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Why ‘Why’ Matters
A perspective from Melissa McCullough
My BFF Kathy tells people that I gave her the best child rearing advice she ever got: “children deserve a reason.” My theory is, if kids understand why you are doing or asking for something, you’re more likely to get cooperation and results. Just like this: “We hold hands crossing the parking lot because you are small, a driver might not see you, and you could get squashed.”
Admittedly, this did sometimes backfire. Knowing the Why, my daughter would negotiate anything: “Can I hold your skirt? Can I hold the cart?” But it served them well, and as adults, my kids thoughtfully analyze things like options, politicians, and policies. My daughter, in fact, ended up as a policy analyst.
Adults need this, as well. My experience on the Planning Commission was that sometimes people would get angry at us about votes when we truly had no choice in the matter. Sometimes, according to ordinance or state requirements, if certain conditions are met, you must approve it. Angry citizens would ask, “why didn’t you do X?” when X wasn’t legally within our authority. What this creates is anger, or, worse, a perception that leaders are not listening, when the outcome could not be avoided. In short, they didn’t understand the Why. (This is not to say that people don’t sometimes disagree about the “Whats”…but that’s a different discussion.)
Modern environmental problem-solving is not as simple as it was in the 1960s or 70s when pollution sources and environmental travesties were obvious. I have spent a lot of my 40-year environmental career explaining Whys because I believe citizens deserve a reason, too. However, many solutions, and even some problems, are quite difficult to understand. They may even be counterintuitive. This is because environmental and public health issues are so complex and the systems involved so integrated.
The research scientists at the EPA will tell you that adequate and accurate problem definition is the most important part of research. If you don’t really understand a problem—its root causes and its confounding factors—you will not find a solution. As a Town Council, that’s also critical. We do not have time or money to waste when we have pressing crises, like climate and housing, to solve. Assuming there is agreement on the need to solve a problem, knowing the real causes of a problem can set the stage for policy debates to decide what tradeoffs are acceptable for possible solutions.
There is a technique designed to explore cause-effect relationships, called “Five Whys.” The idea is that, by iteratively asking Why?, the fifth Why? should identify the root cause. For more complex issues or systems, certainly five Whys might not be enough. Or you may need branching lines of inquiry. But asking a series of why? questions will help you better characterize a problem and its causes. Let me give a simplified example for climate mitigation decision making.
Fact: transportation accounts for 40% of U.S. climate gases, the largest individual contributor.
- Why? Because of the number of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT for short) by Americans.
- Why? Because most of the places that we need to go daily are not accessible without a car, and transit is not practical in most places.
- Why [are places not accessible]? Because for generations, we have designed our places and our lives around cars, separating residential areas from other land uses, like daycare, grocery stores, healthcare, restaurants, stores, etc.
- Why? For a few reasons. Racial segregation, white flight, and “drive ‘til you qualify” made housing more and more spread out as populations grew. Then daily needs followed the housing. Then, more roads and wider roads built to “solve congestion” turned out to put sprawl into high gear, as people could afford a bigger house on a larger lot farther out and it was an “easier drive” to get where they were going.
- Why [isn’t transit practical in most places]? Because it’s too expensive to serve spread-out riders and destinations with transit.
If you think the root cause of transportation emissions is just because cars have polluting exhaust, you will work on making cleaner cars. In fact, this is what EPA did first, but then all that benefit was overwhelmed by the explosion of VMT due to sprawl. We did not understand a very important confounding factor, so we had an inadequate solution. If we had addressed sprawl decades ago, we could have avoided many pollution problems and saved forests, farms, habitat, species, creeks and much more.
My sister said once to me, “Melissa, not everything is a teaching moment!” My response was, “I thought we were just having a conversation!” But aren’t all conversations teaching and learning moments? Even if what I’m listening to is a story about someone’s kid, or someone’s problem, or what made someone feel really good. Those are stories about people’s lives, places and circumstances; they’re people telling you who they really are. Those are all learning moments because they help us to understand the Whys of the people and places around us.
I plan to bring this mindset with me to the Town Council. I know it will help me, and I hope it will be useful to the Council and our residents.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
