In 2001, I was asked to give the Keynote address to the annual meeting of the Henry David Thoreau Society.  The talk, based on my book, No Man’s Garden, was published in The Concord Saunterer, the publication of the Thoreau Society.  Here is an except from it.

Ironies of the Information Age

During the time  that I have been an ecological scientist and involved with environmental issues, I have found several ironies of our modern technological and scientific information age. The first irony is that often we do not measure what we need to know. I have been involved in a lot of major environmental issues, from the conservation of bowhead and sperm whales to the possible effects of global warming on forests. In each case I find that there are key pieces of information missing that nobody has bothered to find out.

The second irony of the information age thing is that, if we do measure something useful, we usually don’t bother to use it. This is true among scientists as well as among public agencies and non-profit interest groups. We just archive information and forget it.

The third irony that, although we have the ability to gather many kinds of scientific information, we tend to solve environmental problems from ancient myths, plausibilities, false inferences, and ideologies. This means we often start with an answer that we wish were true and squeeze whatever scientific information we use into a mold that conforms to this wish. And we get very upset if people do not believe us.
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