Retort to Woodward

ada sprouts

I wish to comment on a recent paper by Pitt and Sherry’s Ian Woodward, “Ignorance is contagious: the importance of critical thinking in environmental management”: Read Here

May I start by saying that I’m very glad Dr Woodward wrote this paper and later presented it as part of the EIANZ’s Industry Connect Seminar Series, Woodward is introducing a discussion that really has to happen, however I believe he may be encouraging yet more of the antagonism that is surely part of the ‘irrationality’ he seeks to remove from environmental decision-making in Tasmania.
It’s true that an increase in environmental concern (over recent decades) has not equalled an increase in understanding of causes for concern and yes, this has led to ‘a public audience that responds asymmetrically to information’. Woodward takes the time to criticise journalists and conservationist interest groups for generating fear campaigns and offering overly-simplistic, ready-made opinions of false dichotomy for concerned publics. Yet while he concedes that it is simple rather than complex messages that the public grasps, he offers no insight on how an environmental consultant/scientist such as himself might simplify the correct, rational information they wish the public to digest and thereby surely mitigate current tendencies towards misinformed group-think.

Woodward seems stuck on a particular idea of environment and environment assessment which is entirely restrictive of human qualities, for example, emotion. This is despite the fact that a POSS assessment (his Planet Panic?) requires the inclusion of cultural, economic and social impact studies in addition to an EIA. I would argue that these additional concerns are in fact essential to any development assessment and wonder how cultural, social and economic issues might ever be separated from those of the environment. Woodward makes the observation: “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”.

If Woodward is suggesting a question with this statement, then he has answered it himself; the misinformation is borne of the “fog of information”, and the “know-it-all” nature of assessment processes, documentation, bureaucracy and professionals such as himself. What’s needed is for these processes to be cut back to their bare bones. Not in terms of reductions to public participation or the proponents’ provision of information but in the reduction of antagonising legal representation and environmental professionals such as Dr Woodward using their expertise for the encouragement of plain-english understanding rather than the further complication of already difficult, lengthy processes that will always be emotional. If the antagonism that comes of misunderstanding and miscommunication can be reduced in such a way, the system may gain more of the rationality Woodward seeks.

Dr Woodward’s paper “Ignorance is contagious: the importance of critical thinking in environmental management” can also be found at:
www.geol.utas.edu.au/geography/EIANZ.htm
or
www.pittsh.com.au “Latest news”