Will the new science of complexity subvert oceans policy?

Introduction

The Telte it's called. It's miles wide, you see, at the entrance, but later on it is split into two by the Hohenh–rn bank; then it gets shallow and very complicated, and ends as a mere tidal driblet with another name. It's just the sort of channel I should like to worry into on a fine day or with an off-shore wind. Alone, in thick weather and a heavy sea, it would have been folly to attempt it, except as a desperate resource. But, as I said, I knew at once that Dollmann was proposing to run for it and guide me in. ...

We soon came to what I knew must be the beginning of the Telte channel. All round you could hear the breakers on the sands, though it was too thick to see them yet. As the water shoaled, the sea of course got shorter and steeper. There was more wind - a whole gale I should say.

I kept dead in the wake of the Medusa, but to my disgust I found she was gaining on me very fast. Of course I had taken for granted, when he said he would lead me in, that he would slow down and keep close to me. He could easily have done so by getting his men up to check the sheets or drop his peak. Instead of that he was busting on for all he was worth. Once, in a rain-squall, I lost sight of him altogether; got him faintly again, but had enough to do with my own tiller not to want to be peering through the scud after a runaway pilot. It was all right so far, but we were fast approaching the worst part of the whole passage, where the Hohenh–rn bank blocks the road and the channel divides. ...

I knew perfectly well that what I should soon see would be a wall of surf stretching right across and on both sides. To feel one's way in that sort of weather is impossible. You must know your way, or else have a pilot. I had one, but he was playing his own game. ...

By the time I realised the danger it was far too late to turn and hammer out to the open. I was deep in the bottle-neck bight of the sands, jammed on a lee-shore, and a strong flood tide sweeping me on. ...

Well, just as I foresaw, the wall of surf appeared clean across the horizon, and curling back to shut me in, booming like thunder. When I last saw the Medusa she seemed to be charging it like a horse at a fence, and I took a rough bearing of her position by a hurried glance at the compass. ...

I kept on my bearing as well as I could, but I was already out of the channel. I knew that by the look of the water, and as we neared the bank I saw it was all awash and without the vestige of an opening. I wasn't going to chuck her on to it without an effort; so, more by instinct than with any particular hope, I put the helm down, meaning to work her along the edge on the chance of spotting a way over.

She was buried at once by the beam sea, and the jib flew to blazes; but the reefed stays'l stood, she recovered gamely, and I held on, though I knew it could only be for a few minutes as the centre-plate was up and she made frightful leeway towards the bank.

I was half blinded by scud, but suddenly I noticed what looked like a gap, behind a spit which curled out right ahead. I luffed still more to clear this spit, but she couldn't weather it. Before you could say knife she was driving across it, bumped heavily, bucked forward again, bumped again, and - ripped on in deeper water! I can't describe the next few minutes. I was in some sort of channel, but a very narrow one, and the sea broke everywhere. I hadn't proper command either; for the rudder had crocked up somehow at the last bump. ...

It couldn't last long, and finally we went crash on to something and stopped there, grinding and banging. So ended that little trip under a pilot.

That was Erskine Childers' hero, Davies, in his turn-of-the-century classic, The Riddle of the Sands, desperately making passage to Cuxhaven through the labyrinth of sand banks near the mouth of the Elbe.

But, apart from being a fine piece of sea-writing, what does this passage tell us today?

I think it neatly captures the central ideas of ocean governance and maritime strategy. Davies' problems with the ocean are ours today. He must assert control over the sea, and is always on the edge of losing it. He is surrounded by the mind-numbing complexity of the sea - a complexity made more awful by his imperfect knowledge of it, for his charts are useless, and he is, as he says 'half blinded by scud'. It is a complexity that exists in the large and the small - as much in the power of the storm and as in the critical fastenings of the rudder; a complexity where the details matter as much as the grand scheme; a complexity born of the interaction between complex human needs and complex natural systems - and which somehow needs to be instantly and comprehensively understood. He must find some strategy, some way through. Above all, he must constantly weigh up the risks and take chances.

I want to tease out these parallels a little more, not only to convince you why Davies' problems are also our problems, but also to take the argument an important step further. I want to argue that if we begin to use the emerging knowledge of the sea to provide contemporary solutions to these eternal problems, then there is a prospect that we will radically transform the way we think of the nature of oceans policy and hence oceans governance and maritime strategy.

