[Paleopsych] Eureka: Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human behavior

[Werbos, Dr. Paul J.]

At 11:51 AM 8/7/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote:
>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human 
>behavior
>http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/su-ecf072804.php
>4.8.1
>    Contact: Mark Shwartz
>    [2]mshwartz at stanford.edu
>    650-723-9296
>    [3]Stanford University
>
>Ecologist calls for creation of an international panel to assess human 
>behavior
>
>    Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich is urging fellow
>    ecologists to join with social scientists to form an international
>    panel that will discuss and recommend changes in the way human beings
>    treat one another and the environment.


Ehrlich came to NSF a couple of years ago.

He wanted to talk about CO2 -- and, implicitly, the big new glorious center 
at Stanford
that is supposed to address such environmental problems.

I still remember the experience of hearing the talk.

Initial hope as he said: "we can't just treat this as research into how bad 
the problem
is. we need research into what can be done to solve the problem. Thus we 
need to
broaden our approach to make it more decision-oriented and 
crossdisciplinary..."

..

But then:" So we need to work more with political scientists and lawyers..."

The oil dependency problem looks scarier every time I look one step deeper.
And it correlates very closely with the CO2 problem. One thing is clear --
lawyers alone have absolutely no hope of locating the real world here.
Without some understanding of technologies and numbers it is hopeless.
Kyoto by itself, for example, is a high-price Gucci fig leaf that covers 
almost nothing.

Best,

Paul

(not representing anyone...)