Flashes In The Noosphere

In this section, it will be shown how the image arises out of a more fundamental picture of the structure of 'everything human'. This serves to indicate that the conceptual framework is not some incidental, design but the environmental science variant of a more general phenomenon. It also lays the basis for solving the last problem mentioned in the preceding section. More practically, it helps to give the Problem-in-Context framework its proper shape, indicating what should be 'up' or 'down', and what basic types of problem contexts there are. This requires a brief sojourn at an abstract level. As the title of the section suggests, I will go there for the simple Problem-in-Context purpose only.

Plessner, a philosopher drawing from a background in biology and the German hermeneutic-science tradition (e.g. De Groot, 1992b, Chapter 7), has formulated a typology of out of which I take a few elements here, through the interpretation of Kockelkoren (1992).

At the first level, plant-like life organizes itself by the realisation of a border between its own and processes and the outside world. From the point of view of the plant, the only 'outside' it may relate to is that what presents itself at the border. Insofar it may be said that a plant lives in a world, this world is

an medium.

Animal-like life is called by Plessner a 'closed' form of organisation, literary because the open border has become folded inside the body, realizing a real border between the body and the outside world, and also more metaphorically because the animal body encloses a central nervous system in which the body itself is represented, monitoring its own states. Through its sensory and motor faculties, the body becomes the mediator between this centre and the outside world, an outside world that has now arisen as a real environment, differentiated from the point of view of the animal into things associated with food, pleasure and risks. For practical purposes, we may distinguish between the social (own species) and the physical environment. The animal, then, lives in a twofold world, the social and the physical. From its own point of view, the animal itself is not part of the world; this is because its centre does not see

Human life adds consciousness to the animal picture, i.e., the capacity of the centre to see itself, making the human being, as Plessner puts it, again 'excen- From this reflective point of view the Self becomes seen as part of the world. Human world is thus a physical environment (consisting of natural things, artifacts and mixed phenomena), a social environment, and an inner

Note that we are dealing with abstract ideal-types here. Neither differences within, nor overlaps between the real-world animal and plant kingdoms are discussed, nor the more fundamental question of possible overlaps (semi-consciousness or other-consciousness) between humans and animal life forms.

world in which the individual sees itself, the two environments and the interactions between them.

Environmental science being a science of collective problems and collective action, we may lift this picture to the collective level. Doing so, the physical and social environments only become larger; collectives relate to more physical and social things than individuals normally do. Conceptually, they remain the same. The individ- ual inner worlds become what roughly may be called culture, the world in which humans see, discuss and decide upon themselves, their environment, their actions in there and, in endless regression, their ways of seeing, discussing and deciding. Culture, like individual consciousness, is recursive 1979). When analyz- ing an environmental problem situation, we make a conscious representation of the problem, environment, values, options and actors; the actors, in their turn, hold a conscious representation their problem, environment, option etcetera, plus that they see themselves as having a problem, and so on. The conceptual framework of prob- will thus be curved inside itself, holding a 'vanishing point' of endless regress. Abstract as this may seem, it will beautifully solve several practical ques- This simple picture suffices for the purposes of the present chapter. I am therefore not going to discuss deeper questions that may be relevant e.g., whether or not 'mind' may in fact be everywhere (Bateson), or whether physical things respond to the attitude of the beholder Let me only say that I hope the picture is neither idealistic, i.e., giving 'real', status to mind only, nor materialistic, doing the same for the physical and social worlds.

Before introducing Figure 3A, then, it only remains to find some technically appropriate terms. The term system ('social system' etc.) has been avoided, being too biased toward to the idea that things are, or should be, structured wholes. Likewise arguments of non-neutrality hold against 'culture', 'structure', 'meaning' and many more. Given also an preference for the same word type, I have followed Dutch landscape ecology and adopted 'physical sphere', 'social sphere' and 'noo- sphere', in which the latter is derived from the Greek (= mind) and may defined, largely following Schroevers (1982), as all human cognition, reflection and design, individually as well as

According to (1992), Plessner thought it also solved metaphysical questions. There can be nothing beyond consciousness (that is, beyond man), he thought, because consciousness is conscious of and so on, and you can never go higher. This is a mistake. There is nothing high or metaphysical in recursiveness. If you can see how you can see yourself seeing

you still see yourself, not or God.

The same holds for the more superficial questions of exactitude of definitions or the overlap between the three worlds a painting physical, cultural, or both?)

