“So much is uncertain that anything is possible, which means everything is at risk.” Huh?

I

Many people with whom I’ve worked and interacted 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 its 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 is at risk.

Huh?

II

Let’s agree that this expectation of next-is-worse follows from the core of today’s modernity—international capital, fossil fuel, global urbanization, the Enlightenment project—while in the same breadth, however, insisting all this is best understood in the very terms of that modernity: Anything and everything is at risk; all risks are potentially scary; indeed, any could be catastrophic.

That said, people with these expectations are like those trying to predict a poet’s next poem from their current body of work. A more productive approach might be to ask: What are we getting from this habituation to next-is-worse?

One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out the details. Another reason is the trained incapacity that comes with fatalism. Repeatedly, the doomer literature nails home that we don’t need widespread fear and dread of COLLAPSE to provoke remedy and recovery, because so many no longer believe in either.

How are the rest of us to respond to these expectations? What can we believe and be doing instead?

III

COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, was for many (me included) a failure to do the needful in limiting temperature rise. But the failure was not that “alternative voices were left out and alternative politics side-lined.” For it first has to be asked: Which COP26 failed?

Such a conference is never altogether in one place and time only, if only because those attending were 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 other venues, where the networking and horizontal relations were underway?

Here, the opposite of fatalism is intermittence. No state of affairs is one-way only.