the timetable project

THE TIMETABLE PROJECT

John McHale

Center for Integrative Studies School o f Advanced Technology

State University of New York Bingharnton, N.Y.

The major problems and crises that human society now faces are not intrinsically new in our historical experience. Human development is a con- tinuous record of the struggle against hunger, disease, war, and ignorance.

The present gravity and critical nature of these familiar aspects of the human condition is their expanded dimension. Their vastly increased scale and magnitude has been compounded, paradoxically, by those successful ad- vances in the sciences and technologies that are the major means of com- bating them. By making man more secure against hunger and disease, we have added astronomically to the numbers of men; by shrinking the physical distance between peoples, we have increased the critical interdependence of all human societies; by communicating the material possibilities of a better life, we have enormously increased the expectations and demands of all peoples to share in our accumulated wealth and knowledge; and by the prodigal exploitation of our physical resources we have produced grave imbalances in our life- sustaining natural environment.

At the time, then, when we suddenly possess the developed skills and resources with which to solve many of our major human problems, they have, in turn, become seemingly intractable; and the recurring crises that accom- pany delays in providing solutions lead to frustration and conflict in major sectors of society. Disillusionment with rational means is encouraged, and an antiscientific and antitechnological bias begins to affect even the allocation of resources to those directions in which problem solutions might best be sought. This situation has been further obscured by the many conflicting ideas, plans, and programs for solution of major problems at the local and world level; such “solutions” often pay little regard to the actual, or potential, realities and limitations of the physical and human resources currently available to us.

Both the seeming “intractability’ of the problems themselves and mounting public pressures for more immediate solutions arise, in part, from the luck of a coherent and integrated assessment of the resources, facilities, and time that may be required for even minimal solutions to many of our problems. Some problems could be solved tomorrow by legislative fiat. Others may take one year, five, ten, or twenty years, to reduce to less critical dimensions; and there are, obviously, several problems in human society that it may not be possible to solve, or even mitigate, in less than two or three generations. It is also increasingly evident that many problems approaching critical magnitude at various local national levels, e.g. population, health, education, environmental deterioration, etc., can no longer be solved even on national terms.

In similar fashion, the scale of many of our global technological systems, e.g. production, distribution, transportation, and communications, has gone

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beyond the capacities of any single nation or group of nations to sustain and wholly operate. They require, and are dependent on, the resource range of the entire earth for the metals and materials of which they are built and the energies to run them-in which no single nation is now self-sufficient. The whole planetary “life-support system” is also increasingly dependent on the global interchange not only of physical resources and finished products but of the “knowledge pool”-research, development, technical and managerial expertise-and the highly trained personnel who sustain and expand this.

The scale and range of our technological intrusions into the planetary biosphere is now such that all large scale technoindustrial undertakings need, increasingly, to be gauged in terms of their long-range consequences and implications for the global community. In these combined senses, and at this scale, there are few wholly “local” problems that may be left entirely to the short-range “economic” expediency or temporal ideological preference of some exclusively national concerns or narrow self-interest groups.

The “problem of problems,” therefore, lies within this realm: initiation of a series of authoritative and comprehensive reviews of major problem areas and their interdependent aspects, together with a sober evaluation of the resources, facilities, and priorities that set the time and scale of their possible solutions within the existing and projected state of our knowledge. From these reviews and evaluations would also emerge a long-range predictive model of the “crisis-points range” within which various interrelated world problems may reach dangerous proportions in the near future.

Such a task, though seemingly overambitious and beyond the scope of our currently organized national and international scientific programs, is now most urgent. Whether it may be feasible or not within the present state of our knowledge and our capacity to organize and apply that knowledge on such a massive scale, it is essential that we begin now. U.N. Secretary General U Thant has, indeed, suggested that our effective margin for engaging in such cooperative global actions is limited to the next 10 years-if we are to survive our present dilemmas :

I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary General that the Membership of the United Nations has perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human condition, to defuse the population explosion and to supply the required momen- tum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.’

The highly critical nature of our current transitional period is such that supportive research programs towards such global action should be given the highest priority by the international scientific community. This is strongly implied by the theme of this Conference and volume, “Environmenf and Society in Transition,” and might be considered as one of the central study and research foci for the development of the World University, which is also being discussed here.

