The ecological crisis and self-delusion: implications for the building sector

Introduction

The starting premise of this paper is that techno-industrial society is inherently unsustainable and that the roots of the matter lie in both human nature and contemporary culture (Rees, Citation2002, Citation2008). Nature and nurture have combined to block a full appreciation of the extent of our ecological crisis so that conventional solutions are illusory and counterproductive. This perceptual blindness is as pervasive in building and construction as in any other sector of the economy. The problem is theoretically solvable, but it is a wicked problem involving complex systems – simply understanding it demands a transdisciplinary approach. Thus, while the primary concern is with buildings and the built environment, insights gleaned from philosophy, history, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science introduce the nature of the problem.

Whatever are we thinking?

Over a half century ago, German philosopher Martin Heidegger lamented that ‘man today is in flight from thinking’ (Heidegger, Citation1955/2003, p. 88). Heidegger was not referring to what he describes as calculative thinking. Calculative thinking is thinking that ‘plans and investigates’; that ‘computes ever newer, ever more promising … more economical possibilities’; that ‘races from one prospect to the next’, never stopping to collect itself (Heidegger, Citation1955/2003, p. 89). There is obviously plenty of that kind of thinking going around.

When Heidegger argues that modern man is ‘in flight from thinking’, he means that we have abandoned meditative thinking. Unlike goal-driven, calculative thinking, meditative thinking is deeply contemplative of ‘the meaning which reigns in everything that is’ (Heidegger, Citation1955/2003, p. 89).

What the science says

One is reminded of Heidegger's lament when contemplating contemporary society's (un)sustainability conundrum, particularly the gap between the scale of the problem and official responses to it. Consider this passage from the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity issued in 1992, the year of the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development:

Of course, as the economy ballooned, the ecosphere continued its slow implosion. In 2005, the authors of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) – the most comprehensive and alarming examination of the state of the ecosphere ever undertaken – were moved to echo the scientists' 1992 declaration:

The ‘severe climate change’ scenario described above was actually CSIS's intermediate scenario, sandwiched between a more moderate ‘expected’ and a much worst ‘catastrophic’ case. However, recent climate change studies indicate that the ‘severe’ or even ‘catastrophic’ scenarios are becoming increasingly likely. For example, paleo-climate evidence shows that:

What has all this to do with Heidegger's thesis? All so-called modern ‘developed’ societies claim to be science- and knowledge-based and, on one level, the supporting evidence is everywhere. World markets are flooded with spectacular science-based technical gadgetry – laptops, cell-phones, iPods, etc. – that is accessible to virtually everyone, at least in the developed world. Modern society is thus a virtual advertisement for the concerted application of instrumental intelligence. Indeed, product-oriented calculative thinking might well stand as the conceptual icon of the late 20th century.

But on another level, modern society clearly ignores its best science. The world is facing a slow but ominous crisis, yet whole domains of relevant knowledge are allowed to ‘lie fallow’ as if of no consequence to human well-being. The world's top ecologists and climatologists tell us that global civilisation is on a collision course with biophysical reality, that we have ‘overshot’ long-term global-carrying capacity. They warn that staying on our growth-based path to global development virtually guarantees eventual catastrophe for billions of people and threatens the possibility of maintaining a complex global civilization. Yet there is scant evidence that national governments, the United Nations or other official international organizations have begun openly to contemplate the implications for humanity if the scientists are right, let alone articulate in public the kind of policy responses the science evokes. Despite decades of rising rhetoric on the risks of global change, the modern world remains mired in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and collective denial. On this level, it is match point to Heidegger – ours is truly a world ‘in flight from thinking’.

Parsing the paradox

How is it that Homo sapiens, self-proclaimed ‘most intelligence species on Earth’, can go about its business as if oblivious to evident and potentially fatal perils? Part of the answer is that active intelligence is probably not the dominant determinant of human behaviour. The brain is a composite organ and the output of the rational mind (cerebral cortex) can be overridden by the more ancient (and obviously historically successful) logic of the limbic system and reptilian brain stem, particularly when short-term self-interest or survival is at stake (Rees, Citation2008). Indeed, recent work in human behavioural psychology suggests that:

