A few people know Alfred North Whitehead as the co-author, with Bertrand Russell, of an intimidating work on mathematical logic.  But his most lasting contribution may turn out to be the ideas about science and human society which he developed during the key period of his involvement with Goldsmiths College in the 1920s, and later at Harvard.
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Whitehead has been written out of the history of philosophy, according to Barry, but his work has now begun to be rediscovered, partly through its connection to the work of the influential French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and his ideas are becoming increasingly relevant.
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Barry believes that both the natural sciences and sociology suffer from the distinction they make between the world of things and the world of people, a legacy of their formation as disciplines in the nineteenth century.  The natural sciences fail to offer insights into human motivations, whereas sociology is weak in dealing with the natural world.  Another problem for sociology is its artificial distinction between the micro and macro levels: it seeks to develop big intellectual systems which explain everything in political terms, but these simply do not work at the local level. 
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He contrasts these approaches with Whitehead’s view of reality, in which process and relationships, rather than “brute matter”, are fundamental.  Whitehead’s approach encourages us to examine individual “events”, such as the recent oil depot explosion, in terms which transcend the distinction between the natural and the social sciences. 
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While it is too early to comment in any detail on the Buncefield event, Barry has some provocative insights to offer into a related issue: the giant Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline being built with the involvement of BP between Azerbaijan and Turkey.  Although BP and the environmentally active NGOs appear to be totally opposed to one another, Barry thinks both sides are, in a sense, part of the same conceptual framework.  Both sides, for example, accept the value of greater transparency but, in doing so, fail fully to address the importance of issues, about which it may be difficult or dangerous to provide public information.  Both sides have remained silent about corruption in the Azeri and Georgian governments.  The NGOs do not care to acknowledge this possibility - it does not fit with their tendency to blame the company for all problems.  And they appear to be equally unconcerned about the low wages being paid to local workers on the pipeline.  It is not hard to see that BP, for its part, may have its own reasons for satisfaction that both these subjects are off the agenda.
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Barry, in his work at the CSISP, has been pioneering an approach which searches out these and other unasked questions.  He admits that asking the questions, or even answering them, may not tell us what to expect in the future: we may not be able to avoid future Buncefields. 
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But that may be useful too.  It is time we acknowledged the limitations of our ability to make predictions.  We all demand greater transparency and openness of information these days, and this leads people to expect greater certainty.  But this may not be justified.  The demand for information drives government to make definite statements about the future even when there can be no certain knowledge - we should not be surprised, in these circumstances, when they turn out to be wrong. 
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To that extent Barry is against transparency.  But he has one piece of advice to politicians on the receiving end of searching questions to which they do not have the answers: have the courage to say “I do not know”.  Who knows: as Whitehead’s ideas work their delayed revolution, that may become the fashionable, as well as the honest, answer.