The final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial. This is a technical term with a precisely defined meaning in individual psychology, and it has been taken over into the pop culture. If something that you perceive arouses in you a painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress or deny your perception in order to avoid the unbearable pain, even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous. The emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety, and grief. Typical examples include blocking the memory of a frightening experience, or refusing to think about the likelihood that your husband, wife, child, or best friend is dying because the thought is so painfully sad.
For example, consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is found to be highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That’s because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst. Although psychological denial is a phenomenon well established in individual psychology, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well.
Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late. Some attempted solutions backfire and make the problem worse, such as the Cane Toad’s introduction into Australia to control insect pests, or forest fire suppression in the American West. Many past societies (such as medieval Iceland) lacked the detailed ecological knowledge that now permits us to cope better with the problems that they faced. Others of those problems continue to resist solution today.
For instance, please think back to Chapter 8 on the ultimate failure of the Greenland Norse to survive after four centuries. The cruel reality is that, for the last 5,000 years, Greenland’s cold climate and its limited, unpredictably variable resources have posed an insuperably difficult challenge to human efforts to establish a long-lasting sustainable economy. Four successive waves of Native American hunter-gatherers tried and ultimately failed before the Norse failed. The Inuit came closest to success by maintaining a self-sufficient lifestyle in Greenland for 700 years, but it was a hard life with frequent deaths from starvation. Modern Inuit are no longer willing to subsist traditionally with stone tools, dogsleds, and hand-held harpooning of whales from skin boats, without imported technology and food. Modern Greenland’s government has not yet developed a self-supporting economy independent of foreign aid. The government has experimented again with livestock as did the Norse, eventually gave up on cattle, and still subsidizes sheep farmers who cannot make a profit by themselves. All that history makes the ultimate failure of the Greenland Norse unsurprising. Similarly, the Anasazi ultimate “failure” in the U.S. Southwest has to be seen in the perspective of many other ultimately “failed” attempts to establish long-lasting farming societies in that environment so hostile for farming.
Among the most recalcitrant problems today are those posed by introduced pest species, which often prove impossible to eradicate or control once they have become established. For example, the state of Montana continues to spend over a hundred million dollars per year on combatting Leafy Spurge and other introduced weed species. That’s not because Montanans don’t try to eradicate them, but simply because the weeds are impossible to eradicate at present. Leafy Spurge has roots 20 feet deep, too long to pull up by hand, and specific weed-controlled chemicals cost up to $800 per gallon. Australia has tried fences, foxes, shooting, bulldozers, myxomatosis virus, and calicivirus in its ongoing efforts to control rabbits, which have survived all such efforts so far.
The problem of catastrophic forest fires in dry parts of the U.S. Intermontane West could probably be brought under control by management techniques to reduce the fuel load, such as by mechanically thinning out new growth in the understory and removing fallen dead timber. Unfortunately, carrying out that solution on a large scale is considered prohibitively expensive. The fate of Florida’s Dusky Seaside Sparrow similarly illustrates failure due to expense, as well as due to the usual penalty for procrastination (“too little, too late”). As the sparrow’s habitat dwindled, action was postponed because of arguments over whether its habitat really was becoming critically small. By the time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed in the late 1980s to buy its remaining habitat at the high cost of $5,000,000, that habitat had become so degraded that its sparrows died out. An argument then raged over whether to breed the last sparrows in captivity to the closely related Scott’s Seaside Sparrow, and then reestablish purer Dusky Seaside Sparrows by back-crossing the resulting hybrids. By the time that permission was finally granted, those last Dusky captives had become infertile through old age. Both the habitat preservation effort and the captive breeding effort would have been cheaper and more likely to succeed if they had been begun earlier.
Thus, human societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it. This chapter began with my relating the incredulity of my students, and of Joseph Tainter, that societies could allow environmental problems to overwhelm them. Now, at the end of this chapter, we seem to have moved towards the opposite extreme: we have identified an abundance of reasons why societies might fail. For each of those reasons, each of us can draw on our own life experiences to think of groups known to us that failed at some task for that particular reason.
But it’s also obvious that societies don’t regularly fail to solve their problems. If that were true, all of us would now be dead or else living again under the Stone Age conditions of 13,000 years ago. Instead, the cases of failure are sufficiently noteworthy to warrant writing this book about them—a book of finite length, about only certain societies, and not an encyclopedia of every society in history. In Chapter 9 we specifically discussed some examples drawn from the majority of societies that succeeded.
