I

No one can accuse poet Jorie Graham of being hopeful about global climate change. There is not a scintilla, a homeopathic whiff, of optimism–enviro-techno-social-otherwise–in the poetry I’ve read of hers.

Which poses my challenge: Is there some thing, other than loss and dread in her four books of poetry, compiled as [To] The Last [Be] Human, that I can rely on or use in my own responding to the Climate Emergency?

To expect answers from poets is to make an outrageous demand, but that is what I’m doing here.

II

There are, however, easy ways to finesse my challenge. First, Graham provides instances where she could be wrong (“. . .how you/cannot/comprehend the thing you are meant/to be looking/for”). There is also no reason to believe her readers read her as she seems to imagine.

But that kind of by-pass fall shorts of what Graham is doing. It’s her sharp scalpel in getting to the bone and making it wholly matter that is my focus. Graham’s analytic sensibility shines through the poems’ dark prospect, and I want to stay with that sensibility.

III

One from many excerpts reflects this sensibility for me (from the first book, Sea Change):

                                                                         the last river we know loses its
form, widens as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever, 
                                                         so that it's not a 
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair, although
                                                         also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-
                                                         ground is bursting with
                                                         sunlight, inquire no further it says. . .  (p. 12)

There’s that tumble of words and turns-of-phrase that deepen a rush. Then they bounce off and back from the hard left-side margins and the right-side enjambment. For someone with my background and training, this is resilience-being-performed.

I see hard walls being repelled from and pushed up to, and sometimes through (as in the hyphen-less “dancefloor”). Not as though it were a hope, but rather as a toggling between everywhere necessary and never out of sight/site: a resilience for the climate emergency.

IV

A tic in her sensibility is illuminating: her intermix of macro and micro, general and specific, universal and particular, without an in-between gradient. Two examples toward the end of Sea Change illustrate this (here too breaking into her flow):

                                                . . . .It is an emergency actually, this waking and doing and
cleaning-up afterwards, & then sleep again, & then up you go, the whole 15,000 years of 
the inter-
                                                           glacial period, & the orders & the getting done &
the getting back in time & the turning it back on, & did you remember, did you pass, did
you lose the address again. . . (p55)

   . . .The future. How could it be performed by the mind became the
                                                        question—how, this sensation called tomorrow and
                                                        tomorrow? Did you look down at
                                                        your hands just now? The dead gods
                                                        are still being
                                                        killed. They don’t appear in
                                                        “appearance.” They turn the page for
                                                        us. The score does not acknowledge
                                                        the turner of
                                                        pages. And always the
absent thing, there, up ahead, like a highway ripped open and left hanging, in the
                                                        void. . . (p45)

Again—that rush of words, use of margins, turns-of-phrase that cut to a point—but what’s more notable to me is the no-middle between future and mind, gods and hands, the emergency and losing an address.

In contrast, I come from a profession where, when conditions are this complex, we look for the meso-level(s). Patterns and formations emerge for the policy analyst and manager that are not seen at the level of individual cases nor at the level of universalized generalizations. For Graham, the complexity is in that wide-open combinatorics of micro’s and macro’s. Her sensibility makes me want to explore that missing middle further.

Principal source

Jorie Graham (2022). [To] The Last [Be] Human. Introduction by Robert MacFarlane. Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA

“[Lucretius] imagines observing, from the safety of the shore, other people who are at peril on the storm-tossed sea. . .” Hans Blumenberg (1997). Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a metaphor for existence. Translated by Steven Rendall, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA

I

Hans Blumenberg, the German historian, underscores that being at sea was not the preferred state of affairs in early Greek and Roman times. That was the purpose of terra firma. Now even terra firma is compared to being anchored while in uneasy waters. In this way, being shipwrecked or falling overboard applies both to being at sea and on land.

Those who don’t drown outright try keeping afloat by grabbing onto whatever is at hand. Try to improvise a raft—or to be tossed up on the shore, itself now a raft of a different sort. If there is any longer term hope it is to render whatever the raft into something more seaworthy.

II

What does this mean practically?

Assume the raft we—that is, the survivors so far—have made for ourselves is a cobbled-together set of re-made critical infrastructures. As when retrofitting bridges and patching up levees are what’s left from prior failures and workarounds.