The universal myth of perpetual growth

Techno-industrial society is no exception. Indeed, perhaps the most ironically enduring of contemporary myths is that modern society is no longer under the spell of myth. The fact is that virtually the entire world is united in a grand mythic vision of global development and poverty alleviation centred on unlimited economic expansion fuelled by open markets and more liberalized trade (Rees, Citation2002). Indeed, perpetual growth is the principal myth giving ‘shape and direction to (economic) life’ in virtually the entire global village today.Footnote2

This universal growth illusion knows no ecological bounds. Indeed, today's dominant economic paradigm represents the economy as all but detached from nature. As Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist of The World Bank, asserted in 1991:

These still-accelerating trends are, of course, the forcing mechanisms driving global change and inspiring the scientists' warnings.Footnote3 Unfortunately, warnings of future catastrophe hold no sway in the human mind against the immediate gratification available in profusion from modern consumer society. The explosive fossil-fuelled growth of the human enterprise may be gradually destroying the planet, but today's market economy is unequalled in its capacity to satisfy both the basic needs and the trivial wants of billions of people ‘right now!’ In some high-income countries, people have become addicted to consumption and ‘shopping at the mall’ is the preferred pastime of millions.

This addiction may be difficult to treat because of a fateful coincidence of nature and nurture. Evolution, including human evolution, tends to favour those individuals who are most adept at satisfying immediate selfish needs. The difficulty arises because prevailing cultural mythology effectively reinforces this innate tendency to live in the moment and discount the future. Market capitalism effectively sanctifies greed and accumulation; corporate advertising trains billions of people to get what they want when they want it (after creating their wants in the first place); and we have come to measure our self-worth in terms of the price and size of our cars, houses, and all manner of other possessions.

Any society so firmly wedded to ever-rising material expectations will naturally resist the argument that there are limits to growth; that we should actually plan an economic contraction is simply beyond contemplation. All of which is to say that logical argument or other products of ‘meditative thinking’ may well be deflected or ignored in the face of deeply entrenched beliefs and favoured stories (including political ideologies, disciplinary paradigms, religious doctrines, etc.). Listen to behavioural psychologist, Gustave Le Bon, writing more than a century ago:

Mass-delusion in consumer culture

If we have not adequately thought through our sustainability conundrum, we should not be surprised that remedies to date are ill-conceived and largely ineffective. I argue that most mainstream approaches to sustainability today – hybrid cars, green buildings, smart growth, the new urbanism, green consumerism – do not, in fact, address the fundamental problem. Instead, they attempt to reproduce the status quo by other means. Consistent with our prevailing cultural illusion, today's global society essentially equates sustainability with maintaining growth through technological innovation and greater material and economic efficiency.

Green-washing the private car

Consider the auto industry (where gasoline has long proved to be a powerful hallucinatory drug): recent Ford Motor Company ads have co-opted ‘Kermit the [green] Frog’ to flog the company's wares. ‘I guess it's easy being green!’ proclaims Kermit, showing off his new ride, the 3750 lb (1700 kg) Escape Hybrid. At a paltry 36 city miles per (US) gallon, the Escape Hybrid is extolled as ‘the most efficient SUV on Earth. How green is that?’ People who drive such four-wheeled delusions are thus persuaded that they are contributing to saving the planet.

It gets worse. In 2008, Green Car Journal selected the full-sized Chevy Tahoe Hybrid the ‘Green Car of the Year’. This is a nine passenger, eight cylinder, 332 horsepower, 5800 lb (2630 kg) behemoth that General Motors claims gets the same city mileage as the standard Toyota Camry (does that make the standard Camry a ‘green’ car too?). Natural Resources Canada's Energuide fuel consumption ratings (in litres/100 km) for the Tahoe Hybrid are 9.8/9.2 city/highway with two-wheel drive and 10.5/9.8 (four-wheel drive) (Wilson, Citation2008). The standard version uses 15.0/9.8 city/highway (two-wheel drive) and 15.1/10.0 city/highway (four-wheel drive), so the hybrid version is about one-third more fuel efficient (hence, its ‘green’ label). Even so, US government fuel consumption ratings places the Tahoe Hybrid ‘dead last among hybrids at 20 miles per gallon in both city and highway travel’ (Job, Citation2008). If the several hundred million vehicles in the world's auto fleet were replaced with copies of this 2.5 tonne gas-guzzling personal truck, would we really be closer to sustainability?