Why, then, do some societies succeed and others fail, in the various ways discussed in this chapter? Part of the reason, of course, involves differences among environments rather than among societies: some environments pose much more difficult problems than do others. For instance, cold isolated Greenland was more challenging than was southern Norway, whence many of Greenland’s colonists originated. Similarly, dry, isolated, high-latitude, low-elevation Easter Island was more challenging than was wet, less isolated, equatorial, high Tahiti where ancestors of the Easter Islanders may have lived at one stage. But that’s only half of the story. If I were to claim that such environmental differences were the sole reason behind different societal outcomes of success or failure, it would indeed be fair to charge me with “environmental determinism,” a view unpopular among social scientists. In fact, while environmental conditions certainly make it more difficult to support human societies in some environments than in others, that still leaves much scope for a society to save or doom itself by its own actions.
It’s a large subject why some groups (or individual leaders) followed one of the paths to failure discussed in this chapter, while others didn’t. For instance, why did the Inca Empire succeed in reafforesting its dry cool environment, while the Easter Islanders and
Greenland Norse didn’t? The answer partly depends on idiosyncrasies of particular individuals and will defy prediction. But I still hope that better understanding of the potential causes of failure discussed in this chapter may help planners to become aware of those causes, and to avoid them.
A striking example of such understanding being put to good use is provided by the contrast between the deliberations over two consecutive crises involving Cuba and the U.S., by President Kennedy and his advisors. In early 1961 they fell into poor group decision-making practices that led to their disastrous decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, which failed ignominiously, leading to the much more dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. As Irving Janis pointed out in his book Groupthink, the Bay of Pigs deliberations exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions, such as a premature sense of ostensible unanimity, suppression of personal doubts and of expression of contrary views, and the group leader (Kennedy) guiding the discussion in such a way as to minimize disagreement. The subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making, such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to be freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally leaving the room to avoid his overly influencing the discussion himself.
Why did decision-making in these two Cuban crises unfold so differently? Much of the reason is that Kennedy himself thought hard after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and he charged his advisors to think hard, about what had gone wrong with their decision-making. Based on that thinking, he purposely changed how he operated the advisory discussions in 1962.
In this book that has dwelt on Easter Island chiefs, Maya kings, modern Rwandan politicians, and other leaders too self-absorbed in their own pursuit of power to attend to their society’s underlying problems, it is worth preserving balance by reminding ourselves of other successful leaders besides Kennedy. To solve an explosive crisis, as Kennedy did so courageously, commands our admiration. Yet it calls for a leader with a different type of courage to anticipate a growing problem or just a potential one, and to take bold steps to solve it before it becomes an explosive crisis. Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule for acting before it becomes obvious to everyone that some action is necessary. But there have been many such courageous, insightful, strong leaders who deserve our admiration. They include the early Tokugawa shoguns, who curbed deforestation in Japan long before it reached the stage of Easter Island; Joaquín Balaguer, who (for whatever motives) strongly backed environmental safeguards on the eastern Dominican side of Hispaniola while his counterparts on the western Haitian side didn’t; the Tikopian chiefs who presided over the decision to exterminate their island’s destructive pigs, despite the high status of pigs in Melanesia; and China’s leaders who mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable leaders also include the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and other Western European leaders, who decided after World War II to sacrifice separate national interests and to launch Europe’s integration in the European Economic Community, with a major motive being to minimize the risk of another such European war. We should admire not only those courageous leaders, but also those courageous peoples—the Finns, Hungarians, British, French, Japanese, Russians, Americans, Australians, and others—who decided which of their core values were worth fighting for, and which no longer made sense.
Those examples of courageous leaders and courageous peoples give me hope. They make me believe that this book on a seemingly pessimistic subject is really an optimistic book. By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures, we too, like President Kennedy in 1961 and 1962, may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success (Plate 32).
CHAPTER 15
Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes
Resource extraction ■ Two oil fields ■ Oil company motives ■ Hardrock mining operations ■ Mining company motives ■ Differences among mining companies ■ The logging industry ■ Forest Stewardship Council ■ The seafood industry ■ Businesses and the public ■
All modern societies depend on extracting natural resources, both non-renewable resources (like oil and metals) and renewable ones (like wood and fish). We get most of our energy from oil, gas, and coal. Virtually all of our tools, containers, machines, vehicles, and buildings are made of metal, wood, or petrochemical-derived plastics and other synthetics. We write and print on wood-derived paper. Our principal wild sources of food are fish and other seafoods. The economies of dozens of countries depend heavily on extractive industries: for instance, of the three countries where I’ve done most of my fieldwork, the main props of the economy are logging followed by mining in Indonesia, logging and fishing in the Solomon Islands, and oil, gas, mining, and (increasingly) logging in Papua New Guinea. Thus, our societies are committed to extracting those resources: the only questions involve where, in what amounts, and by what means we choose to do so.
