Mensanthropist: Debate about Sustainability

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mensanthropist [ men-san-thruh-pist ] noun
a person, who actively participates in fulfilling one of Mensa’s objectives by fostering and utilizing intelligence for the benefit of humanity

So here’s what we discussed in our meeting on the first Saturday of 2021:

Let’s let’s dive into the primary topic of the meeting. There are obviously groups and organizations around the world whose aim is to help the environment or protect the environment and make it sustainable. Why having a group within Mensa which only Mensans can join and what should be the benefit of having such a limited group? What can we do differently or what can we do, that non-Mensans cannot do to help achieving the sustainability?

Julien: I’m not sure that as Mensans we have particular abilities to do things that other people cannot do, but maybe we have some advantages. For instance, the fact that we are an international network could be a big asset in order to share experiences from various countries and compare them. It’s been really striking to me with the COVID last year to see how interesting it can be to compare the different ways that countries respond to the to the pandemic. And it’s probably the same regarding environmental issues. As Mensans we also probably have a superior, so to speak, ability to process information. So maybe we could try to take advantage of that. And that’s why the platform I suggested is really motivated by the need to clarify things regarding planetary boundaries, to better understand what is at stake, what is the real potential of the solutions that are presented, and also a way to sort information in order to make it more easily accessible and clearer.

Martin: I think something that’s direly needed is trying to split what is objective, if there is any such thing, from what is subjective when talking about sustainability. There’re so many things within sustainability which are obviously 100 percent subjective. I think people in general tend to conflict these issues with what feels good with what will actually create a sustainable biosphere. I think a key thing for us would be to find some lowest common denominator of things that are going to be meaningful and helpful. I’m not really seeing that too much when looking at other initiatives, mostly the foundation is about feeling good and not about making the maximum possible impact. I think we need to change that. Obviously then you still need to package that in a way which makes people feel good because otherwise they’re unfortunately not going to be interested.

Omar: I agree with that it is a known issue among the conservation field that we talk about conserving species, it’s a more easy to get funding for the conservation of those species that people like. But maybe it’s more important to protect some insects or other animals that people do not care about or they even will pay for killing them. That’s an important issue, how to make people understand that it is not to preserve what we like, but what we need.

But answering the main question, what can we do as Mensans, I think the only thing that I can imagine that could be our intelligence. I’m not 100 percent sure that we’ll be really useful in terms of that we can also use intelligence not to process information better all the time, but rather to find ways to support our prejudices and ideas. There are still Mensans who deny climate change, who go against science. They are intelligent, but they, based on their previous ideas, just find intelligent ways to support those ideas.

I have cooperated with NGOs and green political parties. And I get very frustrated when they at the same time criticize climate change deniers for not listening to science, when they have a speech that goes against scientific evidence. When you try to present the evidence and convince them, they really don’t care. They don’t want to hear science. They just mention science to support what they think. One thing that we can try to do is to use our intelligence to find good ways to reach people, to convince them about what is the scientific evidence and real science on these topics and to try to counter-act these other lobbies that produce some misunderstandings in people.

Martin: I unfortunately think many of the sort of green parties or similar organizations might actually be more harmful than anybody else because they base something like half of their policy on either outright lies or not understanding the science. Something that I think might be interesting, is trying to make the truth a little bit more easily digestible, like having scorecards about what you can do.

I know the World Wildlife Fund has some stuff like this, like you can calculate your own climate impact and so on. But again, it’s sort of biased, obviously, based on what they have communicated over decades and so on. Having something like this that you can give to people and where they can immediately see where they themselves can have the greatest impact.

Then you don’t necessarily need to say sustainability is one single measure. You could have a couple of different measures, like little traffic lights or something like that, not too complex, but still obviously properly sourced. Distribute something like this, and try to make it objective.

Maybe even trying to put some pressure on some of the organizations which ostensibly are for a sustainable environment, but not directly call them out, because that never helps, but instead having some resources like this which might help them to change their thinking, to just see what are the main things where people can do something and see what the actual science looks like.

Make a couple of little publications, if you will, from it, which obviously I think couldn’t bear the Mensa name itself, but which I still think would be valuable.

How about reaching those organizations and providing some way to coordinate all those activities around the world and make them actually based on science and reach the common goal instead of having too many groups and organizations who seem to do the same thing but not doing the same thing?