Our knowledge of the oceans is still a drop in the bucket

To do that we must first sail west from Davies' beloved Wattenmeer out into the North Sea, to that rugged rock called Helgoland. Here exists one of the oldest marine biology stations in the world, the Biologische Anstalt Helgoland. And here, every day, in fair weather and foul, for more than a hundred years, a scientist walks out to the end of the jetty and takes a water sample from the full tidal stream of the Helgoland Roads. In the biting snow of a mid-winter's gale, she might even think that our friend Davies had it easy. And she, and the generations of scientists before her, might wonder if such a literal drop in the bucket makes any difference at all to our knowledge of the oceans.

Since that first sample was taken, many more have followed all over the world. There has been an explosion of data, information and knowledge about the oceans. With research ships, marine stations, drifting buoys, aircraft and satellites, we have discovered much. In this century we have discovered the greatest geographical feature on the planet - the earth-girdling mid-oceanic ridge: with mountains that dwarf Everest; with a length that makes the Rockies or the Andes seem like mere chains of hills; with the irrefutable evidence of plate tectonics and sea-floor spreading marked indelibly on it; and with whole new phyla of organisms to add to the world's biodiversity.

We now have huge data sets describing a huge range of ocean phenomena. We now have national institutions to collect, store and disseminate those data, and international protocols to share them. We now have analytical tools to take those data and turn them into useful information. We believe that we have the beginnings of a scientific understanding of the oceans. We have a sketch, indeed, of the main physical and biological processes - the great ocean currents, the major flows through the food chain - even if we are frequently surprised by new phenomena that disturb or overturn our comfortable assumptions.

But we need to remember that all these data, all this information, all this understanding are, like those water samples on Helgoland, just drops in the bucket. The ocean is truly, unimaginably vast.

And complex. We are only just beginning to grasp the complexity. We may have added dramatically to our store of fundamental data about the oceans - the observations of the states of the many biophysical and socioeconomic variables. But the key feature of the emerging sketch - the feature that even overshadows the size of the problem - is its complexity, the staggering number of critical dependencies and interactions among the huge number of important variables.

We have been confronted by this complexity as we have begun to grapple with the idea of the ecologically sustainable development of the oceans. The ESD process has forced us to stand back and look at the whole. It has denied us the comfort of diving into some single discipline issue, as we try to balance the largely biophysical needs of the natural system with the largely socioeconomic needs of the human system. And as we go through these exercises we are continually confronted by the complexity - to understand ocean circulation, we must understand climate; to understand climate, we must understand human activity, and so on.

Understanding complexity is changing science

By asking science to understand complex phenomena like the oceans, society has forced science to change, to adapt, to learn some new ways of doing science. By asking science to change its ways, society has also implicitly asked science to renegotiate its contract with society. The surprising thing that is emerging from this is that science has learned a dramatically new way of understanding complexity, and that this is now forcing that renegotiation into new, uncharted waters. Let me explain.

Ever since the Renaissance, science has basically been refining a single method of knowing the world. Regardless of whether it is biology or physics, chemistry or geology, the scientific method has been characterised by the search for the underlying simplicity of the world by reducing the manifest complexity of the observed whole into more manageable, simpler, and more fundamental parts. So successful has this method been, that it is usually called the scientific method, as if to confirm that there can be only the one.

Those more difficult phenomena that could not be handled satisfactorily in this way were more or less stigmatised as too complex, strange, rogue or weird and were left on the shelf for another day. Thus many messy physical phenomena, and particularly many biological phenomena, and especially most socioeconomic phenomena were considered refractory to the scientific method, and by implication were not the proper concern of scientists at all. They were handled by other methods: historical, narrative, ideological, rhetorical, philosophical and so on.

But science is not a method, it is a state of knowing. And in recent years it has responded to the need to know such phenomena as oceans or ecosystems, immune systems or economies with their messiness, fuzziness, incompleteness, novelty, surprise, adaptation - in short, with their irreducible and contingent complexity. It has developed a wide range of tools not only for acquiring the data about such systems, but also for analysing and visualising them. These tools are usually computer intensive and rejoice in such techno-names as adaptive game theory, simulated annealing, neural nets, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, spin glasses, and agent based modelling.

Together with the tools has come an approach, called complex systems theory, which offers a qualitatively new way of doing science. Where traditional science sees the search for simplicity and natural law as the goal, the new theory sees the search for emergent structures and dynamics. Where the old science gives primacy to testing hypotheses, the new encourages generating them. Where the old demands objectivity and the separation of observer and observed, the new sees no such distinction, encouraging interaction and recursion between them. The new science of complex systems tries to build exploratory tools, where the old constructs predictive ones.

