For the last twelve months I’ve picked up a new hobby: thinking about some of the ‘big’ problems that none of our clients ever ask us to work on. High on my list has been to try and understand why most bee populations are in decline.
It didn’t take long for the investigation to reach ‘The Feminization of Nature’ a book published in 1997 and focusing primarily on the feminization of humankind. Over the course of the last 60 years, the book reports on massive drops in male fertility and corresponding massive increases in breast, testicular and prostate cancers. Its one of those doomsday books that, for some reason, the public at large has chosen to bury.
A big clue to the potential reason why this might be the case comes in the last chapter, which focuses on how ‘industry’ was doing its best to challenge and invalidate the evidence. Specifically, the chemical industry. And even more specifically that part of the industry making chemicals with ‘endocrine disrupting’ or oestrogenic properties (mainly pesticides, but also several plastics).
Taken at face value this chapter represents an iconic example of ‘It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It’ operating at a whole-industry level.
What this has meant in the case of the feminization of nature is that every piece of experimental evidence obtained by those outside the industry gets countered by those operating within the industry. The easiest way to counter such experiments is to say that they don’t ‘prove’ anything. Closely followed by setting up a different experiment to demonstrate the opposite result.
And herein lies the real problem. If the problem being tackled is a complex one – as is the case with the feminization of nature – there will never be such a thing as ‘proof’.
The more complex the problem, the further from provability things get. One of the biggest drivers of complexity in this regard are the time-lags between cause and effect. Some of the causal loops in The Feminization Of Nature are measurable in decades: a woman ingests traces of a particular oestrogenic chemical during pregnancy, and her offspring develop testicular cancer when they hit puberty. Or how about the causal link between another mild oestrogenic chemical and breast cancer that affects Caucasian and black women, but only affects Japanese women after their families have lived in the West for two generations. If the consequence doesn’t get manifest for forty years, then we really ought to be teaching scientists a different set of tools and methods to the ones they’re taught today.
Unfortunately (‘for the world’ in this case), the vast majority of scientists and, as far as I can see, every regulator on the planet doesn’t understand complex systems and can’t, therefore, begin to fathom how to design solutions that are safe in complex environments. This allows whole industries to – quite literally in the case of oestrogenic chemicals – get away with murder.
Without wishing to sound melodramatic, not doing anything about the fall of bee populations (or the decline in human fertility, or climate change) until we have ‘proof’ is the same as signing their (and our) collective death warrant.
In the twenty-two years since the publication of The Feminization of Nature, my investigation went on to find, it seems like almost nothing has happened. Lots more experiments, and lots more counter-argument, but essentially all a way to look busy while all the time the problem continues to get worse. Quite literally fiddling while Rome burns. Scientists trying to tackle a complex problem looking for something that doesn’t exist using tools and methods that are wholly inappropriate.
We can never ‘prove’ that oestrogenic chemicals are causing the decline in bee populations in the same way that we can never prove that smoking causes lung cancer.
What is required instead is a way of thinking that acknowledges the complexity, stops looking for ‘root causes’ (there aren’t any in a complex system), stops looking for ‘proof’ (ditto) and instead starts mapping the ‘conspiracy of causes’ and ‘systems’ from which the unfortunate symptoms emerge.
That’s what ultimately happened to the tobacco industry, despite their decades of kicking and screaming protest. There are myriad factors that causally-connect to produce lung cancer, and we know one of them is the smoking of tobacco. Having established that, it is incumbent upon legislators and producers to work to reduce the smoking of tobacco. And to keep doing so for as long as the causal link continues to exist.
Likewise, there are a myriad causally-connected factors that collectively conspire to affect bee populations and human fertility and hedgehogs too, as it happens. In all three cases, one of those causally-connected factors is the release of oestrogenic chemicals into the environment. And because that is so, it ought to be incumbent upon those operating in the domain to a) start building better and progressively more refined conspiracy-of-causes systems maps in order to begin to understand the impact of whatever changes they are thinking of trying, and, b) most importantly of all, work diligently to reduce the release of oestrogenic chemicals into the environment, and to keep doing so for as long as the causal links continue to exist.