Dr. Thomas Sawyer Hopkins: the need for a global plan of environmental sustainability.
The rain is causing a stir on the tin roofing that covers the patio café in Buenos Aires, where a distinguished looking man with mildly savage graying hair is ordering coffee with an exotic Spanish accent mixing Italian and English.
"My gosh!" says the reporter approaching his table, "so you are Thomas Sawyer Hopkins, the scientist. You look like someone I must have met…or should know."
Now the rain is pounding so hard that it is difficult to sort out vowels from consonants and complicated sounding words such as "tsunami" suggest a global setting. Nevertheless, a framed picture of Carlos Gardel on a nearby wall attests to an undeniable location: Buenos Aires.
"Maybe we met in a previous form of life," Hopkins ventures with a slight smirk.
"You mean reincarnation?
"Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"Well, let's get down to the nitty-gritty. I understand you are an oceanographer."
"O.K. I'd prefer skipping the preliminaries. I'm retired from North Carolina State University with the title Professor Emeritus, which is an euphemism for a guy who doesn't get a salary but can keep his office. Anyway, my office has landed in Italy, at the Institute of the Coastal Marine Environment, where I am unsustainably working for sustainability in the sector of European coastal zones. My objective is to be involved in improving public awareness of the need for a global plan to obtain a better level of social, economic and environmental sustainability before our modern version of human society disappears.
"What exactly does sustainability refer to?"
"Sustainability is probably the best term to use when explaining the direction to be followed by human governance. Over time, man and his support system have managed to achieve an apparent equilibrium. However, with a small amount of investigation one realizes that the present situation is a very much the opposite. In fact, the reason that sustainability is a good term to guide us is because it is relatively easy to tell whether you are moving towards or away from it. That is, observing and correcting the direction in which our society is moving is a much easier strategy than to have ideological arguments on what our society should look like in 100 years."
The waitress wants to know if the two men are going to have the traditional "media lunas" with their coffee. Hopkins waves his hand in an ample gesture, saying: "¡sí, por favor!"
The reporter returns to the questions:
"How does one determine whether man is moving towards or away from sustainability?"
"Needless to say the human system is very complicated, yet there is a scientific definition of complexity which involves all of the inter-actions which characterize human society with respect to itself and to the surrounding environment. These inter-actions allow society to reorganize itself with greater or lesser degrees of stability. We can take a few examples. Should the present rate of deforestation continue in the Amazon region, it would eventually turn the area into a desert and that in turn would dislocate millions of persons. And it is easy to determine whether Brazil is deforesting or not. Today we have technology which allows us to determine from satellites if there are a greater or lesser number of trees or if the land is being used in a damaging way. Another example would be that we have hard facts which indicate the about three fourths of the world's fisheries are in the process of collapse…and despite the increased yelling of scientists, most fish eaters continue to believe that the free-market economy will find a solution.
"Three fourths!"
"Yes. And over 50% of the world's coral reefs are in serious risk. These are some of the many indicators which point to a rapid decline in our resource base."
"Is this destructive process due to man or to nature?"
"That is a very interesting point. The Peruvian anchovy business collapsed primarily because of man's over-fishing but secondarily due to the additional-and unexpected-weather phenomenon known as "el niño." So in this case both human and natural causes acted in concert to break the resilience of the system. Then you have the cod industry which has collapsed in Canada and not yet recovered, while collapsing in northern Europe. This is historically very tragic, because cod has been a fundamental part of the European diet for over 500 years. Only modern 'factory' fishing techniques and expanded markets brought it to collapse. Obviously, no market maneuver can re-establish this important food supply.
"What about the tsunami?"
"That recent disaster in Asia could be written off as a strong perturbation of nature, but it is exactly these unexpected natural variations that cause systems to collapse when they occur in conjunction with anthropogenic stresses, as with the Peruvian fishery. In southeast Asia the tsunami has put a tremendous stress on the countries affected, making their recovery difficult."
"Would you say that the tsunami was an exclusively natural phenomenon?"
"The earthquake itself which set it into motion certainly had nothing to do with human activity. Nevertheless, we are not so concerned with the fact that the earth was displaced somewhere under the water; rather it is the great number of deaths that concerns us and that was due to ignorance of natural phenomena and exaggerated by the way in which the coastal land was used together with its high population density. To put it cynically, the goal of rebuilding will take little account of the cultural and environmental aspects of sustainability that preceded the tsunami."
"The press talked about a communication problem in warning the affected nations..."