The approach of complex systems theory, though, is ineffably scientific. It is not some woolly, 'anything goes since everything is relative' belief system. While it does say there may not be simple answers to the way the world is, it does not say any answer is as good as any other. While it does say that we may not yet have the right answers, it also says that many answers - nonscientific answers - are just plain wrong. On all those issues it is as one with traditional science. It fully acknowledges its scientific patrimony.

But this is a lot more than society asked for. All it really wanted was for science to repeat its trick of understanding simple systems, such as the motions of the planets or the workings of levers with a similar sort of understanding for complex systems. We have had three hundred years to get used to Galileo's first scientific revolution, and we have got comfortable with the utility of that knowledge and the technological advances that have come with it. Despite the grandeur of their conceptions, the Apollo man-on-the-moon program was just the technological extension of Newton's reductionist physics, and the human genome project and genetic engineering are likewise no more than technological extensions of Mendel's reductionist genetics.

Instead of that comfortable, practical and confinable sort of science, society has got a revolution instead. And revolutions are uncomfortable, impractical and, often, uncontainable.

Complex systems theory is not at all like Galileo's science. It is, at the present time, a rapidly evolving bunch of tools and a rapidly evolving bunch of ideas, each stimulating the other. But it comes as a set. And herein lies the problem for oceans governance and maritime strategy. Our scientific understanding of the oceans, as it responds to the complexity of ocean phenomena, will fast become dependent on the tools of complex systems theory, and so will increasingly come under the sway of the ideas of that theory

The new science will change the idea of policy

Society has renegotiated its contract with science before, but always from a position of strength, dictating the terms as the needs of society changed. The science of the Renaissance, an extension of medieval philosophy, was seen as a bolster for theology and the established order. By the time of the Enlightenment, the power, particularly of physics and chemistry, to control the world though technology led to the creation of a new contract. Henceforth science was to have a special place in the culture provided that it stuck to its role as the cauldron of technology. This situation was reinforced through the Industrial Revolution and further strengthened in this century.

However, the fruits of science are not only offered to society through technology, but also through policy. Today science provides a powerful stream of evidence about the state of the world into the policy process - data, information, knowledge - but not ideas, or at least, not scientific ideas about the nature of policy itself.

Complex systems theory promises to overturn all this. The evidence it will increasingly be able to provide into the policy process cannot be assimilated without embracing the approach itself, since the theory makes no distinction between subject and object, observer and observed. This is what I meant when I said earlier that the tools, results and approach of complex systems theory come as a set.

In a sense, the results of complex systems theory - the results that are so powerfully informing about the world that they will be irresistible to policy makers - they are a Trojan horse. They carry with them a subversive new scientific way of understanding the world.

Once in the ocean policy arena, these ideas will meet little resistance, for the ideas will find a rich, complex but naÔve environment in which to grow. Ocean policy is a new field without the inertia that comes from years of development and tradition - that's the way we do things round here. They will be as easily applied to the emergence of the Law of the Sea regime as to the emergence of stability in ecosystems. They will see the similarities between the adaptation of the policies guiding the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the adaptation of ballast water species to new environments. They will see in the hierarchy of ocean law and treaties, such as embedded in UNCLOS, a strong similarity with the hierarchy of ocean currents embedded in the global circulation. They will note the novelty of human behaviour, such as the Brent Spar episode, and compare it to novel oceanic phenomena, such as the breakdown of the Larsen ice-shelf. They will see the resilience of human organisations, such as the Rio and Kyoto conferences, and think of the resilience of natural populations, such as the recovery of the great whales. They will liken the expression of individuality-within-generality, as seen in the Regional Seas Agreements of, say, the Mediterranean and the South China Sea, to the expression of the same phenomenon of difference embedded in similarity to be seen in the ocean's great western boundary currents. They will seize on the rich historicity of UNCLOS, the way its present state depends on the peculiarities of its history - think of the cannon range of ancient men-o-war determining modern territorial seas - and compare it to the historicity of ecosystems - say, polar bears only in the Arctic and penguins only in the Antarctic.

These new ideas, in short, will start to work on oceans policy as well as for it. The ideas of oceans policy will become one more input to a new, more complex scientific understanding of the oceans.

We will get an oceans policy, and the ideas of oceans governance that flow from it, come what may. But I do not think it will be just a land lubber's policy writ large. If it is to be evidence-based (and it is almost inconceivable today that it would not be) then science will be there with her data, information and knowledge. And if science is there, then complex systems theory, for the reasons I have argued, bids fair to be there. And if that is the case, the result will be, like any good complex system, emergent, novel, resilient, adaptive, and very, very interesting.

We shall have, as George Herbert said:

Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises ...