Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Too Big to Handle - Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Question of Why Societies Ignore Looming Disasters

Workshop 2014/2015 | Fellow Forum

Too Big to Handle - Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Question of Why Societies Ignore Looming Disasters

October 08–09, 2014

In many instances, societies know that they are facing huge and potentially lethal
problems but fail to handle those properly. There are many examples of this: Many
academics and even international organizations (the Bank of International
Settlements) issued warnings concerning the augmented systemic risks in the
financial system in 2006/2007 but nothing happened. The dangers of climate change
including the necessity to act on a global scale are well known, but states fail to act
collectively. Although the danger of antibiotics resistance is well known, societies fail
to handle the overuse of antibiotics. The list of endangered species and the
overfishing of the seas with all its disastrous consequences are well known; again
nothing happens. All those problems build up slowly, not abruptly like a natural
catastrophe, and even though they may be amenable to a rational solution, this is
nevertheless usually not taken in spite of the fact that the risks are known, i.e.
missing information is not the problem.

This Fellow Forum proposal aims at exploring the question of why societies are
unable to handle looming disasters from different disciplinary viewpoints. Under
what conditions and why is action taken or not? What would be solutions, if any,
from the respective viewpoints? The Forum will not explore handling of disasters
which have already occurred (see Alemanno, Governing Disasters 2011).