2nd article that shaped my career – “Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lessons from History” Ludwig, Hilborn & Carl, 1993

Paul Kinas, professor os Statistics at FURG, introduced this article to me during his grad school course on Bayesian statistics. It is impressive how much I learned from Kinas and how many times I mention him throughout my scientific life.

There are currently many plans for sustainable use or sustainable development that are founded upon scientific information and consensus. Such ideas reflect ignorance of the history of resource exploitation and misunderstanding of the possibility of achieving scientific consensus concerning resources and the environment.

Ludwig, Hilborn & Carl, 1993

I’d rather deal with an unpleasant truth than with a thousand nice illusions.

This opening statement of Ludwing et al (1993) is in agreement with everything that I’ve ever heard, read, observed or experienced in the filed of environmental sciences. And yet, we rather believe that the consensus is somewhere and it is just a matter of time and good will to reach it, as if agreement and consensus were always possible. Almost 30 years after its publication, the several failed attempts to ratify or implement the kyoto Protocol or Paris Agreement, kind of proves it right.

Although there is considerable variation in detail, there is remarkable consistency in the history of resource exploitation: resources are inevitably overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction.

Ludwig, Hilborn & Carl, 1993

Why do we rather believe that we are not going to repeat history? The authors suggests that this consistency is due to the following common features:

(i) Wealth or the prospect of wealth generates political and social power that is used to promote unlimited exploitation of resources. (ii) Scientific understanding and consensus is hampered by the lack of controls and replicates, so that each new problem involves learning about a new system. (iii) The complexity of the underlying biological and physical systems precludes a reductionist approach to management. Optimum levels of exploitation must be determined by trial and error. (iv) Large levels of natural variability mask the effects of overexploitation. Initial overexploitation is not detectable until it is severe and often irreversible.

Ludwig, Hilborn & Carl, 1993

I challenge any of my colleagues to present one relevant example of natural resources exploitation and conservation that contradicts these features. They go on:

In such circumstances, assigning causes to past events is problematical, future events cannot be predicted, and even well-meaning attempts to exploit responsibly may lead to disastrous consequences. Legislation concerning the environment often requires environmental or economic impact assessment before action is taken. Such impact assessment is supposed to be based upon scientific consensus. For the reasons given above, such consensus is seldom achieved, even after collapse of the resource.

Ludwig, Hilborn & Carl, 1993

Then, they propose 5 principles to address properly management:

1. Include human motivation and responses as part of the system to be studied and managed.
2. Act before scientific consensus is achieved.
3. Rely on scientists to recognize problems, but not to remedy them.
4. Distrust claims of sustainability.
5. Confront uncertainty.

Maybe the most important thing that I learned with this article was that when the obvious is not convenient, powerful forces will act against it. Once I heard a senior Brazilian physicist (Enio Candotti) who worked at the Brazilian congress for a long time saying in a talk:

“Scientists and politicians will never understood each other, because they have very different views of what is truth. The truth for scientists is based on evidence. If you can see, measure the length, wide, and weight of a table, then the table exists. But for politicians, truth is based in convenience. If it is interesting for then that something do not exist, then it does not. They can sit around the same table, discuss, and after consensus is achieved, they declare that the table does not exist. Even if it is there.”

Enio Candotti

The five principles are so powerful, that they could be applied in different areas. I never thought, for example, about the importance of including ‘human motivation’ when you discuss with students about their projects, about a course they want to follow, or a mistake that they made in the lab.

And of course, I can fully understand the authors when they say that the specific knowledge required to understand and detect a problem, probably impairs one (the scientist) to have the global understanding required to solve the problem.

This is ruining our ability to confront uncertainty, our understanding of the importance to learn statistics properly so we can deal with uncertainty instead torturing our data to fit into the only (normal) distribution that most people can deal with.