Ockham's Razor

Professor Jane Goodall from the University of Western Sydney is fascinated by the dramatic unpredictability of culture change. Today she focuses on the debates surrounding climate change.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Robyn Williams: Did you know that there are two kinds of person on earth? Some are like you think you are: decent, humane, at one with nature, a combination of Noble Savage and Philosopher King or Queen; the other is avaricious, unfailingly acquisitive, money mad and dollar foolish. Trouble is, each one of us can be both.

Gordon Gecko or Robin Hood, Ayn Rand or Mary Poppins, which do you think you are right now and what might you be tomorrow?

Jane Goodall is a Professor of Literature, a sort of philosopher; but she's also a crime novelist; one minute dissecting culture and razzamatazz, the next minute dissecting a mangled corpse. Another duality. And now we may possibly, just possibly be living in an environmental turning point, does it matter whether we're one thing or the other?

Jane Goodall lives in Queensland but lectures at the University of Western Sydney. Another duality.

Jane Goodall: I used to teach a course called Imagined Futures. It was part of a Humanities degree, and surveyed a range of mainly fictional works to look for recurring tendencies. The most obvious of these was a dominant focus on imagined technologies, as if the future were almost synonymous with technological advancement, which meant, in most of the fantasies we studied, a kind of technological extremism. In the 1950s, for example Asimov imagined cities that were all concrete and steel, and the advent of a new species in the form of steel robots capable of evolving their own intelligence systems. Curiously, what was unimaginable then was a future in which the greening of cities would become a priority.

Culture and technology don't travel on straight parallel routes, they interweave and turn corners, and most of the sharpest turns are culturally driven. As a fiction writer, I'm fascinated by the dramatic unpredictability of culture change. Whoever saw the punk movement coming? Or hip-hop? The Romantic movement in Europe? The Sixties revolution?

So far, the debate on Climate Change is following the typical patterns of futurism. It's focusing almost exclusively on technologies. From fossil fuels and solar panels to hybrid cars, lightbulbs and green bags, the concerns are pervasively to do with adapting in practical ways so that we can minimise the damage our way of life is doing to the planet. Underlying all this though, is an implicit denial of the prospect that our way of life must itself change fundamentally.

Climate change discussion is travelling on two separate roads: one directed towards future economic and technological conditions, and another that is taken up with immediate crises in the way of life for peoples around the world: the kinds of stories emerging from the World Wild Life Fund's Climate Witness program.

But behind that division in focus is a deeper division. It's as if there are two different views of the human species in play.

On one side we have Homo Economicus, whose survival depends on a highly evolved industrial and financial system, an ecosystem in its own right, with a global network of co-dependencies.

The weather systems of Homo Economicus are stock market reactions. Turbulence in that system is to be avoided above all else, so responses to climate change in the natural world must be constrained accordingly. That priority is a fiat. That's not to say that Economicus is a species without capacity for adaptation. On the contrary, it prides itself on an almost infinite adaptability within its own ecosystem, where change is the new constant, as we're constantly told, but the word 'change' has a restricted meaning here. It means change in technologies and work-practices, so if climate change is a problem it must be dealt with in those terms.

Nature can always be got to adapt to the economy. It's a matter of dealing with a few shifting parameters. What else is the history of modern agriculture? Or manufacturing?

It's hard to argue with such a premise. It's hard to argue with Homo Economicus, a species with a high opinion of its own opinions, which it keeps in constant production and circulation, using an assortment of dismissive slogans as pesticides to deal with the nuisance opinion matter of lesser human species.

Like the one that insists on seeing itself as a creature of the biosphere. It's a species oddly maladapted to what is known by intelligent consensus amongst the species Economicus as The Real World. Bio-humanity, this green-tinged throwback, has started to insist on principles of command, control and communications that operate at a cellular level. The dreaded word Gaia has resurfaced, in a new book by James Lovelock suggesting that some kind of revenge is taking place. Gaia is trying to get rid of us.

In the realms of fiction, the novelist Ian McEwan, who's been one of the hard-heads of the evolution debate, is starting to talk like a Gaia convert, comparing the earth to the human brain and warning that we're underestimating its organic integrity, and may pay the highest conceivable price for doing so.

Where Economicus is full of smart strategies and has gone into adaptability overdrive, its bio-counterpart is in desperate straits. Yet with the energy of urgency, Bio-Humanity is actually on the rise, organising itself, according to the American writer Paul Hawken, into hundreds of thousands, even millions of small groups, dedicated to various aspects of planetary and human salvage. Hawken's recent book, Blessed Unrest is subtitled How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why no-one saw it coming.

The trouble is, these two species live on different planets. Planet Finance and Planet Earth are not the same place at all.

In the midst of the great divide, what's a writer to do? The other day I heard Salman Rushdie interviewed and he said that we write stories to understand what kinds of creatures we are. Ian McEwan says something similar: 'We barely know ourselves, and our collective nature is still a source of wonder to us.'

I want to tell a brief personal story about falling between species, because that's an experience I suspect many of us going through.