Research and documentation for the organization of such a collaborative global network for the study and solution of world problems was carried out during the “World Design Science Decade” activity,* by R. Buckminster Fuller and myself, during the period from 1961 to 1968. This work focused on the

442 Annals New York Academy of Sciences

assessment of the total energy, material, and human resources now available to man on the global scale and the ways in which these might be redeployed and redesigned to the maximal advantage of the global community.

The role of scientific task forces to spearhead such a global undertaking has been particularly advocated by the biophysicist John R. Platt:

There is only one crisis in the world. It is the crisis of transformation. The trouble is that it is now coming upon us as a storm of crisis problems from every direction. If we look at the historical course of our changes in this century, we can see more clearly why this is happening so suddenly, and why it has now become urgent for us to mobilize all our intelligence to solve these problems if we are to keep from killing ourselves in the next few years?

My specific proposal concentrates attention on the Timetable aspect of problem assessment. Though framed at the global level, it should be noted that such study(s) could, and should, encompass within its scope specific timetable assessments at various national levels. It is essential, however, that such “local” studies proceed from their position in a world context. Unfortunately, although much excellent work has been done in national planning both in the short and longer ranges, particularly during the past decade, it has inevitably been vitiated by unanticipated changes in the global context.

Because of the high degree of autonomy, more than 140 governments follow their own economic policy and do their planning with inadequate means at the level of the nation-state or even some lower level. This leads to unadjusted imbalances which grow much faster than the means and capacity to stabilize them . . . we need more than economic planning. Planning future technologies to tackle imbalances and integrate their results into the political machinery, governments and people, this should give the aggressiveness of mankind new goals.’

No mandate or institutional setting at present exists for the level of supranational assessment, planning, and goal setting that is envisaged here. The pioneer work of the United Nations and its ancillary agencies is still constrained by specifically political and national representation and the proce- dural directions imposed by these constraints. Other emergent transnational agencies and associations, multinational corporate organizations, etc., do not yet furnish a common constituency or advocacy group for such undertakings. The initiative must then be assumed de novo by those individuals, groups, or institu- tionalized interests perceiving the urgent necessity of doing so.

In summary form, the Timetable project would, therefore, combine:

(1) Realistic appraisal of the current global status of given problems in themselves.

(2) Systematic analysis of their causally connected interactions and relationships.

(3) Projection, in various time ranges, of the estimated crisis points of key world problems.

(4) Assessment of the human and physical resources and the development and potential capabilities available for the solution of the problems in the various time ranges and scales of magnitude.

( 5 ) Identification of value and goal priorities, options, and alternatives within the various areas considered above, and of their local and transnational policy implications.

Such an overall study would be grounded within a framework of the actual

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distributions, allocations, and flows of the physical world resource base and of the developed knowledge and technological capabilities available (or in projected development) for any preferred implementation of solution directions. This would function as a material balance sheet within which to set up the array of priorities, goals, and options available in any time period and would be so projected as to allow for anticipation of the consequences and implications of problem solution actions in relatively long-range terms.

In effect, what we are discussing is an emergency agenda for the world community! Although it may be suggested that such an undertaking is too idealistic and too far removed from present socioeconomic and political realities, it might also be underlined that we have no choice but to proceed on the most idealistic premises if we are to envision at all the basic survival of our world.

Ic tl I

FIGLJRE 1. Relations among human and environmental systems.

The overall “whole systems” for such study(s) should be one that encom- passes the interactions of the various subsystems in a manner that allows and accounts for their most indirect relationships and feedback operations.

In using such models we recognize that all of our large-scale problems must be viewed as occurring within a relatively small global ecosystem in which human activities have explosively increased as a major organic sector of the biosphere, particularly within the last century, and now assume a crucial role in the maintenance of life on the planet. Nature is modifled not only by human action, as manifested in science and technology-through physical transformations of the earth for economic purposes-but also by such factors, less amenable to direct perception and measurement, as political- ethical systems, education, needs for social contiguity and communication, art, religion, etc.


We should, of course, emphasize the wholly denotative convenience of labelling different parts of what is essentially a dynamic whole. When we deal with human activities, their complexity tends to force the use of simplistic models that can be fitted into some neat disciplinary forms. This can become dangerously misleading if we then assume that such problems can be solved within the artificial divisions set up for intellectual convenience. No social problem of small or large scale-and all human problems are axiomatically social-can be solved within the terms of any one discipline.

