It’s Blog Action Day today. I’m not going to talk about climate change per se, since I’ve recently been accused of writing ‘too much like a scientist’ (no, not on my blog… never on my blog, I hope) and I can’t really talk about climate change (you know, CO₂, atmospheric gases and all that. But of course we know there’s much, much more to it…) without the science, so I’ll just write about what has been bugging me this week.

I don’t need Jiminy Cricket to sing me song about what’s right or wrong, or how I should be feeling bad. I am feeling bad.

In the process of assisting in the preparation of an upcoming major regional biodiversity conference, I have been churning out more waste paper, one-sided printouts, unused colour copies, than I have done so during the entire year so far. Not just paper… but other resources too. Sigh – that quest for quality, precision, perfection. It is difficult to enforce personal pro-environmental attitudes when situational influences impose constraints. Still, we try. Or those of us who really care enough, do.

A reminder from the wise talking cricket: “Conscience is that still, small voice that people won’t listen to. That’s just the trouble with the world today.”

Perhaps we could all be Jiminys. Perhaps our voices (reinforced by suitably disapproving looks (Fig. 1)) would lend weight to consciences, and perhaps people would then listen…

Fig 1. Man demonstrating a Suitably Disapproving Look

I’m gonna scavenge the office for any bits of unclean paper and plastic tomorrow. I’m gonna make sure that the recycling bins remain generously fed. I’m gonna…

So there I was, parked at a table full of local and international Shell employees (they were kind enough to sponsor a table and I was there courtesy of the Singapore Environment Council), a youngling challenged to bridge that vast age, experience and sectoral gap in making conversation with people who were asking me about my views on current issues, politics and business over a three-course dinner in a greenfully-decorated marquee full of the who’s who of Singapore’s conservation, environment, landscaping, horticulture, and socially-responsible corporate circles. I didn’t mind it one bit; I miss the intellectual stimulation, and I was at enough ease to have found some dry humour.

I went table-hopping a little. Good to see familiar faces. Keith was there: “Hey! Do you still remember… about four, five years ago… when we guided LKY? I wonder if he still remembers us!” Ah, yes… what an honour that was. I was too shy then, to have asked for a photograph, and I was too young then, to have realised that I had there in front of me the perfect opportunity for a real, personal open conversation with the then-Senior Minister and his wife. Instead, I merely did what I knew best, and showed him the waders, the mudskippers, and my beloved whip spider.

Minister Mah Bow Tan’s speech was followed by a short video (The Garden City Story) which charted the development of Singapore from jungles to a ‘City in a Garden’. Rather impressive aerial videography ala BBC Planet Earth that managed to accentuate the green in our cityscape. So much that we take for granted.

When MM Lee speaks, you listen. Not just out of respect, but because you know that here is a man with decades of wisdom and experience and confident in the knowledge that his vision was what made Singapore, and he is here to share.

I liked the anecdotes. He told of how a foreign expert came and exclaimed that they were (then) doing the wrong things… “Birds feed on insects, and you were using insecticides! Birds like the tall grass, and you cut them all off!” And then they took on the expert’s advice, and the mynahs and the crows came back, birds which MM Lee admitted that he didn’t like (muted laughter in the audience).

When asked about challenges for the future, he lamented that “humans have become to clever for their own good”, sentiments that echo those of other world leaders and scientists. Education should start with the young, who are burdened with a heavier responsibility for future generations.

Otherwise, as the media has conveyed in pretty much the way the media picks up and conveys messages, it was the usual story: Singapore’s green vision was a strategic intent to position itself ahead of the world, building world-class infrastructure, a first world in a third-world region, more green = more happy people, the mark of good administration and leadership, cooperation on all fronts and across all sectors, and so on. The Singapore Story.

It was clear… that it is the political and economic drive that greens a nation. Or this nation, at least.

Ps. This blog post was written while running low on mana. I thought I could’ve managed something more coherent and exciting. I promise it’ll be better if I could talk about this in a conversation… after I get my sleep.

According to the Archbishop of Westminster, the economic downturn could be the very thing that brings us to our senses. “It’s the end of a certain kind of selfish capitalism,” Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said. “This particular recession is a moment – a kairos – when we have to reflect as a country on what are the things that nourish the values, the virtues, we want to have… Capitalism needs to be underpinned with regulation and a moral purpose.”

“One feels very sorry for those losing their jobs but in times of recession people have to rely on friends and neighbours and families and things that really matter to them. That may be a good thing. I think people did lose their way a bit. It has been difficult to bring up children with the kind of values we want. Let’s face it, we now have a ‘me, me’ society, a more consumerist society, a utilitarian society, and our values and virtues have become diminished.”

“Some of it has got to do with having too much. If your worth just depends on your wealth, that is not healthy. Your worth should depend on who you are.”

~ The Times, February 14, 2009

The tragedy of the human race is being played out, Wolf Meynert began. Let us not be blinded by feverish enterprise or technological prosperity; these are but the fever patches on the cheeks of an organism already marked by death. Never has mankind experienced a greater upsurge to its life than today; yet find me one person who is happy, show me one class that is content, or one nation that does not feel threatened in its existence. Amidst all the gifts of civilisation, in Croesus-like wealth of spiritual and material values, we are all anxiety and malaise. And Wolf Meynert relentlessly analysed the spiritual condition of the world today, that mixture of fear and hate, of mistrust and megalomania, of cynicism and despondency: in one word, despair. Typical terminal syndromes. Moral agony.

