Difficult to act on

I have been re-reading Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a great book, much better than the comments that people make about it would make you think. Everybody seems to have got out of it that Easter Islanders and Greenlanders were too stupid to figure out their delicate ecology was going to hell, and we are going the same way. What I find much more interesting is the description of the societies that went against similar problems, and they managed them. And also, the explanation of why some problems are so difficult for societies to deal with. The book explains that these problems go through four stages (I'm rewording things a little for the sake of clarity):

1. They are difficult to anticipate. Usually, because the society has no prior experience of the problem. In the present situation of the world, reaching the limits to growth globally is exactly that kind of a problem. And climate change couldn't have been foreseen until scientists discovered the problem.

2. They are difficult to see. This can happen in many ways. Climate change is particularly difficult to see because weather is variable, and it requires noticing a trend in a very noisy signal. Peak oil is difficult to see because there is a complete lack of transparency in the information about oil reserves on the part of many major players.

3. They are difficult to act on. Surprisingly, this is the main stumbling block in most cases. For most people, this sounds incredible. Anybody can understand not dealing with a problem you can't anticipate or see, or one that is especially difficult to resolve, but not even trying to solve it after you have noticed it? What the hell is going on here? As it turns out, there are two types of factors at play here:

3a. Rational reasons not to act. This happens most often when there are conflicts of interests: individual interest vs common interest, or present rewards vs future rewards. Both cases of conflict of interest happen for the limits to growth issue. Of course, as time passes, the rationality of these choices becomes less and less, because in the long run, every individual will suffer from a collapse in the whole society, and while you may not care too much about future generations, especially if you are single, there is a time when the disaster is here, and it's your own life we are talking about...

It may also happen that those who see the problem lack the skills or resources to resolve it. I saw an example of this on Tuesday, in the Energy Group meeting. The coordinator said once again that he wanted to see some real practical action, and proposed to get solar panels for the cafe where we meet, that is owned by one of the guys that attend the meeting. His proposal included getting some hyper-efficient solar panels from New York. I pointed out that, much better than doing something on a single building, it would be better to find a supplier as local as possible of those panels, and if none could be found, create the business connections so that a local supplier could get those panels, which could benefit many others locally. Suddenly the task sounded like it was way beyond the capabilities of the small group and everybody got nervous.

3b. Irrational reasons not to act. By and large, this is the largest collection of reasons. There are so many ways that human beings can be biased that whole books have been written on this matter. (I can recommend Predictably irrational by Dan Ariely). This week alone I have seen two similar examples:

- No action because the task seems too large to tackle. I saw this on Monday, on a workshop about building a more resilient local economy. People started talking all over the matter, then divided into small groups of two or three people to deal with each of the main issues identified, who then felt way too small to propose any more action than talking some more about it and writing it down somewhere. You would think that a huge task would lead people to look for help, but it just seems to lead to inaction in most cases.

- No action because the task is made too large to tacke. I saw this on Saturday, on what was scheduled to be some kind of arts workshop about the ideal street, and was cancelled and ended up being three people talking in a cafe. We started talking about organizing some kind of big public event on the subject of what people would like the city to be like (more sustainable, hopefully), and people kept adding more and more things to it, to the point that it seemed too large and unmanageable to really seem doable. There was nothing preventing anybody from keeping things at a manageable size, but there you are.

4. They are difficult to resolve. To stop using fossil fuels is a great example of a problem difficult to resolve: the vast majority of our energy infrastructure depends on it, and huge changes need to be made. It's an immense technical challenge.

All in all, if our world manages this problem ungracefully and the Western civilization falls like the Roman did, at least we'll know that the challenge was definitely a difficult one. But it will be little consolation if the historians of the future conclude that, of all the difficulties, the irrational reasons not to act were the killers.