I
Many ecologists and environmentalists I’ve read and with whom I’ve worked insist that, when it comes to ecosystems and the environment, more things can go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong than right.
It is easier to mismanage an ecosystem than it is to manage it. Ecosystem collapse is more certain than ecosystem sustainability. Negative externalities in the environment are to be expected, positive ones not. Probabilities of large system failure and cascades are primed to flip to 1.0 in no time flat.
We must manage the planet’s resources better, but no one should expect technology to help. Economic growth is never a sufficient condition for improving the environment, while economic growth’s impacts on the environment are always sufficient for precaution. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, which means everything must be at risk.
Let’s call this standpoint, next-is-worse.
II
Of course, there are cases where next is worse. In March 1999, a colleague and I interviewed a well-known ecologist who insisted the Delta smelt would not “go extinct even if we try to wipe them out”. Then came the articles with titles like “the collapse of pelagic fishes in the upper San Francisco Bay-Delta”.
That said, this—realism, manifold anxiety, existential panic, dog-whistle alarmism—describes a world not made to my colleagues’ specification.
Nor is there a scintilla of recognition that my colleagues’ specifications to get us to do the right thing by way of the environment—namely, Stop!—pale and wither before the persisting record: Really-existing humans with real problems in real time routinely do not follow orders, even in the most totalitarian of regimes (as we now know to have been the case in communist East Germany and China).
Nor is there a scintilla of recognition that the major feature of their disaster scenarios aren’t the proleptic ruins, but the massive lack of attention to the multiple ways necessary to triangulate and increase our confidence about how specifically to respond. We’d be fools to expect geo-engineers to provide the descriptive specifics for their disaster scenarios. That can only come from others who have far more detailed counter-arguments to insist upon.
III
So, it’s no surprise when next-is-worse fails to create anything like a shared, collective dread pushing and pulling us to manage better.
Where so, how then can it be denial on our part to insist that all existential disasters pose difficulties, highlight inexperience, and emphasize the strategic interludes of surprise, both good and bad?
What can we be doing instead?
IV
Start by accentuating the contradictions.
Let’s agree today’s rotten core is modernity—international capital, fossil fuel, global urbanization, the Enlightenment project—while in the same breadth insist all this is best understood in the very terms of that modernity: Anything and everything is at risk; all thinkable risks are warnings; any could be catastrophic.
In putting the paradox this way, we are like those trying to predict a poet’s next poem from their current body of work.
A more productive approach might well be to ask: What are we getting from this habituation to it-always-could-get-very-very-much-worse?
One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out the details. Anyway, who wants more research to sort all this one way or another when foundations and government agencies suspect, if not already know, that “It turns out we’re not even asking the right questions. . .”
A more obvious reason for habituated next-is-worse-ism is the trained incapacities of fatalism. Repeatedly said: Post-apocalyptic novels—doomer literature generally—nail home that we don’t need widespread fear and dread of COLLAPSE to provoke remedy and recovery, because, well, far too many no longer believe in or see chances of either. Less repeatedly said: But that means you are still here, reading those very words.
V
But what’s so special about “still being here,” when those around us are saying next-is-worse?
A familiar example: COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, was for many (me included) a clear failure to do the needful in limiting temperature rise.
Even then, the crux is not: “Thus, alternative voices were left out and alternative politics side-lined.” You can no more essentialize those voices and politics than you can essentialize the conference. For it first has to be asked: Which COP26 failed?
Such a conference is never altogether there, if only because those attending in Glasgow are being themselves in one venue while being other selves in other venues there. COP26 is and was riddled with this intermittence and who’s to say the earlier or later versions around and in between October 31 and November 13 2021 are not its upside? Next-is-worse is just one venue. What about the others?
Not to see intermittence at work and its importance is like the actor playing Hamlet, who rushed through the bedroom scene with Gertrude by forgetting to kill Polonius.
VI
The fact that we are different selves at different times and occasions would be banal were it not for its imperative: having to listen more carefully to what these selves are saying in real time and across time. I have in mind listening to and for two positive sets of statements from policy types, namely, their references
- “with respect to,” “under what conditions,” “this is a case of”. For example, it’s risks and uncertainties with respect to these failure scenarios and not those that we should be worried about. It’s under those conditions and not these that we take action. What we are talking about is something different, it being a case of . . .
- “Here’s our track record…,” “Here are our measures of success…or failure,” “We’d be ok with these mixed results…”. Does what actually happened match what was originally proposed? Or, how does what happened compare to the success record of others in like situations? Or, what would have happened even had not the policy been implemented?
These statements (and variants) reduce to versions of “yes, but” or “yes, and,” and in so doing indicate the willingness and the ability of the speakers to identify differences that matter for policy and management, right now.
VII
Accordingly, am I the only one who trembles when officials, experts, and advocates say of a particularly tricky state of affairs, “We need to clear the table and make a fresh start!” Dangerous dumbing down is occurring when you hear this and the like from policy types:
- “It’s a win-win, so who can be against it?” (when everyone within hearing distance knows winners rarely if ever compensate losers), “We just need the political will” (when obviously we’ve had too much political will in committing to any and everything), “If implemented as planned” (when the entire point is you cannot assume any such thing); “We need to take back control…,” (when we have to manage precisely because we can’t control and never have been); and
- “It’ll pay for itself” (when costs, let alone benefits, can’t be measured, aren’t evenly distributed, nor collectively borne), “We must do this at all costs” (when what the policy types are really doing is refusing to tell you what they already know about the likely costs, including loss of lives), and “Failure is not an option” (when failure is always a very real possibility in complex situations having mixed results at best).
VIII
So what?
I remember a tense meeting in the midst of the 2001 California electricity crisis. A senior executive at state grid transmission center told the group: “My view is that we are jumping under the table and the earthquake is happening and what we have to do is to hope this isn’t a nuclear attack and that the rubble will settle and when it does, we get up and be the only ones around who know what to do.”
Now that is something we should be listening for and to.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 