities.
The truth is
that the single most important element of the Earth system – from a systems
management perspective – has to be its human inhabitants. More than any other
piece of the system, they are likely to be the one’s to determine whether or
not systems management is even possible in the first place.
When the
government of India and the World Bank sought to build a hydroelectric dam at
Narmada to produce power and manage flooding, hundreds of thousands of
protesters objected to the displacement of villages that would occur. The
resulting reverberations gave rise to a global backlash against dams and the
end of their use as the centerpiece of national development agendas. Likewise,
when the U.S. government sought in the 1970s to dramatically expand the nuclear
power industry in the United States, their efforts were brought to a standstill
by an angry public that ultimately halted the construction of U.S. nuclear
power plants for close to three decades. Parallel protests led in recent years
– despite the threat of climate change – to a policy to end the use of nuclear
power in Germany.
It is time
for a serious effort on the part of the global community and all nations to
engage their publics in a dialogue about the future. This cannot be a one-way
dialogue in which the experts (or the businesses or the governments) tell the
public what they are going to do and ask permission. It equally cannot be a
narrow dialogue about whether to build a wind farm or a concentrated solar
facility on the edge of town (or whether to build it here or in the next county
over). It must be a serious mobilization of the public in a far-sighted conversation
about what kinds of collective energy and environmental futures we want to
inhabit as a species.
It is
interesting that democracies seem particularly unwilling to engage their
publics in meaningful dialogue. They’ll poll them, but not ask them to
participate in fashioning a collective future. Perhaps it is a failure of legal
imagination. We assume that legislation flows from the elected representatives.
Yet we all know that society has a productive power of its own. It is time to
call on that productive power to create new efforts at civic entrepreneurship –
new initiatives to create collective sensibilities about how to proceed as
communities, as countries, and as the world. Who knows, it might actually work.
We know the alternatives won’t. If the public isn’t fully bought into systems
management, they will become its biggest opponents.
About
the Author:
Clark Miller is
associate director of CSPO and associate
professor of science policy and political science.