Why would we now leave this raft—this large-scale water system, this electricity grid—and start over again? Or are we to imagine that jumping overboard now means survival doesn’t also depend on improvising a raft from the debris already there? Clearly, we need different infrastructures, but it is still more reliable and safe infrastructures being sought regardless.

III

So what?

The chief implication is that alternative infrastructures said to make for “calmer conditions” (e.g., micro-grids at smaller scales) nevertheless involve their own adventures and risks.

That educated and informed people regardless stay at sea (as in earthquake zones) even if they can get away tells us something about their—and our—preferences for safety with respect to the known unknowns of where they and we live and work versus safety with respect to unknown-unknowns of doing otherwise.

Which, in case it needs saying, means the shipwreck we see from the safety of the shore is the least objective of them all.

IV

One last point. The “shipwreck metaphor” that interests Blumenberg is actually several. That is, in crises we all are like:

• spectators on the shore looking out to that storm-tossed ship; or
• shipwrecked survivors trying to keep afloat by clasping onto a plank or other debris, only later to be tossed up on a shore, if at all; or
• those who keep rebuilding the ship while at sea, storm after storm, since returning to port is not possible nor is finding any nearby shore.

Note that the significant shift from ship-as-wrecked to survivor-on-their-own. Efforts to restore critical infrastructure services, even if temporarily during immediate emergency response, become a key operational interconnection between the individual as unit of analysis and the infrastructure as a reconstructed unit of analysis. It is that interconnection that is glossed, perhaps often too vaguely, as “building in resilience” as if the next storm is as important as the current one.

“I grew up in the old oil country of north-western Pennsylvania. Learned to drive on steep, curvy two-lane roads that snake through the area. When you’re a teenage boy, that’s alright!

“Anyhow, I know something about driving too fast for the conditions. But I was nothing compared to my high school buddy, Kenny. He loved cars. There wasn’t one he couldn’t fix. And if he didn’t have the right part, he could figure out how to patch something together. None of us had his talent.

“Kenny ended up making a living driving around drilling and fixing water wells and installing pumps in these hills. When business was good, you’d find him deep off the back roads working. When things were slow, he’d be making up for lost time repairing the van or drilling rig.

“Sometimes he’d have to drive a couple hundred miles a day. He’d been on them in every season and every kind of weather, night or day. He always had people helping him. He did that for 15 years, and then one day he spun out, his rig went through the guardrail and down into the ravine.

“No one could believe it. Kenny really knew what he was doing – knew his van and rig, knew the roads, knew just how far to push it to get there with his load in time. Everybody had a different theory about what went wrong.

“Kirkpatrick, who owned the well company, blamed Kenny. ‘I mean, he was good, but always the cowboy. Liked to push everything to the limit, and then some more. I tried to tell him ‘safety first,’ but short of riding along, how could I know when he was pushing it too hard?’

“Kenny’s mom blamed Kirkpatrick. ‘It was that man’s greed killed my son. Always pressuring Kenny to cover more territory in less time. That boss had no idea what he was asking of my boy. Never once had he gone out on the road to see what it was really like. And that van he had Kenny drive was a piece of junk!’

“James Rathbone, running for county supervisor that year, blamed government. ‘Those roads were never designed for hauling heavy equipment. Traffic increased 100% in the last 10 years and we’re still trying to get by on small-lane roads. And where were the police? They’re supposed to enforce the law.’

“Del, a state trooper and one of Kenny’s oldest friends, took offense. ‘We barely got enough officers to patrol the highway. And besides, if anybody knew what he was doing on those back roads, it was Kenny. It was just bad luck that night – a patch of black ice? You can’t see that stuff until it’s too late.’

“Mr. Kirkpatrick’s son, Stuart, with his MBA, blamed competition – all those other drilling and plumbing companies that sprung up in the good times. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about Kenny, but there’s no getting around it. The name of this game is increasing the productivity of every man and piece of equipment out there. And, yes, my dad still has to cut costs. It’s grow or die.’

“In one sense, though, I think they were all right. The truck was old, the roads inadequate. God only knows what it was like to haul a drilling rig under all the conditions. Kenny was fast, and he took pride in covering the distance and finishing the job. But every time he did a little more, it raised the bar in Kirkpatrick’s mind. And the son was right. The company’s under a lot of competitive pressures.

