David Peat

172 From Certainty to Uncertaintytions come under financial or political pressure, when they engage incutthroat competition, when they operate in an environment wherebribes and corruption are the rule, or when operators are overworkedand poorly paid? These are the conditions under which bad mistakescan occur. In every situation, and no matter how many automatic failsafesystems are installed, the human factor can never be ignored, andit remains unpredictable.Take, for example, air traffic controllers, those invisible seat beltswe all rely on when we travel by plane. Effective air traffic control isvitally important to avoid collisions during approaches and takeoffsnear airports. Yet, as I write this book, controllers responsible for theairspace over London are complaining of overwork and high stress levels.They predict that a serious air collision will occur unless their workingconditions are improved. In this case the risk analysis has beencarried out and various technical components are all in place andworking perfectly, but the human operator has become the weak linkin the chain.The UnforeseenThis chapter follows our twists and turns as we seek certainty and reassurancein the face of a variety of ecological crises. Universities andexperts, we discover, have become compromised. The issue is not somuch that any individual expert could be in someone’s pocket, butrather that ordinary people are no longer so ready to trust an expert’sadvice. We saw that risk analysis, while producing scientific-lookingresults, can sometimes founder because of missing information or thatever present human factor. So can anyone reassure us with a definitiveanswer?As we saw in the preceding chapters, twentieth century sciencecaused us to confront issues of uncertainty and limits to our ability topredict and control the world around us. The natural world sets a barrieron how much we can know and how accurately we can anticipatethe future. In case after case our attempts at intervention have beensubverted. But we really did not need a couple of generations of theoreticalphysicists to tell us that our best-laid plans can sometime be