Ian Woodward, Principal Environmental Scientist, pitt&sherry. Ignorance is Contagious (Paper presented to EIANZ Industry Connect Seminar Series July 2008)
Perhaps we like to think that Serious Journalists are better than that but it is a false hope. When was the last time, for example, did you see Four Corners do an expose on the opponents to a development, snaring them with a clever set-piece of questions? Journalistic exposes are invariably on developers, never on opponents. Developers are always held to be evil, opponents are always held to be friars. Journalists are as asymmetrical as the public at large. They are reluctant to point out the candle in the monastery.
Abstract
Human beings are very bad at thinking rationally in a group, particularly if fear is introduced. Blind panic was no doubt very useful as we were evolving on the African plains. If someone yelled “lion”, you wouldn’t survive very long if you stopped and said “are you sure….?” But that same inbuilt response means that fear and panic are easily triggered in environmental debates, debates that should be rational.
Environmental practitioners have an audience that responds asymmetrically to information. It’s very easy to convince people that a false claim of safety (“lions could never harm us”) is untrue but it’s very hard, and sometimes impossible, to convince people that a false claim of harm (“that rock is a lion”) is untrue.
Once a false claim that something awful might happen gets put into the community’s mind it is almost unshakeable, regardless of how clear the science is for the contrary view. A scary claim’s echo bounces around the community and gets heard again from different angles, reinforcing the claim’s grip (“many independent people, including the celebrity witch doctor, think that the rock is a lion, so that’s clearly what it is”).
In the face of such irrationality, environmental practitioners have an obligation to both think critically and explain critically. It’s not an easy task and it can make for awkward moments at dinner parties but we must not shirk our responsibilities, even when our message is not popular.
In 1506 Spain and Portugal were beset by the twin terrors of the Spanish Inquisition and the black death, and someone needed to be blamed. Forced converts to Christianity – conversos – were prime candidates.
In that year a strange light was seen near a crucifix in a monastery, and this was promoted by the friars and taken by the populace to be a longed for miracle, a sure sign that the church would protect them from the horrors of the plague. However, one person, who happened to be a converso, had the temerity to suggest that it may not actually be a miracle but that instead it might simply be a candle, perhaps put there by the friars. On hearing this blasphemy, outraged parishioners dragged the man out onto the street, beat him up and then set fire to him, burning him to death. Urged on by the friars, the parishioners then ran through the streets, grabbing other conversos and dragging them onto bonfires. By the time the violence ended the following day almost 2000 conversos had been burnt to death.
Human beings panic readily, and crowd behaviour in times of fear is usually disgraceful. Mob violence is the most dramatic outcome of this failing but history is crammed full of irrational group-think, and even in our own local society and with our own local issues we are all vulnerable to being overcome by mob-mentality.
Blind panic was no doubt very useful as we were evolving on the African plains. If someone yelled “lion”, you wouldn’t survive very long if you stopped and asked “are you sure….?”. Natural selection’s message to us is: flee without thinking. It’s very easy to convince people that a false claim of safety (“lions could never harm us”) is untrue but it’s very hard, and sometimes impossible, to convince people that a false claim of harm (“that rock is a lion”) is untrue.
And when we run away, it’s best to run in the same direction as everyone else. There’s safety in numbers. If we separate from the crowd, we could more easily be picked off by that lion.
And so it is with public environmental debates. Environmental issues have a public audience that responds asymmetrically to information. Once a false claim that something awful might happen gets put into the community’s mind, it is almost unshakeable, regardless of how clear the science is for the contrary view. And those who choose to question the prevailing view (“perhaps it’s only a rock”) are likely to be shunned at dinner parties.
This has become increasingly evident in recent years. Tasmania’s current pulp mill project is a prime example.
Ironically, I think that the strengthening of the asymmetrical response has come about because of the growth in the public’s environmental awareness. I say ironically, because that increase in awareness is not the same thing as an increase in understanding. It’s more that the shadow of the lion-thing has become bigger rather than the detail of the lion-thing being better understood. For example, we are now faced with an environmental threat as big as the world – climate change – whereas only a few years ago, environmental threats were local, and could be left to others to worry about, just so long as they were local to them and not us. All environmental threats have become heightened in the public’s mind as a consequence of the global shadow of climate change.
Another component of the irony is that the public is ever more suspicious and expects ever more scrutiny of new developments, and regulators respond by demanding ever more detailed environmental assessments, yet the sheer volume and technicality of the information prepared in response to those demands makes it ever less likely that the public will read or understand it.
For example, virtually every member of the Tasmanian public has a view – and a strong view at that – about the likely environmental impacts of the pulp mill but I expect that less than 1% of the public has actually read the documentation. Instead, the public gets its “information” from the media and from gossip, both notoriously poor at dealing with technical issues.