A wholly technological solution, however logical and seemingly efficient, may fail by overlooking some elementary sociocultural requirements. Con- versely, solutions conceived solely in socioeconomic terms may fail through lack of adequate technological considerations. Also, the lack of a systemic whole-system approach to such problems may solve one problem-only to increase the critical range of another. Many of our crucial national and international problems have been caused by short-range and expedient economic and technological decisions taken with little or no regard for their longer-range deleterious effects on man and his environment. These points may seem obvious, but many of our current dilemmas arise from piecemeal and unsystematic approaches to the satisfaction of human needs and emergency solutions of human problems in our recent past.

Major world problems themselves derive specifically from accelerated changes in the past century, when man approached an historical watershed comparable only to the earlier agricultural revolution. In terms of problem delinition and priorities, the continued disparities between the so-called advanced nations and the lesser-developed ones may be viewed as the gravest threat to the global community. The explosive rises in population, the pressures on food, lands, and other resources, the scale of wastage, disorganization, and pestilence now accompanying our ‘‘local’’ wars are also linked in due measure to the revolutions in human expectations that now circle the globe.

This disparity between have and have not peoples may also be defined as part of a growing ecological imbalance in which the hyperactive advanced economies extract more, produce and consume more, and produce more waste, than the lesser-developed; and because of the increased dependence of the more advanced countries on raw materials from the lesser-developed countries, the former now exist in a directly parasitic relationship.

In terms of energy use, the more fortunate individual in the industrial countries consumes more than 50 times that of his counterpart in the poorer regions-and contributes in due measure much more than 50 times the byproduct pollutants now critically affecting the global environ systems.

Overall, the advanced countries in the past decade consumed 77 percent of all the coal, 81 percent of the petroleum, and 95 percent of the natural gas for less than one quarter of the world’s population; one nation alone, the United States, used one-third of the world’s total industrial energy and consumed approximately 40 per cent of the world’s output of raw materials.

In round terms, approximately 20 percent of the world’s population currently enjoys 80 percent of the world’s income and uses more than half of all the earth’s resources, producing a concomitant balance of the biospheric pollutants that have become critically apparent in the past period.

This gap between rich and poor has other salient features that make it one of the most critical problems facing man in the next decade. When treated in terms of population and food, the widening gap has even more threatening


connotations. Present world population totals roughly 3.5 billion, and the current rate of increase about 1.8 percent per year will double world population in just 30 years, i.e., an agreed median estimate for 6 billion people by the year 2000. More than 80 percent of the current increase of population will be in those world regions that now have inadequate food supplies: Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

So the range of crisis points in terms of the population explosion alone is that not only does this doubling within one generation mean not only a necessary doubling of food supply but, if other material standards are to be achieved as well, it will require a doubling, and tripling, of housing, of city sizes, highways, consumer goods, etc., with their equivalent expansion of industrial materials extraction, production, and distribution, which, in turn, will neces- sitate more than tripling the energy consumption of the various fuels-and so on! In terms of current socioeconomic organization, the byproduct pollution and deterioration of the world environment might be near catastrophe.

Though much attention is given to closing the gap between rich and poor nations in traditional terms, through foreign aid, favorable trade balances, etc., it is rather sobering to consider more realistically what this means in material-resource-usage terms. To bring the total world population up to an advanced standard of Western material consumption would require, for example, more than five times the present world production of metals and minerals, which is far more than we can attain with current levels of materials and energy-conversion capacities.

Using one example-extending full-scale electrification to the lesser developed nations-we may note that the average use of copper in the industrial- ized nations is approximately 120 pounds per capita. The increase of even one pound per capita consumption for full-scale world electrification would require a 36 percent increase in world copper production.

In terms of the energy required for such living standard increase, we may underline that in dealing with higher metals extraction and use from increasingly lower-grade ores, the energy required for this alone would be overwhelming, i.e.,

The conclusion to be drawn is that 5 billion persons living at present U.S. standards would require 25 times as much energy as the US. does today . . . (and) at 25 times the present U S consumption of coal, oil, and gas the human race would bum up the earth’s estimated reserves of fossil fuels not in a matter of centuries, but in a few decades!

