Okay, so this anthropologist/psychologist named Gregory Bateson wrote a book called Steps to an Ecology of Mind in the early 1970s. He wrote that humans ought to combine the hard sciences of rationality with the "soft" world of perceptions in order to maintain survival of our species. This has implications for our inability to work rationally within our larger ecosystems.
Evolution of species doesn't occur without the context of the total external world-- we need the full environmental picture in order to understand the evolutionary unit. In other words, our "survival unit" is not our species, it is our species combined with the survival of other species that sustain us. We have trouble seeing this partly because we believe God controls the world, that we were made in the image of God, and that therefore we have divine right to control the world. About this view, he wrote,
"If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite."
Batesman went on to conclude that leaders need better ecological understanding: "The most important task, today is, perhaps, to learn to think a new way...And quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit."
Politicians should have to take a test that measures scientific understanding and moral aptitude.