~ Karel ?apek, War with the Newts (Catbird Press, new edition 2001)

One must acknowledge Singapore’s uniqueness and intellectual interest… does not seem to obey the basic rules of political science… is the only affluent nation in the world that is not a genuine liberal democracy. It has had a one-party rule and a semi-authoritarian regime for forty years, but has maintained long-term economic growth… the government was led for forty years by a charismatic leader… but a personality cult seems non-existent. The bureaucracy has direct power over key financial and other resources, but the level of corruption is negligible. Thus, one can ask: is there something very right or very wrong about the city-state?

~ Maria Francesch-Huidobro, Governance, Politics and the Environment: A Singapore Study (2008)

“Is humanity facing a looming ecological credit crunch?” – so asked Dr Chris Hails, Editor-in-Chief of the Living Planet Report and WWF-International Director of Network Relations, during his talk on Tuesday. A rhetorical question, no doubt, for the answer is a resounding yes.

He presented the findings of the Living Planet Report 2008, with an emphasis on the rather “worrying” trends gleamed from the Living Planet Index and our Ecological Footprint. Basically, that we are facing an ecological debt, that – in the economic terms for which a member of the audience made no efforts to hide his distaste – we are running out of capital, that demand is outstripping supply, that our consumption of natural resources is three times the rate of what the earth is able to sustain, and that humanity’s very existence (as well as that of all species) is being threatened.

The recommended solution? To use energy wedges:

Using a wedge approach (as pioneered by Pacala and Socolow in 2004)… moving to clean, efficient energy generation based on current technologies could allow us to meet the projected 2050 demand for energy services with major reductions in associated carbon emissions.
~ WWF, 2008

Calls for increased government regulatory intervention, cross-sector partnerships, it’s the same scripts everywhere. Same stories being replayed too: market failures, bureaucratic failures, the unreliability of social efficiency. So what’s new? What else can be new?

The global financial networks of the new economy are inherently unstable. They produce random patterns of informational turbulence that may destabilize any company, as well as entire countries or regions, regardless of their economic performances.

At the existential human level, the most alarming feature of the new economy may be that it is shaped in very fundamental ways by machines. The so-called ‘global market’, strictly speaking, is not a market at all but a network of machines programmed according to a single value – money-making for the sake of making money – to the exclusion of all other values. In the words of Manuel Castells:

“The outcome of the process of financial globalization may be that we have created an Automaton at the core of our economies that is decisively conditioning our lives. Humankind’s nightmare of seeing our machines taking control of our world seems on the edge of becoming reality – not in the form of robots that eliminate jobs or government computers that police our lives, but as an electronically based system of financial transactions.”

~ Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living (2002)

From the lack of a true social theory comes the debilitating failure of the social sciences to communicate with the natural sciences and even with one another… the disciplines of both need to be defined by the scales of time and space they individually encompass and not just by subject matter as in past practice, and then they need to be connected.

A convergence has in fact begun. The natural sciences, by their own swift expansion in subject matter during past several decades, are drawing close to the social sciences. Four bridges across the divide are in place. The first is cognitive neuroscience, with elements of cognitive psychology… The second is human behavioural genetics… influence of the genes on mental development. The third… is evolutionary biology, including the hybrid offspring sociobiology… set out to explain the hereditary origins of social behaviour. The fourth is the environmental sciences. The connection of the last field to social theory may at first seem tenuous, but is not. The natural environment is the theatre in which the human species evolved and to which its physiology and behaviour are finely adapted. Neither human biology nor the social sciences can make full sense until their world views take account of that unyielding framework.

~ Edward O Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

Paul Ehrlich, the distinguished Stanford University biologist who won the prestigious Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, believes that every ethical system originated in the human mind, a biological entity. He does not think, like many dualist philosophers, that there are moral truths out there, waiting to be discovered, that are distinct and independent of the messy mass of neurons that house the human mind. We are bound to our empirical existence, and our moral sense is therefore grounded firmly in the human world.

Ehrlich concedes that the capacity to construct a moral system is a product of evolution. We can imagine the consequences of our actions, think about alternatives, and imagine what others are feeling. All these are valuable qualities, and with free will are preconditions for creating a moral system. But the content of that system, he believes, is not dependent on our genes. It is an outcome of human culture, and as such can take many different forms.

~ Lord Robert Winston, Human Instinct: How Our Primeval Impulses Shape Our Modern Lives (2002)

Just as the speck of dust is at the mercy of many forces, so is human behaviour. We are pushed and pulled in all directions by many different biological, cognitive and cultural forces. Some of these may oppose one another, and some may pull in the same direction. It is entirely possible that two instinctual tendencies may act at odds to each other. But that does not mean these forces cannot coexist; it just means that the track through space is more difficult to understand. Just because we have one adaptive mechanism that promotes violence and another that promotes co-operation does not mean that our explanations of these forces are confused. We are pushed one way and pulled another, and our challenge is to try to disentangle the forces and explain their origins.

~ Lord Robert Winston, in Human Instinct: How Our Primeval Impulses Shape Our Modern Lives (2002)