If there is any hope for the world then it must rest with young people. They grow into this world with a new understanding and new ideas of what matters.

If we give them the abilities to explore and to learn about the world, they will understand it better than we do. The danger is we teach them what we think we know, and leave it at that.

Creatures live in harmony with nature, they are changed by it rather than they cause it to change. We have lost contact with nature.

Children change as they grow up. What they think about the world changes from early childhood when they begin to realise they are part of the world, through to young adulthood when they’re out in the world on their own. What they think and what they do is very different through these years. As adults we settle into a life where there is little change around us. We get used to doing the same things, and we like the familiar. As adults we don’t change very much because we have stopped growing and our environment does not change.

There are many things we can do, now. The simplest one is to consume less. But, we are not going to do that. Why? It’s not the way we live. We expect to be able to have what we want. In time, perhaps, we will be able to use less of the Earth’s resources as more of these changes impact on our lives. But, not now. Peoples behaviour is very hard to change. We are just too busy living our lives, to think about and take action on events that may or may not happen in the future.

Some scientists have said that we change now, or it’s going to be too late. Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, "If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

Business and government leaders have to realise this. And they have to take action that will persuade, or force us to consume less. One way of doing this is to allow prices to rise. The recent increase in the price of oil, to over $120 per barrel, is a move in the right direction. Politicians are now bringing in cap-and-trade schemes, that are supposed to encourage businesses to reduce their carbon emissions.

Again, this is not enough.

Living is a process of creating order out of disorder. We use information to order inputs such as raw materials into organised systems, such as buildings, machines, and so on, to improve our way of living. One consequence of this organising is pollution, which may be described as an increasing amount of disorder in our environment.

Kenneth Boulding, The Pollution of Information,

The problem of pollution, therefore, must be seen not as something really incidental to the operations and transactions of society but something quite fundamental in the whole process.

To reduce this pollution, we need to rely on information, "The critical question is whether information can be fed into the system which will reduce it to a tolerable degree. "

He identifies two aspects of information in society,

In the first place, we can speak of information pollution when the information system produces images of the world which are unrealistic in the sense that they do not correspond to some external reality. [..] In its most obvious form, however, information is polluted when people tell lies or when error is perpetuated. The second aspect is a more negative one, what might be described as ignorance, when we do not know things which would get us out of trouble if we did know them.

God knows, we have them both. He regards this as information that is ‘polluted’, and describes three examples of this.

The first case of information pollution is in the price system. This is something which is familiar to economists, though not under this name. The price system, however, is an information system in the sense that it tells people what to do that pays off for them.

The problem occurs when payoffs to individuals too not take into account what economists call ‘externalities’. The management of companies are rewarded when they maximise profits, and they do this by not paying for the external costs of their production, which is physical pollution and environmental degradation. The ideal solution for this is, "the taxation of vice and the subsidization of virtue, and taxes on effluence may succeed where the law of damages fails.

The second source of information pollution is found in the hierarchy of large organisations. The tendency is for the hierarchy to corrupt information to serve its own purposes.

The international system in general, in fact, is a frightening example of how decision makers become trapped with their own information pollution and come to live in a world of half-truths and lies.

However, he suggests that the market corrects this to some extent, "simply because it permits the coordination of many different organizations without hierarchical control ."

He calls the third form of pollution ’saliency’,

All human beings suffer from some kind of information overload, and under these circumstances it is the dramatic and salient information which breaks through the barriers that we all set up against information input. Hence our images of the world are perverted in the direction of the dramatic and away from those things which happen to be true and important but are not dramatic.

We see this in the press, "which carefully filters out important information in favour of the dramatic and is extraordinarily careless about sampling." We also see this in the behaviour of political and business leaders who tend to be "in late middle life and hence their image of the world is determined and perverted by the saliencies of their youth." The only remedy for this is social science which is essentially, "the development of techniques of sampling and testing which are designed to purify the information streams from error."

