Out of the Land of Oz: the importance of tackling wicked environmental problems without taming them

Struggling with complex environmental decision making often makes us feel that only the wizard in the movie, “The Wizard of Oz” (Fleming in Wizard of Oz, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, California, 1939) can produce agreeable solutions. However, this need not be the case if we distinguish between the technical information used in decision making versus the process of decision making. Making environmental decisions is a wicked problem, meaning that values are imposed, whether or not we explicitly acknowledge or understand what those values are. Classic wicked problems are those such as how to choose among potential ozone control policies, climate change policies or developing a sustainability plan. In contrast, tame problems are those where there is a knowable truth. Classic tame problems are those such as estimating the ground level ozone level given source emissions and meteorology within a chosen spatial and temporal scale such as that stipulated by assessing compliance with the federal ozone standard. Lack of understanding that environmental decision making utilizes tame problem information while remaining a wicked problem is a barrier to finding policy solutions. Hence, we challenge environmental professionals to rethink their processes of decision making with the tame/wicked insight offered here.