Whither the built environment?

The building sector spins similar illusions, at least in North America. Almost any weekend edition of the local newspaper contains advertisements of new ‘sustainable’ subdivisions featuring the latest in green construction technologies. A recent article in a Vancouver-based alternative lifestyle magazine asks us to envision:

Admittedly, this seems like an enormous improvement – but there is a hitch. New single family houses (still by far the favoured dwelling type in North America) generally fall in the 2000–4000 square foot range (186–372 m²). Indeed, between 1950 and 2004, the size of the average new house in the US expanded by 135%, from about 1000 square feet (93 m²) to 2349 square feet (218 m²), and one in five new houses now comes in at more than 5000 square feet (465 m²). (The US National Association of Home Builders' ‘showcase home’ for 2005 was 5950 square feet (553 m²) or 15% bigger than the 2004 model.) Forty-three per cent of new construction features 9-foot ceilings compared with 15% in the 1980s. Everything about these dwellings has been ‘super-sized’, from their two-, three- or even four-car garages to their high-end appliances (Wilson and Boehland, Citation2005; Mother Jones, Citation2005) – and keep in mind that most new construction does not pretend to be particularly ‘green’.

Meanwhile, between 1950 and 2003, average US household size fell from 3.7 to 2.6 people. This means that floor space per capita increased by over 230% from 270 square feet (25 m²) to 903 square feet (84 m²). And because of taller ceilings and more features, generally expected economies of scale per unit area are not necessarily realized (Wilson and Boehland, Citation2005). In short, material and energy use per dwelling and per capita have increased substantially, greatly overwhelming the efficiency gains associated with the still relatively few green building and sustainable housing projects. Through the entire period associated with heightened environmental awareness, North American's per capita housing eco-footprints (like their automotive counterparts) have expanded to unprecedented levels of unsustainability.

The commercial building sector is following a parallel path – more correctly, it is setting the pace. To its credit, the industry has been quite successful in promoting new, ostensibly green, building protocols. For example, The US Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) programme was launched in 1999, subsequently adopted by the Canadian Green Building Council, and has been implemented by numerous government agencies, in both the US and Canada (see Box 1). As of December 2008, LEED-oriented initiatives:

Is there virtue in becoming more efficiently unsustainable?

It might seem churlish not to be impressed by the potential energy and materials savings represented by improved building technology. Given the ample latitude for efficiency gains in the building sector, major gains here seem like an obvious victory for sustainability. But what is ‘obvious’ is not always truth. Consistent with Heidegger's lament, the LEED programme has been accepted uncritically (i.e., almost thoughtlessly) as a sustainability solution with little consideration to whether it is actually addressing the fundamental problem of global overshoot and rarely any adjustment to vastly differing local conditions and requirements.

The general problem is that while acknowledging the built environment's share of modern society's profligate over-consumption, LEED (and its counterparts elsewhere) remain wedded to the techno-industrial paradigm. LEED is reform at the margin that would deliver a more energy- and material-efficient version of the otherwise status quo.

The specific problem is that society cannot become sustainable merely by becoming more efficient at the margins. As W. Stanley Jevons recognized in 1865, all else being equal:

All of this comes to a head when the effect of efficiency ‘in context’ is considered. As established at the outset, this is a world in overshoot – consumption and waste generation now exceed the many of the productive and assimilative capacities of global life-support systems by as much as 30% (Rees, Citation2006; WWF, Citation2008).Footnote6 (The empirical evidence includes everything from the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases and climate change, through acidifying oceans, fisheries collapses and ozone depletion to widespread soil erosion and landscape degradation.) If the basic science is correct, prevailing approaches are simply making us more efficiently unsustainable.

The Plimsoll line found on most merchant vessels provides a useful analogy for understanding the fallacy of efficiency in a world at carrying capacity. The Plimsoll line is a standardized marking (or line) painted on the hull of cargo ships showing the depth to which the vessel may be safely (and legally) loaded. Consider a vessel that has been fully loaded and is floating at its Plimsoll line. If one continues to load that ship with inefficient goods – standard appliances, autos, housing, etc. – it will sink in its first encounter with rough waters. Now consider the same vessel, only this time overloaded with an equivalent mass of highly efficient goods. From the ship's perspective, nothing has changed – it will sink just as quickly and just as deep.

