Not disasters that happen, but rather disasters that are averted

I

It’s easy to cook up disaster scenarios. Film producer, Sam Goldwyn, who, when asked about staging the Last Supper, exclaimed: “Why only twelve? Go out and get thousands!” Such is the low-skill toehold of many disaster scenarios.

It’s not just that we’re wrong about some disaster scenarios.

The point is that we are back to a key narrative discrepancy in crisis scenarios—between the stated urgency to do something even if it includes massive experiments, and on the other side the requirement that the planet is to be made reliably safe—yet both claims underwritten by demands of unpredictability at the same scale of analysis, the system level.

“If you want stability, you have to change,” but also: “Since you have nothing to lose, why not change?” This is said without full appreciation of that discrepant “you”—singular or plural, personal or impersonal?—in each statement. Such narrative discrepancies can’t be written off or talked out of. They are to be managed as the messes we are in.

II

So what?

You’d think that the costs to society of confronting limitless disaster scenarios is set by the dangers of ignoring disasters, like earthquakes, floods and fires, easier to identify and assess. More, claims about “globalization,” “financialization,” “disaster capitalism,” and the like as causes of disasters run the risk of diminishing the centrality of those disasters averted by and for real people in real time with real problems.

Such displacement leaves us assuming macro-causes or macro-unknowns are indeed the peoples’ chronic crises. The latter, though, is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios detail how these are chronic because people have failed to avert all their own dreaded events.