Because a resource extraction project usually requires large capital inputs up front, most of the extraction is done by big businesses. Familiar controversies exist between environmentalists and big businesses, which tend to view each other as enemies. Environmentalists blame businesses for harming people by damaging the environment, and routinely putting the business’s financial interests above the public good. Yes, those accusations are often true. Conversely, businesses blame environmentalists for routinely being ignorant of and uninterested in business realities, ignoring the desires of local people and host governments for jobs and development, placing the welfare of birds above that of people, and failing to praise businesses when they do practice good environmental policies. Yes, those accusations too are often true.
In this chapter I shall argue that the interests of big businesses, environmentalists, and society as a whole coincide more often than you might guess from all the mutual blaming. In many other cases, however, there really is a conflict of interest: what makes money for a business, at least in the short run, may be harmful for society as a whole. Under those circumstances, the behavior of businesses becomes a large-scale example of rational behavior on the part of one group (a business in this case) translating into disastrous decision-making by a society, as discussed in the preceding chapter. This chapter will use examples from four extractive industries, of which I have firsthand experience, to explore some of the reasons why different companies perceive it as being in their interests to adopt different policies, either harming or sparing the environment. My motivation is the practical one of identifying what changes would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead. The industries that I shall discuss are oil, hardrock mining and coal, logging, and marine fishing.
My experience of the oil industry in the New Guinea region has involved two oil fields at opposite ends of the spectrum of harmful versus beneficial environmental impacts. I found these experiences instructive, because I had previously assumed that oil industry impacts were overwhelmingly harmful. Like much of the public, I loved to hate the oil industry, and I deeply suspected the credibility of anyone who dared to report anything positive about the industry’s performance or its contribution to society. My observations forced me to think about factors that might encourage more companies to set positive examples.
My first experience of an oil field was on Salawati Island off the coast of Indonesian New Guinea. The purpose of my visit there had nothing to do with oil but was part of a survey of birds on islands of the New Guinea region; it merely happened that much of Salawati had been leased for oil exploration to the Indonesian national oil company, Pertamina. I visited Salawati in 1986 with the permission and as a guest of Pertamina, whose vice president and public relations officer kindly provided me with a vehicle to drive along company roads.
In view of tha
t kindness, I am sorry to report on the conditions that I encountered. From a long distance, the field’s location could be recognized by a flame shooting out of a high tower, where natural gas obtained as a by-product of oil extraction was being burned off, there being nothing else to do with it. (Facilities to liquefy and transport it for sale were lacking.) To construct access roads through Salawati’s forests, swathes 100 yards wide had been cleared, much too wide for many species of New Guinea rainforest mammals, birds, frogs, and reptiles to cross. There were numerous oil spills on the ground. I encountered only three species of large fruit pigeons, of which 14 have been recorded elsewhere on Salawati and which are among the prime targets of hunters in the New Guinea region because they are large, meaty, and good to eat. A Pertamina employee described to me the location of two pigeon breeding colonies, where he said that he hunted them with his shotgun. I assume that their numbers within the field had been depleted by hunting.
My second experience was of the Kutubu oil field that a subsidiary of the large international oil company Chevron Corporation operated in the Kikori River watershed of Papua New Guinea. (I shall refer to the operator for short as “Chevron” in the present tense, but the actual operator was Chevron Niugini Pty. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron Corporation; the field was a joint venture of six oil companies, including Chevron Niugini Pty. Ltd.; the parent company Chevron Corporation merged in 2001 with Texaco to become ChevronTexaco; and in 2003 ChevronTexaco sold its interests in the joint venture, whose operator then became another one of the partners, Oil Search Limited.) The environment in the Kikori River watershed is sensitive and difficult to work in because of frequent landslides, much limestone karst terrain, and one of the highest recorded rainfalls in the world (on the average, 430 inches per year, and up to 14 inches per day). In 1993 Chevron engaged World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to prepare a large-scale integrated conservation and development project for the whole watershed. Chevron’s expectation was that WWF would be effective at minimizing environmental damage, lobbying the Papua New Guinea government for environmental protection, serving as a credible partner in the eyes of environmental activist groups, benefiting local communities economically, and attracting World Bank funding for local community projects. From 1998 to 2003 I made four visits of one month each to the oil fields and watershed as a consultant to WWF. I was allowed freedom to travel throughout the area in a WWF vehicle and to interview Chevron employees privately.
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