Clearly we face many rigorous limitations on closing the gap between the rich and poor nations. Given our developing scientific and technological capabilities, it is possible, but the approaches must be examined more realistically than in terms of pious hope and traditional practices. Such gap closing is only one facet of the world problem. Even when we refer to the so-called advanced nations as enjoying higher standards of living, the quality of life itself is in question where such societies are already faced with severe dislocation, deterioration, and obsolescence in critical areas of their socioeconomic and political structures. Many of their internal institutions are archaic, strained toward breakdown, and their physical environments are still suffering from the backlash of the intial developmental phases of unrestrained industrial exploitation.

And, although we refer glibly to advanced scientific and technological


societies, not one of these yet has approached the beginnings of what might be termed a “scientific” society, i.e., one whose motivations, goals, and orienta- tions are congruent with and permeated with the scientific outlook in the larger sense.

Returning more explicitly to the Timetable project, I would emphasize that such studies should not be confined within traditional disciplinary perspectives or within conventional “single-track” planning programs. The scale and range of problems the project is intended to confront, problems that are highly char- acteristic of the period itself, have a hitherto unknown degree of complexity. It will require the development of a new perspective and approach to the planning function in itself, i.e., “planning which cuts across a multitude of dimensions inherent in such a system-in particular, social, economic, political, technological, psychological and anthropological dimensions-has become known as integrative planning. Integrative planning is, above all, planning in terms of the quality of life.” 7

In light of the demand for relevance in the university structure and for a deeper commitment to problem-focused educational programs, this type of project may serve ideally as a nucleus for reorienting various aspects of university training. The aims of the project itself and the cross-disciplinary work that it will entail by both faculty and students should give a renewed sense of social purpose and of a deeper long-range involvement and commitment to the larger society.

Obviously, as framed in this brief paper, such a project could occupy a great number of professional experts for a long time. Its more pragmatic implementation in combination with the educational process itself may be the most efficacious way to begin and to take direct, gainful advantage of:

(1) A. The direct experience in problem-oriented education that would be derived from involvement in such a study by both graduate and undergraduate students in the university.

B. The postgraduate interdisciplinary work it may afford to a smaller number of those professionals in various fields-who would consti- tute the core staff.

C. The individual and collective expertise and experience available through a distinguished advisory board that would also assist in, and guide, the project, and through the collaborative involvement of a number of key institutes and organizations, both in the U.S.A. and abroad.

This initial pilot phase will occupy the first two years of the study. At the conclusion of this period its findings may then be assessed for the feasibility of continuing the study in greater detail and range, via a collaborative network of other centers and organizations on a larger national and international basis.

( 2 ) A. Relevance to “Social Navigation”

Aspects of specific social and educational relevance.

(a) General social awareness and understanding of the problems accompanying the accelerated changes in the past century has not kept pace with the changes themselves. Attention has been


most easily focused on the more newsworthy aspects of local tensions and societal crises that are, usually, the surface mani- festations of larger problems rather than prime causal agencies. “Literacy” concerning the purview and perspective of larger issues has been inadequate and productive of insecurity and social tension.

(b) The conduct of social policy under these conditions has, in many cases, been forced into continuing postures of crisis management. Decision making at the regional, national, and international levels has specifically lacked the longer-range social navigation aids and “early warning” systems that might have made for smoother transitions in critical change areas and allowed for the degree of anticipatory long-range planning necessary to our forms of complex sociotechnological society. The scale of human “intrusion” into the environment has reached critical magnitude only in the past century-and the majority of institutional arrangements have evolved in earlier periods, when the time, scale, and margins for error were much greater.

(c) In recent years, this awareness of inadequacy in our “societal feedback” and anticipatory control systems has led to the proposal and development of various types of longer range “social accounting” and forecasting, etc. An example of the most recent of these is the “Social Indicators” movement.* The inauguration of the National Goals Research Staff at the highest legislative level was also a further manifestation of the urgent need to increase integral social awareness of the complexity, long range consequences, and implications of all aspects of the local society’s problems and to focus attention on the need for more adequate measures of social development within a larger framework of specific goals and values and their policy options.