The public grabs onto simple messages, and lets complex ones slip through. In Tasmania, the conservation message has been grabbed very firmly because its message is very simple to understand – save or don’t save. Both the public and the media confuse conservation with environmental management. Conservation is simple and neat. It’s easily understood by the public and the media. Environmental management is complex and messy, and it’s very poorly understood by the public and media. It requires much more thinking.
Journalists – the people who inform the public – are as vulnerable to fear as everyone else, and have the same difficulties of understanding technical information. They also help spread fear – it comes with their job. Readers are more alert to and interested in fearful stories than calming stories, and the media serves them what they want, creating a selfreinforcing feedback loop of fear, story, more fear, more stories.
Perhaps we like to think that Serious Journalists are better than that but it is a false hope. When was the last time, for example, did you see Four Corners do an expose on the opponents to a development, snaring them with a clever set-piece of questions? Journalistic exposes are invariably on developers, never on opponents. Developers are always held to be evil, opponents are always held to be friars. Journalists are as asymmetrical as the public at large. They are reluctant to point out the candle in the monastery.
This is exacerbated by what is known as cognitive dissonance, which is the tendency of people to avoid admitting to making mistakes. Rather than make such an admission, people dig themselves further into their entrenched positions. Once someone has publicly expressed a viewpoint on something (whether to the public at large or even just their own circle of friends), it is very unusual for them to withdraw from it, particularly if the topic is controversial. Instead, people usually dig themselves into an even more entrenched position and more loudly justify their viewpoint. George Bush and the Iraq war is an obvious example on the world stage but it acts at the local level too, including on environmental issues. Someone who has publicly opposed a development (such as the pulp
mill) will be very reluctant to listen and concede to scientific argument that is contrary to that view – to make such a concession would be to admit that they were wrong in the first instance. They are also likely to show confirmation bias, which means that they selectively turn off from information which is contrary to their view and turn on to information that supports it.
Due to cognitive dissonance, rather than admitting their mistake people actually become more fixed and dogmatic in their views. An associated tendency is for the community to become more extreme and more determined that their views win out. What should be a rational argument becomes a tooth and claw battle where the objective becomes victory for victory’s sake, simply because they hate the thought of losing to someone who they have demonised.
In many cases, people also use their expressed opposition to a project as a convenient shorthand description of their overall personal values, wearing it like a social bumper sticker: “I oppose project X, thereby demonstrating the type of person that I am. I fit nicely into my peer group.”
A third component of the irony is the hypocrisy of the public. At the demand of the community, industry must jump through all sorts of burning hoops to obtain approval for their project. Industry undertakes environmental assessments, it prepares and implements management plans and it monitors its environmental performance. The general community does very little of these things for their own activities and yet their environmental impacts are greater than those of industry – it’s the community that creates the sewage, drives the vehicles, burns the wood, uses the electricity, and clears the trees for crops and houses, all
without impact assessments … and it’s the community that buys the products of the industries that it rails against.
Amongst this gloom, what should environmental practitioners do? Is there a way out of the dark ages?
Well, yes. I think that there is. But it requires effort and hard work. And usually it is at odds with populist thinking. It requires critical thinking. Environmental practitioners have a responsibility to think critically and to help the community do the same.
What is critical thinking? There are formal definitions that could put us to sleep. Perhaps the simplest way of describing is to think of it in related terms like scientific thinking, rational thinking, sceptical thinking and logical thinking. Basically, it means a way of thinking by which your view on any particular matter is determined by the evidence, irrespective of any obscuring fluff, spin, emotion or peer group pressure.
Interestingly and importantly, critical thinking does not come naturally to most people. It usually has to be learned. It’s hard work and it goes against the natural tendencies given to us by natural selection and evolution. The more you do it the easier it becomes but it always requires you to say, “what is the evidence telling me?”.
Critical thinking minimises the risk of falling for what are nicely labelled “logical fallacies” and I’d like to use these as a way of highlighting how environmental thinking is often anything but critical.
To do this, I have borrowed (not all 20) from a list of the Top 20 Logical Fallacies from my favourite podcast, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. This is a weekly podcast that is always very informative and entertaining, and I highly recommend it.
In the attached table, I have retained the original explanations1 of what the fallacies mean because they are interesting in themselves. For each logical fallacy I provide an environmental example. I acknowledge that my examples are all of illogical opposition to developments, and that examples of illogical support for developments could no doubt also
(1 Steven Novella at www.theskepticsguide.org/logicalfallacies.asp)
be found. However, the bias is consistent with the theme of my talk – examples in opposition far outweigh examples in support.
These examples can help us think about the traps that we could fall into, and therefore help prepare ourselves and others to avoid them. By being aware of these traps, and working hard to stop being sucked into the irrational side of environmental debates, we can help to extract environmental decision making from an irrational mire of ill-informed public catch-cries and try and focus assessment attention on where it should be – environmental science.
These are things we can and should do as individual environmental practitioners.
I’d like to finish by also giving some thought to the environmental assessment process itself.