"There was, in fact, some information which appeared to indicate that there was some previous information available. What happened appeared to be a classic bottleneck in the communications system. You might have a scientist looking at a seismograph yet since he is not an oceanographer he might not have realized he was facing a tsunami event. There were people who figured it out before it hit. The problem was the broadcasting of the information to the coastal areas threatened. And we are talking about an area of thousands of kilometers."
"What exactly is a tsunami"
"It is a sort of 'tidal wave' but not the result of tides. The cause of a tsunami is usually an earthquake that vertically displaces the bottom of the ocean and thereby displaces the surface of the ocean. It is like throwing a rock into the water, causing a circle of out-flowing waves. The waves caused by the tsunami achieve enormous speed, proportional to the depth of the ocean. They are forced to slow down as they approach the coast. When that happens, they begin to bunch up, getting higher and higher. Nevertheless, the wave lengths are so long that if you were standing on the shore it would appear first as if the sea was draining out and followed by its return as a sudden inundation of the low areas of the coast."
"So what you do is to observe these phenomena and propose ways of dealing with them."
"Not exactly. You might say that I am trying to indirectly raise public consciousness concerning the issues we have been talking about. The tragedy of the human predicament is that we are intelligent enough to save ourselves but we are not doing it. I am working in Europe to construct a program for demonstrating the economic benefits of sustainability. It is not enough for scientists to say the world is going to collapse. We have to put that in economic terms so we can involve industry, government. Decision making is based on economics rather than science. Yet science can provide the information needed to carry out a cost-benefit analysis and other means of systematic decision making. Unfortunately, politicians use very little qualitative or objective analysis in elaborating their policies. It is archaic to make decisions based on someone's personal opinion. What we must do is to provide information and convert that into a management infra-structure in such a way that humans will not kill themselves, i.e. to prevent society from committing social suicide. This is not a prophesy, instead it is something which is already happening, i.e., through wars over resources, overpopulation and genocide, increases in infectious diseases, water scarcity, bankrupt nations, etc. The question is when and how we can turn these trends around."
"Do you believe the general public is aware of these threats?"
"Once again, the main problems are not the natural ones. The problem has to do with the interactions between human beings and nature. A sustainable society has to be self regulated, e.g., as our bodies are. If we didn't have self-regulating mechanisms, we wouldn't live more than one day. If something begins to go wrong in the body, it corrects itself. In the case of a society, means must be found to mitigate or correct the problems which appear. But we don't have the complete set of required feedback mechanisms built into our social structures. In answer to your question the problem is that although there is growing awareness among portions of the population, which is promising. Unfortunately, people find it difficult to put the information together to determine the urgency involved. More importantly, they do not understand the solution. So if you present the problem to an ordinary citizens they tend to panic or negate the existence of the problem because they do not know how to react. They find it difficult to accept a doom situation, even though for one third of the world (2 billion) doom has already arrived. If I were to say, for example, that the world's oil resources are going to be on the down side in five years they would not accept that. They cannot imagine living without oil. Unless you present people with a plan to resolve the problem, they will not be able to react in a positive or constructive way. In the case of the tsunami, had people been sufficiently well informed they would have gotten out of the beach areas. And we in the West do not understand what we are doing to ruin the world. The Twin Towers, the Iraq war, the genocide in Sudan, the tsunami all bring significant warning signals, i.e., unless we understand the direction in which we are going and how to correct it, we will react poorly or wrongly to these events and worsen our chances of survival. Sustainability implies stability, a bottom-up approach to knowledge, and self-regulating mechanisms. "
"Do you think the present industrial system could be changed to take nature into consideration?"
"That is probably the most relevant question you could have asked. In pre-industrial society a violation of the resource base would lead to a collapse of society. The more "primitive" societies developed an equilibrium with their natural resources and that allowed them to survive well for a very long time. If you contrast the Vikings with the Greenland Inuit population, you see that the former survived for 200 whereas the latter for 2000 years, because they had learned how to live within their resource base, while the Vikings continued their traditional life style, which proved to be unsustainable on the coast of Greenland.
Western society is based on Adam Smith's theory that you only need capita, resources and labor to construct a capitalistic economy. That was true at the time because resources were considered infinite. They no longer are, but our present industrial system continues to operate on this assumption by considering resources as free. The supply side of the equation does not take into consideration the intrinsic value of coal or water or oil. It only accounts for the conversion of those resources into something useful for man. Now that we are approaching the global limits of our resources, it is like burning the house in which we are living. What we are trying to do is to put resource evaluation into the economic equation, so that if you dirty the air or deplete a resource you will have to pay accordingly. That would introduce the self-correcting aspect into the productive process."
