Too late to save the world?

I was looking at a blog I read from time to time, called How to save the world from the prolific Dave Pollard when a colleague alerted me to this article on James Lovelock's latest interview in which he is reported to be claiming that it's too late to try and save the planet. Two quite different perspectives on 'saving' our world. Pollard's is about searching for better ways to live and making a living and striving to understand how the world works. Lovelock talks of great uncertainty about the future of the planet and how little we can predict and control how we affect climate. I find both in their own ways are reminders of the complexity of life on this planet.

Whose technology? - not mine?

In the past week I've had to 'register' no less than six times to be able to interact with friends and colleagues in their preferred - different - online spaces. I'm reasonably skilled in using such spaces but nonetheless this takes up time I don't feel I can spare. I'm beginning to experience these so-called opportunities for sharing and learning as an imposition and very much about 'someone else's technology'. In parallel with this we've had lots of issues about group websites - losing a much-visited old one because of a server problem, one new one not being accepted within a working group though well accepted at the next level up, vice versa for the other new one. The time that is taken up in servicing such online communications before actually doing any interaction and the emerging issues of power and participation are I think verging on the unacceptable. Also in parallel I'm experiencing - through emailed instructions - many assumptions that academics should engage more and take more ownership of some aspects of collective activity. My difficulty with all this is that because no face-to-face conversations take place very little checking is done about whether we have the capacity to engage in the ways chosen by those initiating changes. So I'm thinking about what strategy I should adopt? Ignore? Opt in? Opt out? Muddle along? Challenge?

Musings about counter-intuition

Sitting this morning looking out across the Bay of Volos...aka the Paghasitikos Gulf. Like elsewhere in Europe it's unusually cold at present. Many shades of grey: cloud, sea, sky, smoke. The general mood in Greece is also rather gloomy at present with 'austerity measures' beginning and the price of fuel rising sharply in the past few days. I was just thinking how difficult it is to juggle actions that are counter-intuitive and how difficult it is to take a long term view. Intuition is an important part of knowing, difficult to ignore, however rational one claims to be. It's not possible for us humans (even scientists!) to just step outside our contexts, though using systems thinking can encourage us to consider our experiences in a broader context.

Three examples come to mind here today concerning: global warming, fish stocks and the economy.

1. Experiencing the coldest winter in parts of Europe for several decades, inevitably makes it harder to think about the climate warming - changing yes, but how hard it is to think of heat when feeling cold or drought when in a flood or vice versa. As humans are we actually able to tune into climate rather than weather?
2. The Bay in front of me is very nearly fished out at present. Yet off the coast nearby are protected reserves and in the years we have been coming here we've experienced times when fish numbers have risen and fallen. Although it's obvious that if left alone fish stocks will recover and quite quickly, for those in the small boats fishing the Bay, instinct seems to say 'fish today' because by tomorrow someone else will have taken the fish. How can all be encouraged to hold off and let fish stocks recover when so much else pushes in the opposite direction?
3. As far as the economy is concerned, most people here seem to think that wages cuts and tax and price rises of the kind now being imposed in Greece will not alleviate the country's economic problems but will have the opposite effect. What kind of interventions would really help improve this situation?

In their different ways each one of these examples is about a need to go against intuition. Is there therefore a link between knowledge that influences our behaviour that comes from intuition and short termism?