Actions & Beliefs vs Chickens & Eggs

Our reactions and thoughts coming out of Small is Beautiful will continue but unfortunately my copy ended up somewhere in central Wisconsin over the Christmas holidays. Nothing that the postal service cannot remedy but I will take this current opportunity to tie together a few threads that have emerged in my mind over the course of the blog. This post is more related to sustainability rather than development but I think with some thought the same thoughts could be extended to development attitudes and work.

Recently Jordan emailed about some other thoughts he was having about another book he is reading, "The Forgotten Way", by Alan Hirsch (2006). He quoted one passage,

"If discipleship has to do primarily with becoming like Jesus, then it cannot be achieved by the mere transfer of information outside of the context of ordinary lived life. As I will attempt to show below, I simply do not believe that we can continue to try and think our way into a new way of acting, but rather we need to act our way into new way [sic] of thinking. How have we moved so far from the ethos of discipleship passed on to us by our Lord? And how do we recover it again?"(2006:122)

The book and Jordan's email were more interested in spiritual matters but I would like to build on the second sentence of the quote concerning acting and thinking. I recently read an article about concerning behavior change and belief and a follow up article on Grist. The article ends with,

"Belief doesn't come first; action comes first. Changing people's behavior -- in small, incremental, but additive ways -- is the best way to open their minds to the science. It all comes down to change on the ground. Climate hawks need to get smart about driving behavior change wherever they can. Those behavior changes will pull changes in consciousness in their wake."

So now on to some of my own thoughts. For a long time I have wanted to post something about why I fear renewable energy so here it goes. It may be somewhat extreme, but try to imagine if tomorrow a researcher announced a super efficient renewable energy source. Anything from a new type of photovoltaic (solar) cell to a new hydrogen fuel cell or even some progress on fusion. This seems to be the underlying target for most investments and research in renewable energy and, as far as I can see, no one is asking the bigger question about the ramifications of such a discovery. When fossil fuels were first identified they were revolutionary. There's no question that the discovery of oil and its effect on the world (think automobile revolution as well as plastics) was incredible. The energy content in oil is incredible and the possibilities that it unleashed confirmed the opinions at the time that technology can and will solve all our problems and bring society towards utopia.

I think we tend to have the same attitudes towards renewable energy and the consequences might be just as dire. For example, can you imagine the rate of deforestation or resource extraction if we had portable cold fusion? How easy would it be to wage a war with super efficient solar panels powering the front lines? (A major consideration in modern warfare is the fuel supply line to the front line.)

Another interesting ramification might be more cultural. "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler is an interesting examination of how cheap oil has changed the face of North America. Cheap renewable energy would probably exacerbate the changes Kunstler observes. How much more separated with the haves be from the have-nots? How much more infrastructure will we demand to support an even cheaper energy source?

So now to tie these thoughts together. First, we have the idea that changing actions can change attitudes rather than trying to change attitudes in order to change actions. (Note that this is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem since the logical conclusion is that at least one person's attitude must be different in order to affect the behavior of others.) Secondly, I mentioned the idea that our current attitude towards renewable energy focuses our actions on reaffirming our attitudes or making them sustainable rather than changing them. For example, we are pursuing electric cars to allow us to keep our perspective on free and easy personal transportation.

I would like to conclude by saying that the economy could answer both of these questions. If we were somehow able to know and had to pay the true cost of every action we did (especially with regards to the environment) our actions would change immediately because we would not be able to afford our lifestyle. In the short term this would drive research towards technology that could solve these problems so that we could return to our current lifestyle. But before the breakthroughs came (if they ever did) our attitudes would have shifted to better understand a sustainable lifestyle.

Note that I said, "I would like to conclude,". Unfortunately, it is our current capitalistic paradigm that has given us these attitudes and the sort of logic that drives the previous paragraph. I suspect that simply having to pay (with currency) the full cost of our actions would really work to create a sustainable world. I look forward to continuing "Small is Beautiful" in order to further understand more of the underlying shortcomings in our economic system.

Kurtis (from Waterloo)