Data will not save us
Information is everywhere. It’s filling our minds and crowding our dreams. None of it coheres. Each data point remains disjunctive. We count and count and count, we model and compute, and day after day, year on year, wring our hands impotently, watching evidence cascade into floods and fires, collapsing kelp forests, bleaching reefs, vanishing ice. Not only is data not saving us, it is blinding us to seeing the true nature of the environmental crisis and how to meet it.
That we make objective decisions has been one of the great myths of my people since at least the eighteenth century. Its origins were the rending of person from world, society from nature, subject from object. No doubt this process had antecedents, but the scientific revolution and the industrial modernity that followed it, sundered us from our surroundings (thereafter, “the environment”) and made objectivity and rationalism defining illusions of Western culture. According to this mythology, there are nuggets of fact that can be established, separate from their surroundings and uncomplicated by values and meanings. The scientific method distils these facts which we then invite to speak for themselves in an orderly dialogue that concludes with decisions being made only on the basis of that which can be quantified. How are such facts derived? By isolating “variables” and severing, over and over again, things from their contexts. The novelist Amitav Ghosh describes the Enlightenment inheritance as “a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities.”
… that is to say, they were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable.
The scientific myth of objective knowledge, ritualised in this relentless discontinuity, is also a political and social myth. Bruno Latour has observed that the most crucial gesture of private property is not enclosure of what is mine but the concomitant exclusion, externalising, of all that is not mine. What I do not own is not my responsibility, not my concern, not part of me. The procedure of accounting requires this: what is counted counts and I am not accountable for anything beyond the ledger. Hence, via a long chain of dissociations, the bizarre practice of greenhouse gas inventories and biodiversity offset calculators.
For decades, since the inception of environmental treaties and the codification of environmental need into law, advocacy for nature has relied on data, modelling and the scientific method to substantiate the case for action. It is a truism of this field that you will not save what you cannot count. If we don’t know how many short-tailed shearwaters live off the east coast of Australia, how will we know when their population is collapsing as a result of climate change? The language and method of data and quantification pursued by the reductive, rationalist sciences has drained our polity of values that cannot be reproduced numerically. This is no secret. The good scientists and modellers involved in these activities know that our evidence-gathering, observations and models are incapable of encompassing the variety and particularity of life. They also know that robust evidence is not inevitably succeeded by action.
Our discontinuity from our material surroundings is so severe that for many years modellers have been attempting to turn the predicted and actual physical effects of climate change into financial metrics — GDP impairment, likelihood of mortgage default, bond ratings. This somewhat desperate manoeuvre is understood to be the only way to make the consequences of ecological collapse make sense to the people making decisions. Astonishingly, to many of these people, the case for transformational change actually already does make sense, but they find themselves in the thrall of a system which enjoins them never to make decisions based on any value but numerical profit. Following the pitiless logic of corporate capitalism — that nothing has value unless it is commodified — climate change modelling and economic modelling are coupled together to calculate the damage of climate change in economic terms. (This analysis, too, is sold commercially as nuggets of insight.) The problem with modelling the financial and economic consequences of climate change, as those who use it know, is that it is always approximate and chronically underestimated. Economic models can accommodate only a limited number of variables and interactions. There are likewise limits to how much data can be processed. Thus, the outputs of these models are narrow in what they are attempting to describe: the relationship of temperature rise to crop yield to GDP, for example. Articulating these relationships gives us very limited insight into our fate under catastrophic global warming but comes coupled with the false confidence of objectivity. Results are being presented to reserve banks and treasury boffins around the world indicating that catastrophic global heating will, say, reduce global Gross Domestic Product by 4% by the middle of the century. Such a fate would be the least of our worries.
Up to a point, quantification seemed to work for climate change because we understand it in large part as a process of chemistry and physics. It is when this method spills into biodiversity and the extinction crisis that its fatal limitations become clear. Biodiversity becomes more valuable the more of it there is, and that is a paradigmatic challenge. In any case, it simply cannot be counted. Science has named and observed perhaps one fifth of the species on this planet. We know very little of most of these described species: how populous they are, their habits, needs and preferences, how they interact with other species, with their habitat, with the weather. If entities must wait to be counted before they matter to us, then the biosphere will collapse waiting for the field trip grants to come through. Inevitably then, from the lofty aim of “protecting biodiversity,” law and process moves swiftly to the reductionism that facts and data require.
