Inside Report for October 6, 2009

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 6, 2009 - Page: 9B

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If you already think you know everything, you’re less inclined to listen to new ideas or make adjustments when situations change. Recognizing that you know only a small portion of what you need to know allows for the ability to change directions more easily.

In a relatively new paper, Eugene Turner, a professor at LSU’s School of the Coast and Environment, examines how this type of “we know everything” thinking can hamper progress in large-scale planning endeavors such as coastal restoration in Louisiana.

“It wasn’t meant to be specifically focused on Louisiana,” Turner said.

Louisiana situations did serve as good examples of the concepts to which he refers, Turner added.

The paper goes on to assert that thinking you know everything about coastal restoration efforts — or at least enough to get started — doesn’t allow for questions to be raised about whether that understanding is correct.

Instead, the paper explains, it’s better to have an “ignorance-based-world view” where certainties are small and people are more open to new ways of looking at problems.

“I don’t think people should stop asking questions (just) to be more palatable,” Turner said.

In fact, this concept of starting from an “ignorance-based-world view” is how science works, he said.

“We admit we don’t know things,” Turner said.

Instead, Turner cited several examples in his paper of how the efforts to halt and/or restore disappearing coastal land in Louisiana have moved forward in a “we know enough” framework.

One example he mentioned is the use of the two largest freshwater diversions in Louisiana to push back salinity levels in some of the parishes bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

“Some wetland plants are, of course, stressed by salinity in laboratory experiments,” Turner wrote. “There are, however, no field-based experimental results demonstrating that fresh, brackish, or salt marsh plants are killed, or if killed, that a replacement wetland plant community more tolerant of salt does not take its place.”

Permanent wetlands loss is not an automatic result of saltier water, he said.