Note that I take the term literary; is the sphere of the world of the mind. Schroevers includes also the physical impacts of i.e., the environment. This introduces a conceptual that is disruptive and not necessary here. In Figure 3A, the physical mind-products are part of the physical together with the natural and mixed phenomena (such

Figure 3A

flashes, research and action. The is the reflective sphere of the mind. The flashes are discrepancies between perceived facts and perceived values, lying in the sphere. In the explanatory i zing) work spreading outward from a problem flash, the three spheres act as normative, social and physical contexts, into which the interpretations spread. Design is a noospheric action following analysis and explanation; implementation physically connects the noosphere with the social and physical spheres.

as the Thus I more or less take the term away from its originator, who, according to E.P. (1971), had defined noosphere as the physical world dominated by human mind "gradually replacing the Noosphere in my definition, parts of which are science and decision-making, sees, measures and discusses the physical world (as well as the social) but cannot replace it.

The top picture in Figure 3A is now arrived at: three drawn without their interactions and without specifying possible overlaps, being of no interest here. The noosphere carries inside itself the representation of the whole picture, which is repeat- ed inside that picture, and so on.

In spite of its simplicity, the picture is in one respect basically different from most other images of people, environment and their interactions. In (1978), for instance, we find the models of of Duncan and himself, reading, respectively, as:

production/protection/compromise/urban-industrial

population/organisation/environment/technology ('POET') production/market/consumption/nature

in which every element is connected to every other. Other models of the same type are the well-known ones of the Club of Rome (Meadows, 1972) and the Dutch 'ecolo- gical model' of Van der and Dauvellier (1978), that read, respectively, as:

activities/needs/properties of the environment/functions of the environment. These models are all typically ecological, in the sense that they could have been formulated in basically the same way for animals. Ants also have individuals, com- munity, techology, communication, environment, production etcetera. The 'materi- alistic reduction' of the human world may be a good scientific strategy from time to time, but fails as a general representation because it lacks what makes humans human: reflectiveness (consciousness at the individual level; culture at the collective level; noosphere).

One of the difficulties this type of models run into is that reflectiveness, not being put on the paper, remains in the heads of the model authors and the model readers, giving rise to an unsurmountable barrier between the 'inner world' of the authors and readers and the 'outside world' represented in the model. Values, having their sources in the inner world, thus cannot be represented in the With that, it is imposs- ible for the models to hold in themselves a representation of environmental problems, as we will see shortly.

The three spheres are conceptually equivalent to the four 'aspects' distinguished by what may be called the in human ecology theory 1975; 1986; Caravello and Secco, 1989): physical, biological, social and spiritual. In Figure 3A, the physical and biological 'aspects' are lumped under 'physical hence denoting everything material (animate and inanimate). This, by the is the only thing the framework has in common with the tetrahedronians; it is sad to see how they either keep on floating in high-holistic mists or fall down from it to the level of trivial Caravello and Secco do so by stepping on the well-known scale of nominal/ordinal/cardinal/rational measurement and sliding down at amazing speed, thinking that rational measurement is always superior. This is only so within the paradigm of

quantification, within which it cannot be seen that it is often much more relevant and difficult to 'be nominal', i.e., to establish qualitatively what or who something is, instead of measuring its size or distribution.

All sciences are cultural The physical sciences look at the physical sphere, the social sciences look at the social sphere and some other empirical sciences looks at interactions. Some sciences, especially the humanities, are recursive: noosphere studying itself. With this in mind, Figure 3A may now be developed one step further by posing the question where environmental problems are represented in the model and what happens, after they have arisen. The three-steps schedule of Plessner will again be used to climb up to noospheric heights.

Plant-like life forms may be said to 'have' environmental problems in the sense that there may be conditions of shortage or excess at the plant The plant may sometimes even 'solve' these problems, e.g., by growing deeper roots. This is not so from the viewpoint of the plant, however, because it has no point of view. It can have no problems, even no bodily probems, because, as Plesner puts it, it only is body, it does not have one, as the animal type of life does.

In animal-like life forms, the central nervous system in which the body is repre- sented may record the body as being in need of something. Typically, the animal then reacts by searching for food, comfort or whatever is recorded needing. If the social of physical environment does not procure what is needed, the animal may be said to experience, also from its own point of view, an environmental problem. Since the animal is not conscious of itself and only aware of an environment, it can see the problem only as 'lying the environment, not in the way it deals with it. The blame, so to speak, is put on the environment. The animal-type of environmental problems, in brief, arise out of immediate needs in the body-cum-body-centre and are seen as lying in the environment. It may be noted at this point that the 'materialistic systems' adherents, taking up basically only the 'animal-level' of humans in their conceptual models often environmental problems to those connected with 'animal-level' needs and the physical exchanges of resource extraction (from the environment) and waste (to the

Human life can see and reflect upon itself, its environment and its way-of-seeing. Environmental problems may in extreme cases be experienced, 'animal-like', as wrong-doings of the environment, but they typically arise at the noospheric level: humans see something wrong in the way humans relate to the environment - taking too much out of it, putting too much into it or changing it in other ways detrimental to the functioning of the Environmental prob- lems, therefore (as all societal problems), are noospheric entities, opposed pairs of facts and values, discrepancies between the perceptions of how the world is or is becoming and of how the world should be. The noospheric discrepancies are drawn in Figure as the flashy tension signs.

