ABSTRACT
In a book aimed at shifting the way we think about the biggest environmental challenge facing global humanity, Mike Hulme (2009) made the rather surprising suggestion that it is useful to think of climate change as a ‘wicked problem’ of unprecedented scope and likely duration. This is because it helps us move from thinking of climate change as a ‘problem to be solved’ in order to see it as a ‘condition in which we are enmeshed’, Hulme wrote.1 The identification of ‘wicked problems’ as ones which defy any ‘true-or-false’ solutions, partly because they are commonly symptoms of other problems, was first advocated by planning theorists Horst Rittl and Melvin Webber (1973). Rittl and Webber noted that planners have to grapple with unpredictable human behaviour in trying to meet sometimes competing social needs and there is a touch of humour in their use of a term which suggests that some problems are too devious for us to tame. Some wicked problems may never be vanquished, the suggestion goes, however we can learn how to manage them better and not let them get the better of us. We will return to Hulme’s interesting perspectives on living with climate change later in this chapter, however, we will begin by focusing a little on how we got enmeshed in the climate change condition. This chapter suggests that it
is useful to think of three global challenges to sustainability as wicked problems and these are:
1 the emergence of human-induced global climate change; 2 the looming spectre of ‘Peak Oil’; and 3 the intransigence of global poverty.
