What kind of information do we need?
My colleague John Hiles once said that people are alienated from the large systems around them (e.g. science, technology, politics, economics), not because of lack of information (the Sunday New York Times, as just one example, provides more information weekly on all these systems than most of us can absorb), but because they lack the mental models to make sense of that information, which is therefore mostly just noise to them.
Perhaps the most common response to this problem is what might be called ‘sloganeering’. If I can develop a slogan that purports to cover a complex subject-area then I don’t need to know any more about it. If I believe, for example, that “all politicians are corrupt”, or “climate change is a conspiracy cooked up by left-wing scientists” then I don’t need to know or think any more about politics or climate change. The slogan is itself a complete answer.
The antidote to sloganeering is not the provision of more information per se, but the provision of tools and approaches that show the practical choices confronting us and their potential consequences.
Providing more information on climate science, for example, is likely to be much less important than providing information to particular communities on the consequences over time of specific mitigation and adaptation measures. After all, belief in the seriousness of climate change is only one factor in the desirability or acceptability of such measures.
This judgement was the original basis for our attempts to develop a computer game-like modeling systems on urban sustainability, to allow anyone to see the consequences and trade-offs associated with different choices about the future of their city and in that way make up their own mind about what future they want.
People do not need to become experts on the scientific, economic, political, etc. dimensions of the sustainability challenges we face. Instead they need to be provided tools that will help them make sense of the bewildering amount of information that already exists.