David Peat

50 From Certainty to UncertaintyThe end of the twentieth century saw the failure of a number ofgrandiose schemes. We were going to green the world and discoverabundant energy. To take one example out of many, in the James Bayproject, extensive areas of northern Quebec were to be flooded to producevast amounts of hydroelectric power. It was only after considerableprotests stating that this virgin land supported abundant herds ofcaribou and was the life and culture of the Cree peoples that the mostambitious part of the project was abandoned.Again and again such master plans proved to be insensitive to localcontexts. As an antidote environmentalists adopted the slogan: Act locally,think globally. Any program should be asking: How does thisrelate to the world as a whole? How will it impact on each small communityand ecological system?Take, for example, the idea of a “region.” Politicians draw a line ona map and call it a country, a state, a province, a county, or a region.But we can define a region in many different ways: by the accentspeople speak; by a network of family links; by the sort of work done; bya drainage basin, mountain range, river, or coastline; by the circulationof a newspaper; by religious groups and associations; by annual festivals;and by patterns of trade, travel, or migration. Ultimately one endsup not with a single region but with a multiplex of overlapping maps.Regions and territories depend upon a variety of contexts. But to dealwith such complexity requires a more flexible and context-dependentway of thinking that is not familiar to most politicians.As well as acting locally, we should consider the global perspective.The Amazon basin is not confined to one country. Its rainforests havean impact on the entire globe. The Rio Grande does not respect naasserted:“For any proposition P, either P or not-P is true.” In other words, any middleor intermediate term, or proposition, is excluded and no ambiguity is present in thelogical argument.This law of the excluded middle has been much critiqued by modern logiciansand a variety of alternatives have been proposed: a three-valued logic, logic that isbased on laws of probability, context-dependent logic, and so on. Clearly the statement,“It is true that either the electron is a wave or it is not a wave (i.e., a particle)”does not apply at the level of quantum theory.