Boulding ends with, " It should be observed that the solution even of the problems of material pollution depends ultimately on cleaning up the pollution of information, for it is defects in the information system which create the material pollution."

There you have it. An excellent essay on information and decision-making in society.

Farmers depend on fertiliser it to increase the yield of their crops. A pound of chemical fertilizer contains more of the major nutrients than 100 pounds of manure. Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who has focused on eradicating poverty, “Putting fertilizer on the ground on a one-acre plot can, in typical cases, raise an extra ton of output. That’s the difference between life and death.”

From the New York Times,

Agriculture and development experts say the world has few alternatives to its growing dependence on fertilizer. As population increases and a rising global middle class demands more food, fertilizer is among the most effective strategies to increase crop yields.

With a growing population, and a rising demand for food and biofuels, farmers are encouraged to plant more crops. As demand grew, the fertilizer mines and factories of the world proved unable to keep up.

Norman Borlaug, the American scientist awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries, “This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.”

But we’re in a Catch-22 situation here. We need more fertiliser to feed a growing population, but more of it causes more pollution,

Environmental groups fear increased use, particularly of nitrogen fertilizer made using fossil fuels. Because plants do not absorb all the nitrogen, much of it leaches into streams and groundwater. That runoff has long been recognized as a major pollution problem, and it is growing.

Where these rivers carrying fertiliser meet the sea,

In the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, nitrogen runoff from fields in the Corn Belt washes downstream and feeds plant life in the gulf. The algae blooms suck oxygen from the water, killing other marine life.

More than 400 dead zones have been identified, from the coasts of China to the Chesapeake Bay, and the primary reason is agricultural runoff. Professor Robert J. Diaz at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, “Nitrogen is nitrogen. If it’s on land, it produces corn. If it gets in the water, it produces algae.”

A new forecast predicts that we will have a decade of cooler temperatures in North America and Europe. This is a perturbation in a longer term trend of rising temperatures. Will the public see it as such? Campaigners are struggling to persuade the public that we have a problem. If they see cooler temperatures, they may not believe the scientists’ forecasts of global warming.

Andrew Revkin, in the New York Times,

Can a species that evolved as an opportunist (grab those berries, gorge on that fallen antelope) and responder (fight or flee) meaningfully integrate evidence of long-term risks provided by science (on climate) or economics (on Social Security) and act for the sake of the future?

We plan for the long term when we can see that doing something now will bring added benefits to their own welfare in the future. However, when we need to sacrifice now to avoid something happening in the future, it’s not so easy to do.

People are prepared to invest in the future, but they need to be convinced of a return. In the case of global warming there is no obvious return. There is just a safer world.

The world faces an energy requirement that will grow as developing nations consume more energy. There just isn’t enough at the moment to go around. There are many research projects looking at different sources, but there is not yet one with evidence on a technology that could deliver a significant contribution. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, talking about the lack of innovation,

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. People are not working on things that could have that kind of influence.

The question is, why didn’t we do all this investment 10 years ago? Innovation is needed to help find solutions. However, people have a "fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural."

In order to do stuff that matters, we need to overcome this aversion to risk. Part of this is financial - when we make investments we look for a reasonable return. If we don’t see this we don’t make the investment. Another reason is the lack of boldness and vision. Money is now going into trying to extract the last drop of oil from the seabed. But, the amount of research money and effort is not in proportion to the result.

We’re not looking far enough ahead. As a society "on the larger questions we have, we’re not making reasonable progress."

Page suggests that we don’t have enough people with the ideas and the education to develop these new technologies, "Those people don’t really exist. You can’t hire them. People usually have careers where they stay in pretty fixed areas." We need more people with an engineering background and with leadership skills to push forward.

He is still

.. hugely more optimistic because now we have a conceptualisation of the problems that makes some degree of sense to a fair number of people. Look at the things we worry about - poverty, global warming, people dying in accidents. And look at the things that drive people’s basic level of happiness - safety and opportunity for their kids, plus basic things like health and shelter. I think our ability to achieve these things on a large scale for many people in the world is improving.