The point is that when a ship – or planet – is loaded beyond carrying capacity, there is nothing for it but to jettison cargo. We have to lighten the load. Climate change science says that, for sustainability, the developed world needs to achieve absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of 80% from the levels of the 1990s by mid-century (perhaps more according to the most recent studies). Similarly, eco-footprint analysis suggests that North Americans should be taking steps to reduce their energy and material consumption by 80% to create the ‘ecological space’ required for needed growth in the developing world.Footnote7 When absolute reductions are required, more efficient growth is anathema, the more so if advertising campaigns have deluded politicians and the public into thinking that efficiency-based measures constitute real progress.

Rethinking sustainability ‘in context’

Acknowledging our planetary ‘Plimsoll line’ forces us to rethink the meaning and implications of ‘sustainability’. To begin, it is essential to define an ecologically sustainable system as one that could continue to operate in its present state or configuration indefinitely without degrading the biophysical basis of its own existence.Footnote8 This seems fairly straightforward, but is not as simple as it seems. For example, techno-industrial society is an increasingly integrated global society, a fact that has two important implications that are generally ignored in local (i.e., sub-global) sustainability discussions, including those about green buildings:

• No individual country, region, city or development project can achieve sustainability on its own if any system of which it is a part, or to which it is critically connected, is unsustainable. Melbourne, for example, is dependent on a global system and, if that larger system is unsustainable, then Melbourne, even if it has an exemplary track record in itself, is unsustainable. The city is at risk as a result of climate change, depleted resources, geopolitical instability, or other factors emanating from and that may overwhelm the larger system upon which it depends. In short, terms like ‘sustainable city’ or ‘sustainable building’ are meaningless taken out of context.

• It follows that the best any sub-global system can attain in isolation is a state of quasi-sustainability. This describes a level of economic activity and energy/material consumption per capita which, if extended to the entire system, would result in global sustainability.

But circumstances have changed with the increasing scale of the human enterprise. The world is now in overshoot – the planet's critical resources and ecosystems are being permanently degraded and dissipated even at current levels of economic activity, despite the fact that much of the human population remains in poverty. In these circumstances, grimy factory cities such as those now found in ‘modernizing’ China are not sustainable. Indeed, polluting industrial cities anywhere add to the already excess burden on critical global life support functions.

Where does that leave relatively pristine Melbourne and Vancouver? Many people see such cities as icons of sustainability, but in the modern global context, this is simply wrong-headed – at best, it confuses ‘sustainability’ with ‘liveability’. There is no question that Vancouver and Melbourne are highly liveable cities. However, they are also arguably among the least sustainable cities on Earth. The inhabitants of modern high-income cities enjoy their high-quality urban environments and material lifestyles at the cost of unconsciously imposing an enormous material burden on the rest of the Earth. Consumer cities are massive sinks for the world's resources and the ultimate sources of most of its industrial wastes. This simple reality is not always obvious to their inhabitants (or even professional analysts) – resources come into the city through the ‘back door’, often at night, embodied in the thousands of tonnes of manufactured goods and foodstuffs that seem to appear miraculously each day on thousands of store and grocer's shelves. The wastes generated in the production of all these goods have been left far behind at many distant points of origin. (In fact, much of the pollution generated by modern China's factory cities is actually attributable to consumption by people living in wealthy cities half a world away.) Even the detritus generated in high-income cities – household wastes, excess packaging, worn-out or obsolete consumer goods, the CO₂ emissions of thousands of private vehicles, etc. – is dumped into the global commons (the oceans and atmosphere) or quietly shipped hundreds of kilometres away for incineration or final disposal in overtaxed landfill sites, sometimes in other countries.

What does this mean for developed societies? High-income consumer cities consume many more resources and generate much more waste per capita than do the developing world's polluted industrial cities and have a correspondingly larger negative impact on the world's ecosystems. To reiterate, Vancouver and Melbourne are grotesquely unsustainable – they currently exceed even the quasi-sustainability standard by a factor of four or five.Footnote9 Making their citizens more efficient consumers merely compounds the problem.

The China syndrome

Any discussion of global sustainability must factor in China and, again, global context is crucial. The modern world may already be in overshoot, but it is still growing. An additional 2–3 billion people will join the human family by mid-century and the global economy is expected to expand by as much as three-fold.

Most of the anticipated population, economic, and urban growth will take place in developing countries and China, with its increasing wealth and massive urbanizing population, will claim more than a proportional share. China now accounts for about half of the world's new building volume and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future (Fernandez, Citation2007). Housing represents 80% of the 1.5–2.0 billion m² of new building stock added each year in China. (By 2015, half of all housing stock in China will have been built since 2000.) Unfortunately, housing is the most material-intensive of the major building types, using nine times as much material volume per unit area as industrial construction and, in China, fossil-energy-intensive concrete is the preferred building material. To make matters worse, operational energy consumption (per m²) in residential buildings in China is twice that of residential buildings in developed countries with similar climates (data from Fernandez, Citation2007). Is there any greater opportunity for technology transfer and developmental leap-frogging?

Actually, there probably is. India and the rest of the developing world are bent on catching up with China. Counting new arrivals, the world's cities (and their supportive ecosystems) must accommodate several billion more people in the next half century.

Clearly these realities pose an enormous challenge to sustainability on a planet already living beyond its ecological means. The building sector would be irresponsible not to organize globally with programmes to minimize the material impact of this unprecedented 21st-century development surge.

Conclusions: What lies ahead?

Serious contemplation of present trends raises many uncomfortable questions the world would rather avoid: Could the present human population enjoy a reasonably satisfactory material standard while living within the means of nature? (What would an equitable sustainable life style for 6.7 billion people ‘look’ like?) Can the Earth accommodate nine billion people sustainably? Under what material conditions? What changes to prevailing beliefs, values, and assumptions are necessary to achieve a society that is 80% less energy and material intensive even as population and material demand continue to grow? Acknowledging that (un)sustainability is a collective problem, will global society be willing to share both the pain and the gain of collective action to resolve it? If food, energy or other vital resources become truly scarcer, can we avoid hoarding, civil unrest and geopolitical chaos?

These questions make clear that sustainability on a crowded resource-constrained planet requires that the denizens of high-income consumer societies begin an unconstrained reassessment of their prevailing cultural beliefs, values and assumptions – this is what ‘paradigm-shifting’ is all about. We have no choice but to reinvent ourselves. Everyone, from ordinary citizens to the highest levels of government, should be involved in what should become a full-scale bottom-up, top-down international debate. What we need to begin the process is bold political leadership. Imagine the impact if just one major national leader stepped forward to acknowledge the gravity of the situation and challenge the world to engage in a global ‘dialogue for survival’.

Were it to accept and take this challenge seriously, today's generation would become the first to decide, self-consciously and purposefully, to rewrite its cultural narrative. Survival demands that we create a new, more sophisticated cultural myth incorporating core beliefs and values that are compatible both with biophysical reality and socio-political necessity on a finite planet. Growth must give way to the ‘steady-state’; competition yield to cooperation; selfishness bow to generosity in sharing limited resource on this single Earth. The alternative is geopolitical chaos and war from which no winners will emerge.

Major life style changes are inevitable. The future demands a less material-intensive culture in already developed countries. The value emphasis would shift from quantity of possessions to quality of life. People will come to judge their self-worth and social status less in terms of things accumulated (manufactured capital) and more in terms of relationships enjoyed (social capital). This transition away from stuff toward family and community should actually be painless. We have long known that, in wealthy countries, there is no longer a significant relationship between either objective indicators of population health or subjective well-being, and rising incomes.Footnote11 What intelligent, self-aware species would continue to defend a growth-based economy and pursue a materially excessive lifestyle, knowing that the latter were destroying the social and biophysical basis of its own existence while producing negligible positive return?

Getting serious about sustainability clearly also has major implications for urban form, land-use zoning, urban transportation, and building technology. Given emerging ecological constraints what would a truly sustainable city ‘look’ like? The overall goal of future planning should be to reduce the ecological footprint of the built environment. The sprawling land-grabbing, auto-dominated, fuel-inefficient cities of North America and Australia (and increasingly Europe and some developing countries like China) have become entropic dinosaurs. National/provincial/state governments need to create the land-use legislation and zoning by-laws urban planners need to consolidate and densify existing built-up areas to capitalize on the economies of scale and agglomeration economies available to compact communities. There should be no new greenfield suburban development in many countries. Think ‘compact, car-free’, clean-air, ecologically healthy cities with improved public transit/cycling/walking access to a wider range of nearby urban amenities. People will actually be better off for shedding their material over-burden.

