Sustainability and social learning
What do freeways, office electronics and safer sports equipment have in common? They are all examples of what I have come to think of as a rule about technological change: the second order effects of any new technology are often in the opposite direction of the first order effects, and bigger. The first order effect of highways is to reduce congestion by providing more space for the same number of cars. The second order effect is to induce more traffic, and by so doing, eventually create more congestion than was originally there. Similarly, with office electronics, the initial effect is to reduce paper use, since so much can now be stored electronically. The second order effect is to make it much easier to print things, but also to make possible new and more complex types of data collection, leading to a huge increase in information collection, most of which gets printed. The paperless office is drowning in paper. And safer sports equipment makes any individual action safer, but seems to lead inexorably to greater risk-taking. It seems clear that socio-technological change is inherently unpredictable and gives rise to many unexpected effects. As someone once said, the only law of sociology is the law of unanticipated consequences.
I think the implications of this are not that all our sustainability actions are futile (or that we should try to promote unsustainability in the hope that the second order effects take us where we want to go!). Rather it is that we need to think about emergence, resilience and adaptability in everything we do. We need to develop technologies, and design policies that are designed to be adaptive, and cope with unanticipated effects. We need to pay attention to the behavioural dimensions of our technologies and policies. We need to be more participatory in our design and evaluation of technology and policy. Achieving a sustainability future will be less like deciding on a future state and then making it happen, and more like a process of social learning characterized by experimentation and trial and error.