(d) The Timetable study should be viewed within this outlined context of societal relevance as attempting to develop a more precise overview and awareness of the interrelated complexity of our major problems and to communicate the time, range, and scale of their critical proximities. Its findings would, therefore, be addressed in various forms to the largest audience, and its ongoing synthesis of social navigational trend information would be of continuing value to other agencies and institutions engaged in other problem-solving and goal-definition areas.

B. The educational relevance of such a study, as conducted within the university, with a relatively large group of students, lies in its provision of an opportunity to confront “problem-oriented education” in an innovative manner that would allow students to work at such a study in an active research-team project design rather than in their customary passive course-taking role and that would encourage the development of a genuine transdisciplinary educational base that would draw on, for example, a generalized knowledge of the basic sciences-social, as well as physical, chemical, and bio-


logical-and of the ways in which these contribute to the overall conceptual whole of the study. Assessing the scale and magnitude of human trends in the past period would lead to involvement with socioeconomic, scientific, and technological histories and case studies in a somewhat different manner than through more specialized course work in these areas.

Considerable attention would also be given to the current range of forecasting methods and techniques and to their validation and practical use, for example, in ongoing policy decisions in various problem areas. Students would also be introduced in a real-work situation to the various sophisticated systems- analysis and forecasting methods available. The compilation, indexing, and cod- ing of human and physical-resource base information will require student work teams to review and develop efficient information storage, access and retrieval -including E.D.P. systems and computerized techniques.

Because the presentation of the results of the study would be designed for a variety of audiences, there would also be the concomitant exposure to, and use of, the range of communications media that may be employed for different audience ranges and purposes.

In these various ways, the educational framework of this study would also be unique in that the students would be initiating and organizing their own work-group situation and allocating various organizational member func- tions; directly consulting with, and being exposed to, various individuals and authorities in the university, industry, and government; and coordinating their own work internally in close collaboration with other groups working in contingent areas.

Assuming that the above &&year phase was confined to graduate students, one could in the second year of the program use a multiplier effect to seek the largest feasible real involvement of undergraduates by attaching to each graduate researcher a number of undergraduate students who would then form an extended group engaged through seminars and direct work in the ongoing program. In this fashion the project could be gradually expanded to become an important self-generating focus of creative involvement for the university at large. A not inconsiderable aspect of such direct involvement and con- frontation with world problems in a systematic way is that it would provide meaningful answers to the searching and often turbulent questions that are today asked both of the university and of the society.

References

1. Thant, U. 1970. Introductory remarks to “The Challenge of A Decade, Global Development or Global Breakdown,” Prepared for the U.N. Center for Eco- nomic and Social Information by Robert Theobald.

2. Fuller, R. B. & J. McHale. 1963. Doc. 1. Inventory of World Resources Human Trends and Needs. Fuller, R. B. 1964. Doc. 2. The Design Initiative. Fuller, R. B. 1965. Doc. 3. Comprehensive Thinking. McHale, J. 1965. Doc. 4. The Ten Year Program. Fuller, R. B. 1967. Doc. 5. Comprehensive Design Strategy. McHale, J. 1967. Doc. 6. The Ecological Context: Energy and Materials.

3. Platt, J. R. 1969. What we must do. Science 166: 1115-22. 4. Menke-Gluckert, P. 1969. Proposals for an international program for joint tech-


nological endeavors for peaceful purposes, I n Mankind 2000. R. Jmgk and J. Galtung, Eds. Oslo Universitsforlag. Oslo, Norway.

5. A more detailed review and analysis of these problems may be found in the World Facts and Trends booklet prepared for this Conference by the author, and staff of the Center for Integrative Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton. New York.

6. Population Bulletin No, 2. Vol. XXVI. 1970. Population Reference Bureau, Inc. Washington, D.C.

7. Jantsch, E. 1969. Integrative Planning for the “Joint Systems” of Society and Technology-The Emerging Role of the University. Paper for Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

8. McHale, J. 1969. Science, technology and change. In Social Intelligence for America’s Future-Explorations in Societal Problems. Bertram M. Gross, Ed. Allyn and Bacon, Inc. Boston, Mass.

9. Steinhart, J. S. and S. Cherniak. 1969. The Universities and Environmental Quality-Commitment to Problem Focused Education, A report to the President’s Environmental Quality Council. Office of Science and Technology, Executive Office of the President.

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