Once arisen, they also function in the social sphere, of course, then in their turn studied by the (noospheric) sociology of science, which in its turn starts to function as a social entity...

This is not necessarily inherent in the systems approach; see, for instance, E.P. (1971, 3rd pp. 510-516) about quality of life, culture and values.

It may be noted again that if we would be working with a model containing social sphere elements and physical sphere elements only, we would not be able to locate an environmental problem on the paper. We would be able to say: "An environmental problem is that something is wrong with one of these but the problem ('wrongness') itself would remain in our heads or in our words only. That is because 'animal-level', models do not take the human stance, the stance of being able to put on the paper the observer's own values. It may seem paradoxical, but recognizing the intrinsically subjective, inner-world character of environmental problems is the only way to locate, externalize, discuss and thus objectify them.

At this point, it serves to define the concept of the normative observer. The normative observer is the agent whose value perspective leads the formulation of what the environmental problem is, and therewith the problem analysis, the

of the problematic actions and the design of possible solutions. Although we may informally speak of the normative observer as "we", or "the researchers", we should note that the normative observer may in fact be anyone. If you are pondering whether the pesticides you use in your garden may cause an environmental problem, you are the normative observer (as well as the actor you observe, In applied research, the researchers usually 'adopt' the value perspective (policy objectives etc.) of the agency they work for, and identify other actors, but often also the same govern- ment agency, contributing to its own problems. Section 3.4 gives a few more examples.

In our heads (formally, the head of the normative observer), the world as it is perceived to be (facts) and the world as it is perceived it should be (values) stand side by side, their discrepancies constituting the environmental problem. If we externalize this structure by putting it on the paper, facts and values continue to stand side by side. As will be further explained in Section 3.6, facts and values have therefore no different status'; they are both subjectivity at a single level. In Figure 3A and in all other pictures to come, facts, values and their discrepancies ('flashes') can be drawn in the same figure without difficulty. This cannot be achieved in Cartesian, models, that picture the world outside (physical and social spheres) as something objective while the inner world remains fully subjective,

Douglas and (1982), (1988) and many other social scientists express the character of environmental problems by saying they are "con- Douglas and Wildavsky stress the role of science and open societal discussion (cf. 1981), in objectifying the perception of environmental problems. This repeats what has in Chapter 1 already been defined as the demarcation between daily life knowledge and science (any science: empirical, normative or hermeneutic). Whether speaking about physical things, social phenomena or ourselves, science is there to bring perceptions of facts, values and their discrepancies closer to what these facts and values really are, in other words, to objectify them, bringing them closer to the objects themselves. In order to visualize the role of science in Figure 3A, we may restate it in the following way. Being reflective, the noosphere contains a symbolic

representation of the full three spheres. As far as this representation is common sense or implicit, fully subjective knowledge, we simply do not draw it in Figure 3A. When science or other open, objectifying discussion comes into play, we can say that this 'objectifying movement' spreads 'over' the facts and values of the three spheres, covering more and more parts of the spheres under a 'blanket of

without scientific knowledge ever becoming itself

It is now easy to follow what happens in Figure 3A. Going from the top downward, we see how an environmental problem arises as a purely subjective 'tension flash' between facts and values in the Sometimes, such a flash does not ignite a larger one on the collective-subjective level; it then dies out, scientifically justified or not, maybe to flare up later.

When the flash does not go away spontaneously, an objectifying process is set in motion: the problem becomes discussed and researched. Since there are three spheres for the objectifying blanket to spread into, it usually does so, although in countless variations of sequence and degree; the rest of this chapter goes deeper into many The essential thing to note here is that the process of objectifying is the same as putting the original, subjective problem flash into scientific contexts, that coincide with the three spheres. Emphasizing this, the term 'sphere' has been replaced by 'context' in the second picture of Figure 3A. Moreover, the term 'no-os' has been reduced to 'normative', making it more concrete. Values are indeed the most import- ant noospheric context elements, playing a pivotal role in all environmental science research, but it should be kept in mind that cognitive paradigms, e.g. the holistic versus the way of perceiving the world, are in fact also co-determining problem perceptions (De Groot, 1984b).

The second picture of Figure 3A shows the first two stages of the contextu- process, problem analysis and problem explanation. The difference is that problem analysing stays relatively close to the original flash and problem explanation moves further into backgrounds. Typical analytical questions concern, inter alia,

physical: sources, environmental transfers and impacts

social: problem causers (actors), problem victims and degrees to which they are affected

normative: ethical and economic assessments of how serious the problem actually is.

Typical explanatory questions, further probing into the three contexts, are: physical: the causes why nature cannot process or produce more than it does