Martin: You need to be politically suave in how you approach people and not just go out there and say, hey, we’re going to make you evidence based instead of continuing to spout these lies about their powers that you have for the last 30 years or whatever it might be. In that direction and trying to to make it concrete, evidence based numbers where possible, and also somehow being seen as legitimate and not being in the interest of any organization or something in particular.

Omar: We need different approaches and different kinds of knowledge. Not only ecology, but it’s also necessary to communicate on engineering, on how to change cities, to make them more sustainable, also for example, how to fight poverty in developing countries. Really hard questions and they need to have people with different expertizes, working together to answer these questions.

In a group like the Mensans for Sustainability, we have a lot of people with different points of view that can be useful, but also that can be problematic sometimes. We probably will have to face some different opinions between us and we will have to see if we can really have a proper debate between the different points of view to make to shed some light on it. These green parties and organizations have the best intentions, but they fall in these problems, that they are so convinced that they use the platforms to spread fake information.

Martin: There’s four people of us here right now. We’re not going to immediately change the world. We can at least get started and try to build a momentum, because if we can’t build a proper momentum and we just start doing 10 different things, it’s all going to fizzle out. Better to do one reasonably simple thing to start with, then branch out from there and get other people within Mensa interested, and so on.

You just need to find that place where where it’s still going to have actually some sort of a meaningful deliverable. I don’t think the first thing that we should do is something contentious, like saying, oh, everybody should be a vegetarian, because that’s obviously never going to work. But if we start talking about power generation and so on, that’s a little bit less contentious. Even if a lot of people have strong opinions for or against nuclear power, for instance, they tend to have less strong opinions of solar versus wind.

Julien: Maybe the first step would be to focus on a few ideas that would appeal to at least the four of us and then to other people and then see how it goes. One of the choices we probably have to make will be to either focus on one particular issue, or try to have a sort of a systemic approach in order to address all of them, which make things, of course, more difficult, but also interesting, because as you all certainly know, we face climate change, but we also have to deal with biodiversity and we also have to deal with biogeochemical flows and land-system change and all of them have interactions. It’s an important choice that will have to be made in the very first steps.

I always thought that one of the biggest indicators of Albert Einstein’s intelligence was his ability to present complex problems and complex science to people in a simpler way so that even less intelligent people could understand it. That may be one of the things that we are able to help with. We have different sustainability problems and knowing what is the current priority may be may be very important. People may not know that until they get the information processed properly. Julien, what is your planetary boundaries proposal based on?

Julien: It’s a concept that was created about 10 years ago, and it was updated a few years ago with additional limits. It’s not very well known so far because as far as the researchers themselves admit, it’s hard to quantify each precise boundary. It’s just a way to raise awareness, especially on the fact that each issue cannot be addressed separately from another issue, you have to take everything into account. For instance, if energy transition goes too much against biodiversity or against land use for agriculture, we have a problem. So what is important with this notion of planetary boundaries is really the systemic approach that our policymakers must have in mind for the next years and any solution that is proposed.

The other thing that you all mentioned is it may be difficult to properly reach the right amount of people in the right way to actually convince them to do something. How about trying to address it to the organizations who already have the environment to reach the public and just convince them to to use the sources that we prepare for them instead of trying to do the marketing ourselves?

Omar: I have tried that also with other colleagues from our expertize as scientists, and we know that usually it doesn’t work. It’s difficult because as Martin said when they have spent a lot of their energies and resources to support an idea, they are not willing to say that it is wrong. What we can do, as I said at the beginning, is to try to do something different. We cannot say that Mensa supports any of our ideas. We cannot use the logos of Mensa or the brand. But we may say that we are Mensans or something.

Science is considering all these complex systems and the big picture of this policy. But it’s very complex. It is difficult to make it simple for people to understand. It’s easier for people to rely on simple messages that are given from populistic parties than to rely on reality.

Martin: I would also say the green parties, the Greenpeace and so on out there, maybe they are not the ones that would be most receptive. Maybe the political parties and other relevant organizations that don’t have as much prestige involved would be much more amenable to a message. If you’re talking about more the sort of middle of the road parties, I think they understand that something needs to be done, but they don’t know exactly what. And they might be a little bit more open to looking at the output of different organizations, think tanks, groups, whatever. So I guess what I’m saying is we shouldn’t discount trying to go to to those who have historically not not been the greatest advocates of sustainability.