"Nevertheless, the world's number one producer does not seem very interested in conservation policies."
"That's very true. The U.S. owes its wealth to its resource base and refuses to recognize that it is no longer resource independent. Their attitude in this regard is like getting on a plane and having fun flying around but forgetting to look at the fuel gage. Everything is fine until you run our of fuel, out of resources. You cannot study complex systems by looking at what has happened; you can understand dynamics by what has happened but you cannot understand the future unless you look at the inter-actions between man and nature. Most of what we do is based on people's convictions or theories yet they tend to be sloppy in the sense of not being very useful in a rapidly changing world. Another problem is the complete misunderstanding of Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, echoed in the masculine interpretation of politics and economy."
"Could you please elaborate on that point?"
"Darwin studied specific species, which cannot breed with other groups so they form separate entities in the biological world. Functional aggregates of these species form what are called larger ecosystems. None, including human beings, could subsist without being inside an ecosystem. Having learned how to use stored energy, humans have grown outside their "niche." That is, the human niche practically includes the entire global ecosystem. When an organism stretches beyond its nitch, it runs out of resources and collapses, unless it express a responsibility towards the habitats and existence of the remaining species in the ecosystem. Often when a huge or critically important niche collapses the rest of the system collapses along with it.
What people took home with them from Darwin was that the strongest would survive. They used that in politics and economics to ruin their competition. This was a tragic and self-serving miss-interpretation of modern biology. Survival of the fittest is really not the ultimate law of the jungle because in the jungle there are no top predators or mono-species populations. If you go to the Amazons you see an enormous variety of trees and animals. It is the inter-action which makes the system work. The lion eats the best meat, then comes the hyena to eat another part and then you have the ants and the microbes, which turn whatever is left into gas. You have a very efficient system using and re-using resources. The real law of the jungle is that of cooperation, not competition. At the species level, the best individuals survive; at the systems level the best and most diversified system survives. The system that makes best use of its energy is the one that will survive. We have learned that the capitalistic system produces monopolies, which if left alone the system would consume itself. This is why governments try to regulate them. But this puts business and government in an oppositional stance that is unsustainable because there are no strong self-regulating relationships involved. We are inventing tricks but not fixing the basic problem: allowing diversity to grow, developing healthy cooperative relations, and establishing a stronger self-regulating governance."
"Something like unilateralism versus multi-culturalism."
"You can see that in terms of a town or country with only one or a few products: when the basic resources is depleted the whole community collapses. You need societies with very diverse economic endeavors. Not everyone needs to look the same, do the same thing, or produce the same kind of services. The redundancy of function is healthy. Even on the board of directors of a corporation you want diversity. There are many applications for this idea but our societies find it difficult to condone diversity, due to the fear of people who are different from ourselves. In trying to ostracize them, we ourselves become vulnerable because our exclusive attitudes prevent inter-action with others. "
"If we find it so difficult to adapt to change, what does that suppose for the future of society?"
"It is possible. Iceland for example is making the transition from oil to hydrogen. So far most countries are not taking preventive strategies to avoid over dependence on a doomed resource. They want to rely on the free market, in which as the supply dwindles other energy forms will become cheaper and therefore develop. In theory this could happen, but in practice there are too many risks; e.g., oil wars, resource hording, global panic, time to change the energy infrastructure, public preferences, etc. So what we see is crisis management: an industry creates a market for its product and takes it to its limit; and when it realizes reform is necessary, it tries to switch to another product and advertise itself as the savior of the new society. The point is that that social responsibility is not rewarded in the market economy (yet), and consequently has not led and cannot lead the necessary social changes; it can only react and adapt to them. We need corporations to work for us, not against us. What the world needs to understand is that moving towards a social, economic and environmentally sustainable society is our only hope. Practically speaking, it needs to see success in terms of sustainability development: e.g., policies which improve the human condition while also preserving natural resources. Examples do exist and the means of diffusing this information through internet also exists. Let's hope for success!"
Contact Thomas Sawyer Hopkins, Phd:
Email: tom_hopkins@ncsu.edu
Email: tom.hopkins@iamc.cnr.it
For those interested in following up the ideas expressed by Dr. Hopkins in this interview, we are including an article he wrote in 2000, entitled, "Avoiding Our Own Survival." You can download this article in .pdf format.
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