Accordingly, it is not all biodiversity that we study and must protect, but a specific list of species and ecological communities known to be threatened. To get on that list, a species must be understood: there must be data demonstrating that it has declined. Once on the list, the species is perhaps granted further study when a mine, a highway, or a housing development is proposed in a habitat where it lives, but that habitat is unlikely to be spared unless there is data proving that the species cannot avoid extinction without it. For a handful of species, guidelines are crafted that specify how to comb the area under threat to determine if the creature or plant is present. This many hours must be spent searching in this or that season; this or that trapping or survey technique must be deployed. Such guidelines are written based on what we understand of the creature’s habits and dependencies, so rely again on knowledge, study and data. Thousands of hours of patient observation, cataloguing and conclusion-drawing informs such documents: it is not possible to do this for each one of the more than two thousand species listed as threatened in Australia, let alone the half a million or so species of insects, fungi, plants and animals thought to live here, in complex relationships with each other. When a regional baseline assessment of biodiversity was conducted in the Beetaloo sub-Basin in the Northern Territory to prepare for the arrival of the shale gas fracking industry, scientists found hundreds of species of ants they had never encountered before. Of the 748 species of ant now known to live in that region, only 39 can be confidently named.
Even if the known, listed and studied creature or plant is found to be present in the place where someone wants to dig a mine, build a suburb or bulldoze a road, even if the ecosystem elements found to be present are deemed within the terms of guidelines to be important for that species, this is still no insurmountable impediment to that habitat being approved for razing by a bureaucrat or a Minister. After identification, counting and assessment, comes decision. If biodiversity is in the path of development, that usually means deciding to clear the habitat and to “offset” the impact of its loss, by not clearing, and perhaps restoring, similar habitat in some other place.
Offsetting is the logical end of a science and a society that quantifies without value, that cannot accommodate the particular and beautiful qualities of all things, but instead relentlessly generalises, categorises and counts. When applied to chemistry, trading and offsetting initially made apparent sense. One molecule of carbon dioxide seemed demonstrably identical to another. Trading schemes for pollution, whether salt in rivers or carbon in the atmosphere, are rooted in counting. When the logic of these schemes seeped into our dealings with biodiversity, its absurdity became immediately more obvious. One koala is not identical to another. Five does not equal five when we’re talking about five hectares of mature diverse forest and five hectares of newly planted saplings. Context, time, the tapestry of habitat, the infinite variety of interaction, what these creatures mean to themselves and to other creatures, including people, all of these particulars are erased in the numbers game.
At worst, fixation on data is a means by which decision-makers, and all of us, are absolved of responsibility for the cataclysms we are bringing down on the Earth’s inhabitants. This is the effect of Australia and the companies that mine coal here arguing that the emissions created by the burning of exported Australian coal overseas (our largest single contribution to climate change) doesn’t “count” because it is “counted” in the emissions inventory of another country. To take moral, legal, social or political responsibility for it here would be “double-counting.” Numbers are so authoritative and mesmerising that this self-destructive logic has been accepted in Australia’s mainstream discourse for decades. In a similar manoeuvre, modelling on a grand scale estimates various pathways by which the world could stabilise global average temperatures at various limits of warming above the pre-industrial average. How much gas gets drilled, chilled, shipped and burnt in these scenarios varies. Consequently, the results of such modelling are wielded as arguments to continue doing more gas drilling, chilling, shipping and burning, despite the very obvious reality that this activity, too, is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and sending the climate and life systems of our planet into catastrophic upheaval. Indeed, to say the numbers are “wielded” disguises the degree to which the calculations themselves have come to stand in for decision-making. This is another of Latour’s insights, that the impersonality of “The Economy” empties the public sphere of protagonists, becomes an apparatus that operates on autopilot, beyond intervention (“Nothing and no one decides: it suffices to calculate”). Thus the spectacle of people in government, finance and business, treating the results of modelling with the submissive posture of Calvinists.
The aura that has formed around the temperature stabilisation goals of the Paris climate agreement reveals a superstitious undercurrent of our supposedly rational reliance on “evidence.” They are no longer numbers at all, but totems. Thirty years of accreted scientific analysis, political briefings and economic speculation crystallised into the Paris Agreement decision to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, despite considerable scientific debate and dissent over the emergence of that figure as a supposed guardrail against catastrophic climate change. Indeed, the 1990 Stockholm Environment Institute paper credited with early identification of two degrees as a stabilisation goal also warned that “Temperature increases beyond 1.0°C may elicit rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” Hence, the concerted efforts by small islands states in particular to ensure that the less dangerous goal, stabilisation at 1.5 degrees warming above the pre-industrial average, is included in official commitments. In reality, politicians have committed to these numbers without understanding what they mean and without undertaking the decisive action that would be required to meet them. It could be argued that the temperature goals, too, have become a means to absolve political and corporate actors from responsibility. Australia, after all, “only” emits around 1% of the greenhouse pollution going annually into the atmosphere and the estimated carbon “budget” remaining before breaching the temperature goals becomes inevitable is billions of tonnes. One extra coal mine seems, to some, insignificant in this context. Indeed, environmental assessments of coal mines and gasfields frequently express the emissions created and enabled by these activities as small fractions of global pollution. (They do not, tellingly, make the same kinds of comparisons for job numbers). Every new emitting activity appears to be within the “carbon budget” for these goals until that budget is exhausted. By then, the deficit will be on someone else’s account.
The Aspendale headquarters of CSIRO’s atmospheric science division hosts the organisation’s “air archive.” It is the longest-running archive of its kind, holding dozens of canisters of air captured at Cape Grim since the late 1970s from which samples can be taken to understand and compare the composition of the atmosphere across time in response to pollution. There is something profoundly romantic about this plain room filled with carefully labelled canisters and old photographs of the teams that collected them. Science as it is practised by these people is not valueless. It emerges from passion, personality, relationships, contingency. The patient attention of scientists to the world around us can provide a counterpoint to the soulless dominance of data. There are scientists measuring minute fronds of moss in Antarctica, recording its growth in millimetres, year on year, or lovingly characterising the stars, or deep and ancient aquifers. There are scientists out in the Kimberley, weighing the eggs of wrens, as light as soap bubbles, to understand how heat and song influence chicks before they hatch. These are acts of profound tenderness and curiosity. There may be redemption in them, but we need to honour the passion and values that drive them to claim that redemption.
When we see the world in its simultaneous wholeness and particularity, nothing is easily tradable any longer. As it turns out, one kilogram of carbon is not identical to another, because every kilogram has different qualities. The kilogram of it that your child breathes out each day and the kilogram created when you drive a car for 20 minutes to go to work are not the same. The tonne of carbon dioxide absorbed by 50 growing trees in one year and the tonne absorbed by a machine invented for the purpose are not the same. Switzerland and Slovakia report creating roughly the same volume of greenhouse gases every year, as do Ethiopia and Qatar, but the unique complexity of these volumes — how they came about, what the activities that make the pollution mean to people, who makes decisions about it and how place and the texture of life will be affected by it — is flattened by mere calculation. The complexity of the climate change negotiations that take place at the UN reveal that this particularity is already tacitly acknowledged. We pretend to act on evidence, when in reality, we are acting in a rich and moving network of interests, histories and values.
There are two problems we need to face. The first is that we are not the objective, rational society we claim to be. The evidence has been clear for a long time that evidence being clear for a long time is not the precondition for action on climate change or the extinction crisis. The case is made: something else is holding us back. It is not true that we cannot save what we cannot count. Rather, we will not save what we refuse to understand. Once we accept that decisions are based on values, not facts, we can begin the task of challenging those values. The second problem is that even if it were true that once we have all the data and all the answers, better decision-making will follow, there is simply no time or capacity to collect, process and analyse data enough to understand the world. We know, for example, that methane is a potent short-term driver of global warming, and that dramatically reducing industrial emissions of methane right now would give the world much needed extra time to wholly decarbonise. Withholding further release of methane to the atmosphere would create a grace period, slowing warming in the short-term while transformation takes place on the Earth’s thin liveable surface to stop the release of more carbon dioxide — a gas with a less intense, but much longer-lasting warming effect. We also know that we are not measuring methane emissions accurately. It’s possible, even likely, that much more of it is coming out of coal mines, for example, than official data records. In Australia, methane emissions from coal mining may be as much as 60% higher than reported in our inventory. Experience should already have shown us that raising estimates of Australia’s methane emissions to make them more accurate will not prompt this country to change its approach to the export of coal. Our governments are not acting decisively to reduce the million tonnes of methane it reports being created by coal mining: it’s not credible that the same governments would behave differently if the true figure were 1.6 million tonnes. This is a clear point of departure for acting without full knowledge. There is no time to hesitate, to wait for more accurate measurement and consistent rules on methane, before we stop doing things we know release it into the atmosphere — building more coal mines and drilling more gasfields.
