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By Root 2195 0

and complain about the problem—such as Tasmania’s Green Party that first protested foxes’ introduction into Tasmania. The public may dismiss warnings because of previous warnings that proved to be false alarms, as illustrated by Aesop’s fable about the eventual fate of the shepherd boy who had repeatedly cried “Wolf!” and whose cries for help were then ignored when a wolf did appear. The public may shirk its responsibility by invoking ISEP (p. 430: “It’s someone else’s problem”).

Partly irrational failures to try to solve perceived problems often arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives of the same individual. Rwandan and Haitian peasants, and billions of other people in the world today, are desperately poor and think only of food for the next day. Poor fishermen in tropical reef areas use dynamite and cyanide to kill coral reef fish (and incidentally to kill the reefs as well) in order to feed their children today, in the full knowledge that they are thereby destroying their future livelihood. Governments, too, regularly operate on a short-term focus: they feel overwhelmed by imminent disasters and pay attention only to problems that are on the verge of explosion. For example, a friend of mine who is closely connected to the current federal administration in Washington, D.C., told me that, when he visited Washington for the first time after the 2000 national elections, he found that our government’s new leaders had what he termed a “90-day focus”: they talked only about those problems with the potential to cause a disaster within the next 90 days. Economists rationally attempt to justify these irrational focuses on short-term profits by “discounting” future profits. That is, they argue that it may be better to harvest a resource today than to leave some of the resource intact for harvesting tomorrow, on the grounds that the profits from today’s harvest could be invested, and that the investment interest thereby accumulated between now and some alternative future harvest time would tend to make today’s harvest more valuable than the future harvest. In that case, the bad consequences are born by the next generation, but that generation cannot vote or complain today.

Some other possible reasons for irrational refusal to try to solve a perceived problem are more speculative. One is a well-recognized phenomenon in short-term decision-making termed “crowd psychology.” Individuals who find themselves members of a large coherent group or crowd, especially one that is emotionally excited, may become swept along to support the group’s decision, even though the same individuals might have rejected the decision if allowed to reflect on it alone at leisure. As the German dramatist Schiller wrote, “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.” Historical examples of crowd psychology in operation include late medieval Europe’s enthusiasm for the Crusades, accelerating overinvestment in fancy tulips in Holland peaking between 1634 and 1636 (“Tulipomania”), periodic outbursts of witch-hunting like the Salem witch trials of 1692, and the crowds whipped up into frenzies by skillful Nazi propagandists in the 1930s.

A calmer small-scale analog of crowd psychology that may emerge in groups of decision-makers has been termed “groupthink” by Irving Janis. Especially when a small cohesive group (such as President Kennedy’s advisors during the Bay of Pigs crisis, or President Johnson’s advisors during the escalation of the Vietnam War) is trying to reach a decision under stressful circumstances, the stress and the need for mutual support and approval may lead to suppression of doubts and critical thinking, sharing of illusions, a premature consensus, and ultimately a disastrous decision. Both crowd psychology and groupthink may operate over periods of not just a few hours but also up to a few years: what remains uncertain is their contribution to disastrous decisions about environmental problems unfolding over the course of decades or centuries.