I think what we can get inspiration from as well is the pandemic, because within the last year we learned that having having a reliable information is very important, but properly processing it in the right way is even more important.

Martin: I think being able to visualize it well is going to be crucial, because even if we spend hundreds or thousands of hours each and we write this white paper, which is five hundred pages long, nobody’s ever going to read it and we’re all going to be very disappointed. If we can make it „sexy“, I think that’s going to be absolutely crucial to get it out there and to make people start looking at it. In the background you obviously need to have your sources.

And these days, it’s not especially complicated to do nice interactive graphics. That’s something I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on. We can also really easily do some some different mockups and start thinking about it, go out and test it with friends and family, if we don’t have the exact numbers yet, at least starting to think about how it could be presented.

Omar: A good way to share this knowledge could be maybe to have it like video games in which people can play how to run the world, they could make choices how to run society and it could work like a scientific model, showing real effects of the different choices. So, by playing, people could learn how to do things that take into account science in order to make to world more sustainable.

Martin: I actually have a friend who’s built that for Android and he’s been building a bunch of other computer games as well. If we find some good idea and we think it could actually be a worthwhile thing, that’s definitely somebody we could we could be talking to. But I think key there is to build a game, it needs to be engaging. It doesn’t need to be fun as such, but it needs to engage people.

Julien: That’s an important part of my proposal, but it’s not obvious enough. It’s important to be able to get access to the core information which could be the base of the pyramid. But it’s also extremely important to make it appealing and accessible. And this could be the synthetic information at the top of the pyramid. And both dimensions are important to explore and to work on.

I think core message that could be a conclusion of our meeting today is that first we need to do something to make it easier to understand the impact of things, as Julien suggested, we need to make sure that it’s based on science, and as Martin suggested, we need to find an appealing way how to present the results of that.

Julien: We seem to share similar way to see those issues and the objective that we would like to reach, the proposal I made is, again, just a proposal. So it’s still very open to discussion but if it appeals somehow to other people, we’ll see how far it can go.

Martin: Final point from my side as well, I think what’s important is if we’re looking at things like countries and so on, that we actually look at where resources are consumed, not not just where they are being produced. So that we actually explain where the actual impact is. If we’re talking about trying to get people to change, first we must try to see where it is that they actually can change.

Julien: Probably one of the key success factors would be to have some sort of a core team that has enough knowledge on those issues in order to produce robust information and then contributors that would be interested to participate.

Martin: As well as at what point this doesn’t need to be a project only for Mensans anymore. Do we sort of incubate it in a Mensa space and then make it a wider thing? Or do we say, no, this should just be a Mensa thing and then there can be offshoots with other people? I think at some point we also need to try to define that, to manage everybody’s expectations.

Julien: Sure. Why not why not have Mensa incubate that thing and then make it wider?

That’s an excellent idea. Maybe Omar can have some ideas on how to get the contributors participating. I’m sure the scientists who do the research will appreciate being able to contribute to the project.

Omar: Yeah, one problem that we have is that we spend much of our time doing the research, but then we are not so good at communicating it or we don’t have that much time to have an impact on society when we have to communicate.

Julien: There are many websites that enable scientists and researchers to publish their work, even on an international basis. But those websites, as far as I know, don’t make it very appealing. So there is a room for something different.

Omar: Part of the work will be to take the science and then make it easier and more appealing for people.

Martin: That’s actually something I have been doing to some extent. You can either do it as a visual, sort of like a conference poster, or you can do it as a slightly more interactive version, with software like Power BI. There’s also this software called Prezi, which is sort of like PowerPoint, except you can zoom in and zoom out and see new things when you start zooming in somewhere. You could basically build something like this whole tree in Prezi, sourced with different kinds of data, maybe you could even have some recommendations in there, for each thing you could have like a little dashboard. There’s many different ways that we can start looking at it. But obviously first we need to just focus on what sort of content should we try to to generate or collect.

Ok, let’s take it as a start of the discussion and hopefully we will keep it alive in the Facebook group. Thanks for participating in this meeting, and hopefully it will not be the last one.

Omar: Yeah. Thank you.

Julien: Thank you for organizing this.

Martin: Looking forward to the next meeting.

You can follow up on the discussion in the Facebook thread:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Mensansforsustainability/permalink/2808579119397730/