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Doubt and the Values of an Ignorance-Based World View for Restoration: Coastal Louisiana Wetlands

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Abstract

Embracing doubt, a signature strength of science, is an essential core component of an ignorance-based-world view (IBWV) that assumes the areas of certainty are small relative to the large field of ignorance. The contrasting knowledge-based world view (KBWV) assumes that small and mostly insignificant knowledge gaps exist. When the KBWV is combined with a sense of urgency to “do something,” then the intellectual landscape is flattened, the introduction of new ideas is impeded, monitoring and adaptive management is marginalized, risky behaviors continue, and social learning is restricted. The history of three coastal Louisiana land-uses (agricultural impoundment, marsh management, and dredging) is one of ignored and untested assumptions that might have provided a cause-and-effect means to avoid catastrophic land losses—the result of a KBWV that remains the primary perspective of Louisiana’s current coastal restoration and management program that includes river diversions and a proposed expansion of hurricane protection levees into wetlands. I argue from the pathology of results that willful adoption of an IBWV in the administration, management, and implementation of restoration will reduce the scale and diversity of significant missteps in the future, improve project efficiencies, and cause fewer unintended consequences that cannot (again) be retracted.

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Acknowledgments

This manuscript benefited from conversations and work with many colleagues inside and outside of academia, and with students over the years, and from the comments of three anonymous reviewers. I am also thankful for time spent with the Land Institute and C. Swarzenski, and for the enthusiasm of nonscientists who thoughtfully nurture efforts to make things better. Mike Weinstein extended the invitation to participate in a Future International Sustainability/Integrated Coastal Zone Management/Ecosystem Rehabilitation Symposium at the 2008 Restore America’s Estuary meeting. Support was provided by the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program MULTISTRESS Award No. NA16OP2670 to Louisiana State University.

Conflict of Interest

I have no financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. I have full control of all primary data and agree to allow the journal to review the data if requested. There are no potential conflicts in the use of the data or financial conflicts.

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  1. Coastal Ecology Institute, and Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    R. Eugene Turner

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“Failure to suspend and test assumptions is the most surefire way to guarantee patterns of interaction that simply reinforce positions from the past. In this way, untested assumptions come to govern organizational actions, just as they undermine genuine attempts at collaboration.” Senge et al. 2008, p. 257.

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Turner, R.E. Doubt and the Values of an Ignorance-Based World View for Restoration: Coastal Louisiana Wetlands. Estuaries and Coasts 32, 1054–1068 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-009-9214-4

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