The Problem Isn’t Knowledge

There is a comforting assumption behind much of the way we deal with problems: if people knew better, we would do better. This assumption sits behind many societal issues like poverty, the environment and disaster. Especially disaster.

So we research, investigate and collect data. We commission reports and conduct inquiries. We educate people about risk and produce frameworks explaining what should be done about it.

I’m glad we do this. Knowledge and gradual improvement matters. But there comes a point where lack of knowledge stops being a convincing explanation for why we keep finding ourselves in the same position.

I’ve been thinking about this while researching disaster. We know an extraordinary amount about what creates one. We can model hazards with remarkable precision. We understand vulnerability and exposure. We know that where and how we build indicates risk, that poverty and disadvantage affect people’s ability to prepare and recover, and that decisions made long before a flood, fire or cyclone influence what happens when it arrives.

None of this is particularly new. And yet we keep producing the conditions in which disasters occur.

Something similar happened with sustainable development.

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland Report. It argued that environmental protection, economic development and social equity could not be treated as separate problems. In the Chairman’s Foreword, Gro Harlem Brundtland wrote:

‘We call for a common endeavour and for new norms of behaviour at all levels and in the interests of all. The changes in attitudes, in social values, and in aspirations that the report urges will depend on vast campaigns of education, debate and public participation’.

Nearly forty years later, we have certainly had the education and debate.

We know vastly more about climate change, environmental degradation and the consequences of our actions than we did in 1987. Most of us don’t need another graph explaining that endlessly extracting resources from a finite planet might eventually cause a problem.

But the interesting part of Brundtland’s statement isn’t really the education. It’s the reference to attitudes, social values and aspirations. Because changing those turns out to be much harder. I feel like it’s what’s holding us back.

Information has to compete with the systems in which we live. We might understand the environmental consequences of consumption while living in an economy that depends upon us consuming more. We can understand the danger of building in hazardous places while housing shortages, land values and development pressures encourage us to keep doing it. We can know that disadvantage makes people more vulnerable to disaster while accepting economic arrangements that reproduce disadvantage.

It turns out that while knowledge tells us one thing, the world around us can reward us for doing another. Perhaps that is why so many of our problems begin to look strangely similar once you peel back their outer layers.

It isn’t that we don’t know what to do. Often, we do. The harder question is why, knowing what we know, we continue to make choices that produce outcomes we say we don’t want.

That question has occupied me increasingly as I’ve been writing about disaster. I started by thinking about hazards, risk and emergency management. But the further I went, the less disaster seemed like a technical problem.

We’re really good at solving technical problems, and reducing its prevalence and impact certainly requires technical expertise, good policy and better planning. However, those things operate within a much larger set of choices about what we prioritise, what we reward and what we are willing to sacrifice.

Which is why I started with Brundtland, as perhaps the most important part of that passage wasn’t the call for more education at all. It was the recognition that meaningful change ultimately requires something much more difficult: a change in what we value.

The problem isn’t only what we know. It’s what we care about. The challenge is what we do about that, because what we care about influences everything we do.