“And Kenny’s mother was right. Neither Kirkpatrick nor the MBA-toting kid knew the first thing about driving, even if they knew something about the business end. For sure neither of them had experienced the driving risks first hand.

“But none of this is bottom line for me. Sure, it was an accident waiting to happen, but no one is talking about all the accidents Kenny and those with him prevented. We’re all in the big race for time and money and that takes skill. That means having very good drivers, especially when the roads have more traffic than they were built for and there are too few cops on all the roads that matter.

“We need more Kenny’s, not fewer, if we’re going to kick into shape this mess we’ve connected ourselves into.”

And anyway: Which root cause? Hegelian alienation, Marxian false consciousness, Weberian disenchantment, Freudian defense mechanisms, Sartrean bad faith, Orwellian doublethink, Gramscian hegemony, or Goebbels’s Big Lie? Or is the root cause, in that famous “last instance,” Kuhnian paradigms, Foucauldian discipline, or God’s plan, or that sure bet, money—or have I stopped short of the Truly-Rooted Root Cause?

Root-cause explanations are exaggerated judgments, each pretending an outsized clarity. Root causes wash out contingencies and their differentiations. What if “the root cause” is more contingency?

How about starting with the following?

The resulting loss of prosperity and destabilization, and even more so the loss of the ability to provide protection and security would benefit no one. Therefore, an immediate and complete opening of borders as well as an immediate shift away from the concept of citizenship towards new models of citizenship cannot be a panacea, because such drastic measures at this present time appear to be utterly utopian, given the numerous purposes that borders and the concept of citizenship undeniably serve and the disadvantages that could result from their abolition.

Yet the previously developed critique of the border and the concept of citizenship shall not be in vain. Rather, this critique is meant to highlight the need for gradual change.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/article/borders-citizenship-and-global-inequality-what-barriers-pushbacks-and-passport-controls-reveal-about-our-understanding-of-the-equality-of-humankind/55C2EA985F7E5BD97222CCC638CF7E1B

The author argues in particular that “the increasing number of problems of global scope—especially environmental problems such as the ozone hole in the past or climate change now—underlined the need to transcend existing borders,” adding that this and other globalization also “raised expectations of a gradual transcendence of borders.” Again, that highlighting of “gradual,” even in the climate domain.

What is it?

First and foremost for our purposes here, it is actionable granularity with respect to a policy or management scenario. I focus more on major crisis scenarios involving infrastructures and climate change, but as will be seen, I could be talking as well about any scenario focusing the success or failure of a policy or management strategy.

It’s tempting to equate actionable granularity with “sufficient” details for the implementation and operation of said policy and management. But I have something more specific in mind. I have in view the range of policy analysis and management that exists between the adaptation of policy and management designs to local circumstances and the recognition that systemwide patterns across a diverse set of associated cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.

Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty reduction to local circumstances and being cognizant that patterns may well emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty reduction and how these patterns differ from not only system poverty formulae but also localized scenarios based in these formulae. It’s this domain of knowledge of how to translate system patterns and local contingency scenarios—without any guarantees that reliable poverty alleviation will take place—that interests me.

The obvious implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty reduction cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract (more in a moment). Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.

Why does this actionable granularity matter?

It matters because a methodological problem arises when cases are treated as unique or stand-alone albeit no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case are embedded along with (2) the practices of adaptation and modification that also emerge along the way with in scenario formulation and pattern recognition. From a policy and management perspective, you can say these pseudo-unique cases have been over-complexified.

For example, a now-famous joint statement in the form of one sentence was issued by the Center for AI Safety: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” It was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures. Of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of artificial intelligence. But these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios. In so doing, they leave us to translate—that is, (re-)complexify—these scenarios anyway we wish.

I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism assigned to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem ends up prematurely translated as “wickedly unique.” Nor should we forget that how abstractions can also be wickedly unique, e.g., when political possibilities are foreclosed by abstracting the world into complexities everywhere colonized by the Climate Emergency (or capitalism, or inequalities, or. . .).

So what? Just what are we to do with respect to actionable granularity of scenarios?