I admit to being pretty confused here. As far as my immediate dependencies are concerned, I'm Economicus. I'm a consumer from way back, and my confidence is still high enough to keep me driving a car, paying off real estate and going shopping. For fun. Yes, I admit it. I still go shopping for fun.

Of course I'm aware of climate change. I do my shopping with a green bag. I've changed the lightbulbs. And put ethanol mix in my car. Then I switch on the TV and find out I've been filling my petrol tank with other people's food supply.

Something's bugging me. The dog keeps looking at me in a funny way, suggesting that I don't take enough walks. Something's calling from a place I can't quite identify.

I went for a drive last weekend. With the dog. He's called Woody, my dog. I found him racing along a highway and when I stopped the car, he got in and immediately went to sleep on the passenger seat and we've been inseparable ever since. Well, ever since the RSPCA released him for adoption.

But anyway, we went for a drive, Woody and I, across the Darling Downs near where I live in Queensland. An amazing landscape, pitted with ancient volcanic bubbles. And we got to a place called Jondaryan, which is a colonial sheep station where they've preserved the historic equipment and buildings. Woody suggested a walk, and immediately tried to head for the shearing shed, which was exuding a rich animal scent, but he wasn't allowed in so we just cruised the perimeter, looking at the antiquated machinery positioned on the outskirts. But then I saw something that brought me to a stop.

First, it made me think of a sedan chair, except this was a very crude and rustic version, a framework made from branches lashed together to form a stretcher with a raised cover of thick canvas. It was big enough to accommodate one adult lying down. The front of the structure was on wheels, and there were handles at the back so you could push it along like a wheelbarrow. According to the notice in front of it, this was a shepherd's mobile shelter.

I understood, then, why this thing had stopped me in my tracks.

You see, I had found the missing link.

The place where Bio-Humanity starts to morph into Homo-Economicus.

Whoever slept in this would have no worries about his ecological footprint.

He might have had a bit of trouble with the weather.

It gets freezing cold on winter nights out there, and there are lashing storms.

But actually, this mobile home was a pretty good piece of technology. The canvas had leather straps so you could batten it down tight, and there was a thick sheepskin over the bed. The front wheel and back legs kept it off the ground, clear of the rising cold and damp. It's impossible to look at a thing like this without a mental cross-flash that puts you into the life of the person who used it. It may be completely unlike anything in your own life, but your body knows this kind of thing. Here's some residual affinity with a structure expressing such an immediate relationship between the body and the weather.

The missing link might have discovered the key to sustainability here, I was thinking, but the thought was interrupted by the roar of a passing truck behind me, a cattle truck. A mobile emissions centre carrying its heavy breathing cargo on the road to industrialised death.

The guys who drive those trucks don't do much better out of the economy, relatively speaking, than the shepherd who spent his days pushing his canvas bedroom around after a wandering flock, but the evolution of Homo Economicus drives forward relentlessly in the name of improved living conditions. Bio-Humanity, meanwhile, watches with increased detachment, aware that some species manage to drive themselves to their own extinction.

What kind of species are we? Is there something that alienates us from cattle trucks and stock markets (of both kinds) and draws us into visions of a simple life exposed to the elements? Are we seeing the resurgence of some buried desire in Homo Economicus to return to such a life? Is that actually part of what's going on in the spreading concern about climate change?

Never underestimate bio-humanity and the intellectual power it can suddenly generate when it's moved to bring about some shift in the foundations of a culture. Visions of simplicity can trigger sudden energy surges driven by a kind of moral fury at the state things have come to. William Blake, writing in just such a fury at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, railed against the species-split he could see happening. At the end of his epic poem Jerusalem, he writes: 'the Vegetative Universe opens like a flower from the Earth's centre' and Human Forms 'are restored to commonality with Tree, Metal, Earth and Stone; the Planetary rhythms of time.'

'Romanticism!' scoffs Economicus. 'Escapist fantasies for those too soft in the head to confront the real world.'

I don't think so. A culture surge is like a tidal surge. It shakes the foundations of what a majority consensus has deemed to be the reality of things. There's a cyclone surely coming our way, but as to how, where and when, don't expect any advance warnings.

Robyn Williams: Suddenly it'll be upon us. Professor Jane Goodall from the University of Western Sydney. Her latest book is called 'Frankenstein's Science', which she helped to edit, and her latest crime novel is 'The Visitor'. Very scary.

Next week I shall introduce a woman who, I'm pretty sure, has never listened to any of my programs, and I don't mind a bit. Find out why next week.

I'm Robyn Williams.

Guests

Professor Jane Goodall
Professor of Literature
University of Western Sydney
Sydney/New South Wales

Publications

Title: The Visitor
Author: Jane Goodall
Publisher: Hodder

Title: The Calling
Author: Jane Goodall
Publisher: Hachette Livre Australia

Title: Frankenstein's Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1830
Author: Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall (eds)
Publisher: The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgn1 10 (advance access published on line on July 30, 2008)

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

Brigitte Seega