What would it feel like to make decisions without data and modelling? To live without metrics? We would need to find other values through which to understand the consequences of such decisions. The way we think about and respond to the climate change and extinction crises would change utterly. Imagine making a decision about a forest. There is political disagreement about its future, and whether a coal mine should be permitted to clear most of the forest. How does a supposedly “evidence-based” decision get made about this? Scientists are sent into the forest to look for, let’s say, tree-dwelling microbats. If they find none, one fact about this forest is produced: it has no tree-dwelling microbats. Of course, when, where and how you look for bats has an influence on whether you find them. Say there are rules about when, where and how to look for wildlife and rules letting you extrapolate and draw conclusions about the value of the forest based on its type and assemblages of trees and shrubs because it’s too time consuming to look for and record every single creature. If you followed these rules and presented tables counting the hectares of this and the numbers of that in an Environmental Impact Statement, you would have produced a particular collection of facts about the forest that may assist you in making a decision about its fate. But your decision is still a matter of judgement, informed by what is important to you. As an alternative, say instead that everyone who has a stake in the decision is required to go into the forest for a week and not speak to each other, but simply listen, watch and feel. At the end of the week, they sit together in a circle and discuss their experience. There would still be much of the forest’s life and meaning, its transformations and secrets that such a group would be unable to access, yet they would know the forest in different way from the knowing of graphs and tables. They would make a decision in a different way, too.
Even more than the extinction crisis, climate change is a problem that it seems terrifying and naïve to approach without numbers. We need to know how much things will cost, how many tonnes a soil carbon project sequesters, the probability the Thwaites glacier will collapse and cause three metres sea level rise in a given time period. Most importantly, we feel we need to calculate Australia’s precise degree of responsibility for all of these matters. On the contrary, making decisions about climate change in the absence of data, models and cost-benefit analyses would be liberating and transformative. Every decision would be particular and attentive to context. A proposal to extend the life of a coal mine for twenty years would seem, on the face of it, obviously not a good idea, because it would create unknown volumes of greenhouse pollution in a situation of unknown precarity for the global climate. There are people working in that mine who will need other work and would feel aggrieved by its closure. The whole region they work in, which has many coal mines in it, feels strongly about the continuation of coal mines. The need to prevent pollution means the mine should not proceed, but instead, investment, policy and attention could to be focused, in the present, on all the ramifications of that decision for the people and places concerned in it. There are complexities of trade, law, capacity and justice that make these decisions difficult and far-reaching. To make decisions without data would not be simpler or faster than complex modelling and environmental assessment exercises, but these processes are already neither simple nor fast. It would, however, be profoundly different. The first heave is to stop pretending that coal mines are approved because they “stack up environmentally,” (or even economically) as if the person making this decision has no judgment or values but is mechanically compelled to approve a mine expansion because a cost-benefit analysis dictates that they should.
The truth about facts is that they are products, made at the intersection of the world with observers who carry their purposes and values, rules and assumptions with them. This is not to say that facts are false, but they are limited in ways our culture has chosen to erase so completely that the act of erasure itself is obscure to most of us. Environmental Impact Statements do not begin from the question how should a forest be valued? Or even what destiny is this forest pursuing for itself? Anyone asking such questions will be ignored (derided!) because their terms cannot be accommodated in our systems of knowledge and decision-making. The local who values the liberty and autonomy of the forest faces a dreadful choice: engage on the naïve, destructive and impossible terms allowed by quantification, or set off urgently in another direction seeking the grail, to change the nebulous system that condemned the forest before the counting had even begun, a system for which no one claims or admits responsibility.
Contrary to the categorising, externalising habits inherited from the Western Enlightenment, Amitav Ghosh writes that “the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast.” These inescapable continuities always surrounded us, long before “the environment” was invented. In the era of climate disruption and ecological breakdown, they will intrude into our lives in ways we will not be able any longer to ignore. Many scientists, to their credit, have not ignored it. If you actually read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report, you will find close attention to the interconnection of human lives with the physical and ecological processes of our planet. You will find curiosity about the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples. You will find a clear statement that action on climate change means “systemic change.” If you read the assessment report from the equivalent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, you will also there find a clarion call for transformational change, “a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” To undertake that transformation, it is not mere data with which we must engage, but values, histories and continuities. Erase the numbers from both documents to find the political, social and corporate commitments we should have been making from the outset — not to numerical targets and budgets that are as mystifying as any religious text, but to systemic change, to making every single small decision in a different way, in a way that actually counts.