Return to that word, “translate.” I am writing about the two senses of “translation:” scenarios translated from one language or worldview into another and scenarios translating a messy reality into stories with beginnings, middle and ends (even if the ends is an untidy in medias res). I’m sure that terms like Climate Emergency do not translate well across worldviews, and I am sure that current scenarios about the Climate Emergency are too often insufficiently granular to be actionable by way of highly variable infrastructural implementation and operational.

If it is true—and I have no doubt it is—that governments are failing to meet their own biodiversity targets, then are the targets granular enough to account for what constitutes saving this biodiversity and the steps needed to do that? Or better yet, are the steps detailed by way of adaptive equifinality, i.e., multiple ways to save, say, these species here and now? For that matter, why is there just-one-way-only in meeting a target? Why moreover is “biodiversity” species-orientated and not, say, “ecosystems” in this shared way of life versus “surroundings” in that other one?

More to the point, it is not possible to expect that same authorial voice translated across all accounts of “saving biodiversity.” Gone is any hope for what others have called the overarching “objective style of discourse,” that is, “a certain measured style that comprises perspicacious structuring of arguments, clear signposting, definite conclusions, systematic presentation of evidence, elimination of the author’s distinct voice and autobiography, lack of flourishes and digressions, avoidance of ambiguity, and other such stylistic properties” (https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/61/4/559/6402993).

Gone in other words is the assumption that the levels of actionable granularity reside in the objective style of discourse used in so much of contemporary scenario planning (note this is much more than an issue of a discourse being “scientific”). Rather that granularity lies, if at all I argue, in peoples’ really-existing practices based in their really-existing experiences and perceptions.

Again, so what?

For example, consider the practice of improvisation witnessed during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis on 11 March 2011:

In order to try to mitigate the effects of the accident, the plant’s operators working in Reactor 1 engaged in multiple acts of bricolage, diverting the functions of whatever was at hand to address the situation. For instance, as their monitoring system had ceased to function, they diagnosed the state of the reactor using sounds, and the colour of steam, as this was their only option. Likewise, as the water pipes inside the nuclear plant were no longer working, they had to change the function of a diesel pump so that it would pump water directly into the reactor.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10892680241256312

Here there was no workaround or alternative for the improvisational at the level of granularity confronted.

One policy and management implication of the latter particularity is insufficiently acknowledged: Our really-existing critical infrastructures, as criticized as they are, will be full of second chances. With or without Stop-Oil, infrastructures will remain central to energy provision and interconnectivity; with or without Sustainability, reliability and safety will be demanded across that interconnected provision. Technologies and system configurations will change, but even the keywords of radical versions of the Energy Transition—transformative, emancipatory—are redolent with the promise of second chances along the way.

What makes the second chances so important? For one thing the Climate Emergency portends all manner of illiquidity, not least of which are today’s infrastructures being tomorrow’s stranded assets. But “stranded” underscores the place-based character of the infrastructure. Stranded also implies the possibility of its other use(s), second chances in other words. One must also wonder if current Energy Transition scenarios are granular enough to take them seriously.

How do such findings differ from the what has already been found in the literature on implementation difficulties?

The notion that there is a knowledge domain of professionals who privilege systemwide pattern recognition for better practices and the ability to modify official macro-policies in light of local contingencies does not match well the micro-operations of individualistic street-level officials, change agents, policy entrepreneurs and progressive farmers in the implementation literature with which I am familiar.

In my reading of that literature–and I stand to be corrected!–the locus of implementation was and continues to on micro-operators—the fabled street-level worker, including the cop on the beat, the teacher in the classroom, and the caseworker on a home visit–who may not even see themselves as implementing (undermining, changing) official policy. For the street-level worker, the individual constitutes the center of gravity of service provision. Numbers and trends, so important to knowledge domain discussed above, are really not a major point; the worker’s relationship with the client is. ‘‘Indeed, the worker’s decision of when to conform to rules and procedures and when to break them and when to cooperate with authority and when to act independently is the essence of street-level judgment’’ (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003, 68). “Street-level workers do not see citizen-clients as abstractions—‘the disabled,’ ‘the poor,’ ‘the criminal’—but as individuals with flaws and strengths who rarely fit within the one-size-fits-all approach of policies and laws’’ (Ibid, 94).

Or to put the point in more positive terms, the notion of networked reliability professionals with special skills not necessarily prized or valued by micro-operators helps shift the locus of site-specific implementation to implementation systemwide.