Policy-makers, planners and designers should also begin to reconceive cities as whole systems, as urban eco-regions. Should not the built-up urban core – the city proper – be surrounded by adequate rural hinterland to generate much of its own food, fibre and water and recycle its own wastes? Where possible, this whole integrated system should be politically formalized as a new form of bioregional city-state that would function as a semi-independent human urban ecosystem, thus elevating biomimicry to the geographic scale.

As for buildings themselves, the first step should be to acknowledge that greater material efficiency is not enough – new buildings, no matter how green, still add to the total human load. We must also recognize that while all building and renovation is local, each local project must reflect the harsh global ecological, economic and ethical context in which it is embedded. Consistent with these principles, the building and construction sector should do the following:

• Promote ‘new and green’ buildings mainly in the developing world. Here population growth and urbanization are inevitable and ‘new build’ is therefore necessary. Governments and international agencies should therefore be working with both trans-national and local building sectors to ensure that new construction in the developing world employs the most efficient building methods and technologies possible in the circumstances. (Note that this may often include ancient local technologies.)

• Emphasize that renovation and replacement is the most effective adaptation for the relatively slow-growing countries of the developed world. New construction in these countries currently affects only about 2% of total building stock annually and incrementally increases total consumption. The existing building stock accounts for most building-related energy consumption and will be around for decades. Real gains – absolute reductions in total energy/material use – can thus most readily be made through renovation/retrofit programmes (or the replacement of old buildings when justified by comparative life cycle analysis).

• Recognize that in order even to remain ‘in place’ on the sustainability treadmill, energy and material conservation in the First World must be reduced sufficiently to compensate for increased consumption in the Third World:

• Work toward ensuring that zero-carbon construction becomes the norm everywhere.

• Award ‘Green’ certification based on obligatory post-occupancy assessment, not mere intent.

• Acknowledge that LEED and like ‘green building’ protocols may have been a necessary first step but fall far short of both the necessary and the possible. Of contemporary approaches to both new construction and major renovation, the German PassivHaus standard brings us closest to the necessary mark in stringent performance standards.Footnote12

• Recognize that the private sector and market forces alone are unlikely to achieve the necessary social or even sectoral transformation. (Un)sustainability is a collective problem that requires top-down collective policy incentives as well as bottom-up innovation and initiatives.

• Use the private sector's obvious communication skills and advertising acumen to help construct the needed social narrative for sustainability. People will not readily accept sacrifice, but will respond willingly to positive scenarios of sustainable urban futures. It should not be difficult to show the potential public health, ecological, economic, social and aesthetic advantages of sustainable, low-consumption urban living compared with the slow disaster currently unfolding.

• Work with Faculties/Schools of Urban Design/Architecture to begin the process of curriculum reform necessary to reflect the values and requirements of a modern sustainable culture. What new disciplinary narrative can be articulated to inspire design students and engage their creativity in creating a new vision for the built environment that is both human scale and Earth friendly?

A final reflection: carpe diem

In recent years, the building sector has been among those industries leading the charge against environmental decay. However, it is time to raise both aspirations and impacts. Reform at the margin must give way to a complete rethinking of the industry's role at the global scale. Acceptance of the above guidelines would revolutionize the building sector and reorient it geographically, yet even this framework is a barely adequate response to probable ecological change. The question is: does the industry have the intellectual courage and practically momentum to remain in the front lines of the sustainability campaign? Were the building sector to acknowledge and act consistently with ecological reality, the world would necessarily take notice. Indeed, no industrial sector has greater material leverage and none is better positioned to lead the quest for global sustainability. If just this one major economic sector were publicly to declare itself, dare to seize the advantage and opportunity, the rest would surely follow.

The alternative is somewhat less inspiring but, based on the historical evidence, book-makers would probably give it better odds. Human societies are behaviourally conservative; people are predisposed to avoid uncomfortable realities that threaten the established order of things. Unless at least a few strong leaders and organizations are able consciously to override this natural predisposition, cognitive intransigence may well turn out to be the ultimate human tragedy in the face of accelerating global change. As John Ralston Saul observed more than a decade ago: