Session Four Discussion

Roberta Balstad: Thank you very much, Andrew. I think the rest of the panel is here.

Okay, I really have the best job, because I could listen to everyone talk and now I get to ask the questions that all of you in the audience, I'm sure, had. Because the various talks covered so many different aspects of individual and social behavior, I'm going to try to look at issues that are common across the talks.

One of them, when we began, the very first speaker, Joel Cohen, talked about the two different worlds that inhabit our globe, the relatively developed world and the less developed but very rapidly growing world. Most of you to some extent talked about the poor and those who are not poor, and I guess my question is if we are seeking sustainable development, can we do so as long as these differences exist, can we do so successfully as long as these differences exist? Partha?

Sir Partha Dasgupta: The numbers don't add up as far as I can see for the huge inequality to persist. And you want growth across the board. In mathematical terms there's a kind of polarization that we have been experiencing the past forty, fifty years or so, growing polarization. And it's hard for me to think of a scenario in which it is possible to maintain this polarization and then claim that you're on a sustainable path. So no, the numbers don't add up. my very rough calculations that I've been making.

Johann Rockström: I think we've alluded to that in several presentations during these two days, that if you want to lift the one billion people who are living on less than $1 a day today out of poverty, the implications on energy, land, water, all so to say national capitals, is very insignificant at the scale of the global challenge we're facing. So you could lift people out of poverty in a sustainable way without having significant impacts on the environment of the world. What happens is that once you've taken them across that threshold what trajectories do they embark on, once the opportunities for increased consumption is opened up for them? And then of course if the aspiration is the European or the American lifestyle then they are boomeranged out on the wrong trajectory. So the key is of course to reduce and change lifestyles at the top, so you guide the bottom.

Roberta Balstad: Any other comments on that? Joel, do you want to add to that?

Joel Cohen: Well, we've taken the word poverty as if we knew what it meant. And there's the material poverty that Jeff Sachs started us with, and that I understand. Not enough calories…

The question is what does poverty entail, and it certainly entails alleviating the material shortages that Jeff Sachs started us with. Poverty means not having enough calories to stand up and protect yourself against disease, and not a secure place to live. But beyond that level wealth may not entail a lot of material throughput. Software has a limited material impact, psychoanalysis whatever its utility has limited material impact, poetry and music can be forms of wealth that don't entail enormous material input. So I think that the definition of wealth in the wealthy countries and in the formerly poor countries, once we get rid of poverty, will probably evolve a lot.

Andrew Dobson: My slight worry about that is, as I said, for many people that I talked to last weekend, who I'll talk to next week, so much of their wealth, or their quality of life, is tied up with the other species with which they coexist. And if you lose those species then you completely destroy that lifestyle and replace it with one that might actually not be so healthy with them. I don't know many Masai who have a psychologist that they have to go and speak to. And that might be tied in with their interactions with other species.

Roberta Balstad: Okay. If we are planning to mobilize, then all of our resources, their wealth, whether it's material wealth or whether it's ecological wealth or knowledge wealth, but if we're to mobilize this to advance sustainable development, what would you suggest become the first priority in terms of this path towards sustainable development? And I guess a side question of that is is it necessary to have priorities, or is it even possible to have priorities, is this so multifaceted that a single priority might impoverish it or might cause a problem in achieving it?

Johann Rockström: Well my simple would be that Joel has got it right. I think it's knowledge, it's definitely investing in knowledge. And not only knowledge among the fast growing part of the world but definitely knowledge among those who, as we concluded yesterday, are not in this room and who should be in this room.

Joel Cohen: I have to agree with that. When he says I'm right, can I disagree?

Roberta Balstad: That's a very important priority. Are there any others? Is that doable in real time?

Joel Cohen: But let me just say that knowledge, you can't learn on an empty stomach, and you can't learn if you're full of worms, and if you're feverish and you're at home you're not going to be in a position to learn. So education does depend on non-educational infrastructure of food, water, health, shelter, getting to school. All of those things have to go along with it, even though I think those things should be aligned so that they do support the learning, as you said. In other words, so I don't think a single priority is a realistic option. I think these things have to be integrated, that's what makes it complicated, that's why we're at this meeting. There's not a magic bullet, even though I think education is extremely important.

Roberta Balstad: Okay. Does anyone else want to contribute to that? Parker?

Parker Mitchell: I would say that education is obviously something that needs to happen. The question that I would ask is what's the root cause of why people aren't being educated? And it's been touched upon, but just to take an example that Joel mentioned very quickly this morning, access to sanitation. Few people in this room who haven't been visiting developing communities would probably realize that building latrines in schools will increase girls' enrollment in schools by 5 to 10% because there is a social stigma against sending your girl child to school if there's no latrine there. So when we talk about increasing access to education, which is obviously a huge component to it, there's a whole bunch of other root cause factors that we need to understand, and each of those root cause factors will be different if you're in northern or southern Zambia, let alone if you're in Chile or if you're in India. So understanding each of those factors, Joel had a very good list, but actually understanding and applying those. I think that our contention is in development at least there's kind of two different streams. One is improving service delivery, so making sure that teachers are better and there's kind of an outsider's let's get this right in service delivery. Then there's also the component of let's try and put money and power in the hands of the poor people so they can make their own decisions. And that's just one distinction I'd like to draw, because we've found that if the money and the power is in the hands of the poor people they can ensure that the teacher shows up for school, they can make their own decisions and they have power in the local political process, whereas if you depend too much on an outside delivery mechanism it can break down because the ultimate beneficiaries don't have the power to ensure that the service delivery actually happens. So that's really healthcare and education.

Roberta Balstad: Okay, great. Partha.

Sir Partha Dasgupta: Some mixed feelings about the tenor of this discussion, so we expect it to be a bit provocative rather than just agree with one another, which becomes very boring. All my colleagues here have said is right, this sounds right to me. But there is a kind of a disconnect in my judgment in thinking that the education that is required is only for the poorest who are illiterate for the main part. On the other hand if we recall what our colleagues were telling us all of yesterday, it seems to me the educational requirements in the richer parts of the world is huge, inasmuch as it's not about writing, not about reading, but about understanding nature, about what's going on. It's just remarkable to me how ill educated we are in understanding the feedbacks that we create, the perturbations we create, with the lifestyle that we lead. And it's in that context I was suggesting that I don't see the numbers adding up. I think probably we who are fortunate enough to live in the north and enjoy the lifestyles we do, and the wealth we own, we probably need to think in terms of reducing our consumption patterns into less energetic areas. So education cuts both ways, and I would be a bit concerned if we thought exclusively in terms of what's happening in Africa and large parts of south Asia. I think so much of the ills of our contemporary human situation is due to us, too.

Parker Mitchell: I would add that the challenge I would throw it is not necessarily educational, that's a component to it, but it's forcing people to work together. Because for the past 100 years many of the problems that communities have faced were local. If you wanted to build a new building or deal with a highway problem you could solve it by talking to your neighbors. But now the problems that we face, as everyone has mentioned, are global problems, and we don't have that experience of working collectively to solve these problems. So mechanisms that could be introduced at a younger age to force young people to work with one another across as many cultures as possible and to realize that their future is bound together I think would be an important first step as well.

Andrew Dobson: To just partly be provocative, but we don't only have to change the way the people in the bottom part of that pyramid think, but it's the people at the very top, I mean particularly in the US at the moment there's this massive focus on terrorism being the biggest threat to the world. If you want a world that's going to breed terrorism have a world that's environmentally degradated. And that's exactly what we're doing. If we're really worried about terrorism long term then we should be thinking much more about producing an environmentally sustainable world, and one in which education has reduced the potential for terrorism to breed in the first place.

Roberta Balstad: Okay. We are running out of time, but I'd like to ask another question that we've touched on here. We've talked a lot about individual behavior and individual poverty and social poverty, but we haven't really gotten into issues of culture, of religion, of social values. When we're thinking about challenging behavioral patterns and practices, to what extent do we have to incorporate an appreciation and an involvement of various cultural, religious, and social groups within the various populations?

Parker Mitchell: I think it's critical for two reasons. Obviously the legitimacy reason, but just as importantly on an implementation side it's kind of the getting the answer right, and that you can't as an outsider have the depth of knowledge that someone who has the breadth of local experience. And we talk about kind of collective behavior change, you know, one challenge I would throw out to the Earth Institute for the next conference, I mean we're sitting up here, we're five old men, I might not be so old but I will be soon, but there's lots of very intelligent women out there and I would say that they are not as represented on the panels as they could be. You know, I was here to talk about implementation, and last night I had a chance to talk to one of the people who's in charge of the Millennium Village Project in Malawi, her name was Revi Harrare [?] and you know, she knows much more, I don't know if she's in the audience today, but she knows much more about implementation than I ever will because I'm just telling the stories that our volunteers tell me. So getting that perspective from the field and living those values I think would be important.

Roberta Balstad: Okay. Johann?

Johann Rockström: Yes, so just trying to be a little bit provocative also, of course one should respect culture. But often we forget the timeframes of what culture really is. If you ask an African farmer about maize, for example, he or she will always say that that's part of our culture, but it's only fifty, sixty years old. If you come, as you rightly put it, Parker, out to any farmer anywhere in the world and you talk to them about abundaning [?] plowing because that's one of the key, key ways of assuring that you degrade your soil, they will tell you upon my dead body. This plow I inherited from my father who inherited from his father, but it was in the end introduced by the Brits as a colonial contribution to degrading the African continent. Now that's not very old, that's not a very old culture. If you go back just seventy, eighty, ninety years it was slash and burn, shifting cultivation systems, based on systems which in the end where much more conservation positive than the kind of systems that we have today. And you can go on and on in finding that culture often is as much, let's say, looser and brittle than you might expect. And I think that's also a signal that farmers or poor people in the world or all communities are much more receptive to innovation that you might in the beginning perceive. And I think we've gone through a development paradigm which in the ‘60s and ‘70s was such technology transfer oriented, and all the failures of that led into the ‘80s where we were supposed to be so incredible respective [he means “respectful”] to culture, religion, and social conditions that you were not allowed to introduce any innovation at all. And now I think we're lucking moving back to a situation where technology transfer innovation is allowed in kind of a collision with cultures in an adaptive co-management mode, and I think that's very positive. And so one should yes, respect culture, but you know, have a kind of a little bit arm length's distance to it.

Robert Balstad: I wish we could go on because I think I saw several hands go up as Johann was talking, and I think it's a measure of both the vitality and the thoughtfulness to that panel brought to their presentations today. But we have the next item on the agenda. So please join me in thanking the panel for their presentations.