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There is a tension between land based planning and sectoral controls at sea. Many bodies are involved. The effects of complexity are adequately illustrated by this story from the last days of Richard Feynman’s life. When he was dying of cancer, Richard Feynman was asked to sit on the inquiry into the loss of the space shuttle Challenger which was set up by the Congress. He realised early on that the performance of the rubber seals in the joints of the solid booster rockets at the low temperatures experienced on the launch day were the source of the problem, but there was a lot of covering up and misinformation going on.
Feynman, in a televised sitting, asked for a glass of iced water. Solemnly, iced water was served to all the committee members. Feynman then pulled a sample of the rubber seal out of his pocket, and a pair of pliers. He simply demonstrated that is was supple until immersed in the iced water when it became brittle. Game, set and match!
As James Gleick says in his biography of Richard Feynman, "NASA had become an agency lacking a clear mission after the moon landings programme, but maintaining a large established bureaucracy and a net of interconnections with the nations largest aerospace companies such as Lockheed, Martin Marietta and Morton Thiokol together with hundreds of smaller companies. All became contractors for the space shuttle programme. Within a decade, the shuttle had become a symbol of technology defeated by its own complexity and the shuttle had become a symbol of government mismanagement. As Feynman stated, the agency as a matter of bureaucratic self preservation, found it necessary 'to exaggerate: to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it would fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, and to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered'".
With only a minor substitution of words, this statement could apply with frightening accuracy to the environmental establishment created by the EU, governments, NGOs and companies in Europe!
Complexity is likely to undermine Sustainability
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