---

Other sources.

Maynard-Moody, S., and M. Musheno. 2003. Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

For ease of distribution, copies of the guide based in material from this blog can be accessed at:

When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene

Addendum (December 2024)

Geoff McDonnell has done a systems schematic of the Guide at:

https://insightmaker.com/insight/3TjWXFI28TGV1KM7RKWXyz/When-Complex-is-as-Simple-as-it-gets

If public and open markets are no longer the main mechanism of distribution of goods and services, if the allocation of financial resources is subject to the idiosyncratic whims of a few gargantuan corporations, if Big Tech companies acquire a significant part of their capital for free because consumers do not own their data – that is, if rent has displaced profit in our political economies – then indeed, are we still speaking of capitalism?. . .That is, [this means] facing up with the fact that along with neoliberalism, the familiar toolbox of progressive politics (e.g. taxation, regulation and mobilisation), has also become passé – or at least inadequate for the challenges that lie ahead. Perhaps we must think and act more radically.

https://www.postneoliberalism.org/articles/what-comes-after-neoliberalism-big-tech-and-asset-managers-as-the-new-rentiers/

Or perhaps we just ignore such endings. There is no perhaps when it comes to demanding details for our next steps ahead.

If only policymaking were a clinic in close reading. . .

If only policymaking didn’t require competence at the edge of the burn pit. . .

If only policymaking didn’t color us skeptical. . .

If only policymaking offered a peak beneath the waves.

I can’t quote them because Heidegger was a Nazi, Pound a Fascist, Sartre a Maoist, Eliot an anti-Semite. I don’t read Foucault because he didn’t care if he infected guys and I don’t read that mystery writer because she was a convicted killer. I don’t go to baseball games because of the players’ strike way back when and I refuse to watch that man’s films because he’s said to have messed with his own kid.

I don’t buy Nike because of the sweatshops, listen to Wagner because he was a Jew-hater, or have a TV because it makes children violent. I can’t eat tofu because of genetically modified soybeans or cheese because of genetically modified bacteria. I don’t listen to Sinatra because he was a nasty little man or Swarzkopf because she was a collaborator. The U.S. government’s been screwed since Johnson and the Great Society (no, since FDR and the welfare state (no, since Lincoln and the Civil War (no, since Jackson and the Trail of Tears (no, since Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase (no, since Washington and his plantation slaves…)))).

I don’t trust Freud because he didn’t understand women, Klein because she couldn’t get along with her daughter, Bettelheim because he’s said to have hit kids, or Laing because he wasn’t nice either. I think we were never further away from nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis (only afterwards did Brezhnev insist on nuclear parity). Plus it’s a good thing Japan has lost decades of economic growth or they’d’ve been re-armed by now.

From time to time I’ve wondered if Socrates could go to heaven. Speaking of which, why is Adam painted with a belly button, where in the Bible is the turkey that keeps showing up in those pictures of Eden and Noah’s Ark, and for that matter why do shadows first show up in early Western art only? Do you really think historical Jesus worried about who licks what where?

Dying means my total annihilation: Too bad for eternity, I say—it doesn’t know what it’ll be missing. Plus, when I’m dead “I will always have been.” Still, little gives me the exquisite pleasure as knowing my secrets die with me.

Which makes me wonder: Other than the streets, where do squirrels go to die? And whatever happened to pineapple upside-down cake and Saturday drives? I have to wonder, did Wittgenstein read Rabelais: “Utterances are meaningful not by their nature, but by choice”? Can there be anything more mind-numbing than beginning, “In hunting-and-gathering societies. . .”? And just who did say, Freedom is the recognition of necessity (Hegel, Engels, Lenin, who)? E Pluribus Unum: Isn’t that Latin for “Follow the dollar”?

Whatever, every morning I wake up and thank heaven I wasn’t born a minority in this country. If I had a magic wand, I’d solve America’s race problem by giving everybody a master’s degree. I’d make sure they’d all be white, married, professionally employed, and own homes. (BTW, every adult in China should have a car; with all that ingenuity they’d have to come up with a solution to vehicle pollution.)

But then again, I’m quite willing to say that the entire point of human evolution is there hasn’t been any point worth speaking of. As for the rest, I suppurate with unease. It’s probably—possibly, plausibly?—wise not to think too much about these things.