In Tasmania, assessments under the Environmental Management and Pollution Control Act 1994 typically involve the preparation of a Development Proposal and Environmental Management Plan (DPEMP). As the name says, the assessment documentation includes a description of the proposed development (the DP bit) and a description of how it will be environmentally managed (the EMP bit), all integrated into a single document, for a single decision.
In concept, this is a neat idea and it has served us reasonably well – for assessments that have a low public profile, that is. I don’t think it is ideal for projects that have a high public profile, however. Once an assessment gets into the public arena in a big way, it moves onto another planet, Planet Panic.
On high profile projects, the ever increasing assessment demands that I’ve described above mean that DPEMP preparation is becoming increasingly difficult and costly for developers to prepare (expenditure that must be incurred even before they know whether they have a project or not) and for regulators to assess, while the likelihood of the public firstly reading and secondly understanding the mass of technical documentation prepared for the DPEMP is becoming less and less.
Regulators feel public pressure too. The public throw darts at unpopular development proposals, and the more controversial a project is the more darts that are thrown in the hope that the project will bleed to death. Regulators – being human – tend to protect themselves from criticism of inadequate assessment by hanging a study or management plan requirement on every dart that sticks, and even some that fall to the ground. All the darts hurt equally and tend to be given equal treatment, regardless of their true environmental validity or priority.
I think the result is that environmental assessments on publicly controversial projects are becoming too big, too all-encompassing, too know-it-all. The assessments are becoming shrouded in a fog of information, through which only populist misinformation emerges.
Developers are often forced by public pressure to spend money on environmentally insignificant but politically significant issues, just to jump through the approval hoops. This money would be far better spent on actual environmental management of the development itself – it would result in a better environmental outcome.
To fix these problems, on projects that have a high public interest (say, those equivalent to Projects of State Significance and also major level 2’s) it would be nice if the DP and the EMP parts of DPEMPs could be separated into distinct assessment processes.
This may seem like a retrograde step because their integration 15 or so years ago was at the time seen as an improvement. However, I’m not arguing that we go back to where we were – rather, we should separate them as a better way forward. To their credit, regulators are pragmatic and in effect do this to some extent already under the current system – they often grant an approval conditional on environmental management plans being prepared for approval later. However, the current system is forcing regulators to tinker at the edges like this, and I think their pragmatism highlights the need for a system change.
On high profile projects, the DP assessment would come first. Proponents would prepare a Notice of Intent, describing their proposal and key environmental issues. The assessment authority would review the Notice of Intent and issue guidelines identifying threshold environmental requirements that must be satisfied for the project to be allowed to proceed. The Threshold Requirements would be restricted to go-no-go matters, asking the question: Is their anything fundamental that means that the proposal must be refused?
Examples might include the potential for irreparable environmental harm, the unavoidable loss of a major population of a critically endangered threatened species or the emission of a pollutant for which there is no available technology that could achieve water quality objectives in the project’s receiving environment.
The Notice of Intent and Threshold Requirement Guidelines would be advertised for public comment, then both would be finalised. The proponent would then undertake studies and investigations and prepare a Threshold Requirement Report, which would be subjected to a public assessment process. There could be different levels of assessment, depending on the scale of the development and the importance of the threshold issues, similar to the different assessment levels under the EPBC Act, for example. There would be a public appeal process.
The outcome of this assessment would be a go-no-go decision on whether the project can proceed in-principle. The decision would be based on very focussed, make-or-break considerations, without the fog of information demands and overload from matters that are not fundamental.
If the decision is favourable to the proponent, this would not mean that they could go out and start building, only that they could now move on to the EMP phase of the assessment.
However, they would move to this phase in the knowledge that there is nothing fundamentally flawed with the proposal that would see their investment in the studies and investigations needed to prepare the EMP wasted by a belated refusal due to something that was fundamental.
In the EMP phase, the assessment authority would issue EMP guidelines, and the proponent would prepare an EMP to address those guidelines. The EMP would then be advertised for public comment and the authority would assess the EMP, taking public comments into account, and requiring the EMP to be amended as necessary. If the assessment authority is satisfied with the final EMP, it would be approved and the project could then proceed. If the proponent cannot prepare a satisfactory EMP, the project could not proceed. Appeal rights would be restricted to whether the EMP decision is reasonable (there would be no
reopening of threshold issues).
The above suggestions might be seen as favouring developers but this is a misreading. Such a process certainly would make it easier for developers to understand and address what’s environmentally important and it would allow them to better target their assessment money and efforts but this does not mean that their environmental obligations would be weakened in any way.
On the contrary, it means that the information prepared and used for the assessment of their proposal will be targeted, relevant and efficient. Decision making can then itself be more targeted, relevant and efficient. Importantly, the environmental debate about the project could therefore be more rational (entirely rational is a forlorn hope) and the environmental management measures that emerge would reflect environmental science, not political sensitivities.
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