Environmental and Natural Resource Economics and Systemic Racism (short report from Resources for the Future)
By Amy W. Ando, Titus O. Awokuse, Nathan W. Chan, Jimena González-Ramírez, Sumeet Gulati, Matthew G. Interis, Sarah Jacobson, Dale T. Manning, and Samuel Stolper
Mercifully well-written and short, this working paper summarizes in one place all that is wrong with environmental and natural resource economics as applied to real people with real problems making real decisions.
–If, as novelist Henry James put it, what is real is what remains, then the playwright Samuel Beckett’s “nothing” in “Nothing is more real than nothing,” is what remains—before or after—everything has been ironized?
–What’s to be criticized when the positives are those that make room for knowing more by knowing less, that at times what clarifies is blur, that good enough is to be naïve enough as an adult to see anew, that recasting categories of living and acting happens at the limits of cognition, and that thinking the hitherto unthinkable is an everyday extraordinary?
–It should be scant surprise that a species constantly recasting its past finds it difficult to predict its future.
–“Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.” Paul Valery
–The more you have to lose, the less you can take for granted. We are left somewhere between “Though to/hold on in any case means taking less and less/for granted…” and “to lose/again and again is to have more/and more to lose…” (Amy Clampitt from her “A Hermit Thrush” and Mark Strand from his “To Begin”). What to do? Elizabeth Bishop suggests: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster”.
–As one critic points out, reversion to the mean is not reproduction of the same.
–We’d like to believe that an idea isn’t responsible for those who believe in it, but that misses professed ideas reflect intentions, and intentions can be part of action.
–There is that sheer delight in turning catastrophism against the catastrophists. The delicious part of an otherwise dispiriting meeting on one-more-crisis comes when I get to add “. . .and of course there are the other things to worry about.” Heads look up, eyes dart, you can almost hear them thinking. If someone does ask—“What other things?”—I offer nothing explicit. We, well, can’t quite put our finger on what’s going wrong, this unease. . .
–They hanker after the old language, that of Baroque music or Mozart, and keep asking why we can’t have more of that now. Yet it’s not only that the language has changed, that we can’t go back, and that new language is needed for meanings pushed further. They also want more Bach because that way they don’t have to think about the new, let alone the changes in between.
–The idea was that critique would ensure an imagination that was ahead of history, or in our case, ensure change is in the race with inertia.
–As the law has no eyes (said Xenophon’s Cyrus), so too macro-design.
–They read less as crisis scenarios in need of details than grudges passed off as threats.
–You’d think that “radical” in “radical uncertainty” would require responses other than the same-old same-old. Yet in his book on the 2008 financial crisis, Mervyn King, former head of the Bank of England, ends up recommending the conventional: Radical uncertainty–King’s term–needs to be better incorporated in economic and financial theories and practices. In this way, “radical” is dumbed down at the exact moment when needed most.
–If, as they say, need connects everything, then rarely have we been as connected as we were when isolated from each other during the pandemic.
–It’s an odd kind of a-historicism to deny utopian possibilities because we live in an endless present that forecloses on anything like a future.
–Overdetermination: too much wind-up for the pitch thrown. Resilience: the play in a steering wheel. Progress: watching Sovietology fade away. Solipsism: the last stage of society’s polarization.
–To “see” the unknown unknowns means sensing ignorance through surprise and contingency. The opacity of ignorance leaves these traces and traces mean ignorance of unknown unknowns is never “placeless.”
–How can you have “proper pricing of risk,” if you don’t know the system to be managed and the reliability standard to which the system as a whole is to be managed? Only then, can you ask: How are the risks entailed by subscribing to that standard for this system to be managed?
–Utopians are, in my view, too often criticized for their optimism. Utopians, after all, are the ones more likely to ask: What kind of society designs its critical infrastructures in such a way that not managing them reliably is more costly than having to manage them reliably, all the time 24/7/365? How long can our reliability professionals provide just far enough and just soon enough what is just enough? No wonder utopians without answers want something better!
I
I first came across Frederick Scott Oliver,in a passage that still resonates from a 1955 lecture of T.S. Eliot:
But it should also be obvious to everyone from his personal experience, that there is no formula for infallible prediction; that everything we do will have some unforeseen consequences; that often our best justified ventures end in disaster, and that sometimes our most irrational blunders have the most happy results; that every reform leads to new abuses which could not have been predicted but which do not necessarily justify us in saying that the reform should not have been carried out; that we must constantly adapt ourselves to the new and unexpected; and that we move always, if not in the dark, in a twilight, with imperfect vision, constantly mistaking one object for another, imagining distant obstacles where none exist, and unaware of some fatal menace close at hand.
Does this all mean futility or what we called at that time, the quietism of despair? Not so, Eliot immediately adds: “This is Frederick Scott Oliver’s Endless Adventure.”
II
Even though his language is dated and some opinions rebarbative, Oliver’s The Endless Adventure, published as three volumes in the 1930s, is so contemporary as to make one weep. The book is out of print, so here’s a sampler of quotes::
III
Oliver defends politics specifically against university specialists (another contemporary resonance), and his comments about economics and economists ring true to this reader. Oliver does not defend all politicians: “It was in plain truth only a quack cure-all at which a cabinet of ignorant shirkers had snatched in its perplexity,” he writes.
Fortunately, Oliver takes us further than that. He also talks about political imponderables and chance, as well as inexperience and difficulty, as if they were the churn in that watercourse—the thalweg—at the lowest part of the valley along which we cross and whose waters we ford.
For an excellent introduction to a Taiwanese drama series–humor, mystery, investigation, a bit of horror, top-tier acting and chemistry–click the link below:
https://ww1.dramacool9.ac/oh-no-here-comes-trouble-2023/
I can’t recommend the twelve episodes (with subtitles) highly enough.
In the Guardian’s online Bookmarks today, the science fiction author, M. John Harrison, answers the following question:
How do you feel about the emergence of AI?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/m-john-harrison-i-want-to-be-the-first-human-to-imitate-chatgpt-wish-i-was-here?utm_term=6469c17386bac9427580944744a8948a&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bookmarks_email
I’d separate the thing itself from the boosterism around it. We’re at a familiar point on the curve when it comes to the overenthusiastic selling of new scientific ideas, where one discovery or tech variant is going to solve all our problems. I’d say wait and see. Meanwhile I’ll be plotting to outwrite it; I want to be the first human being to imitate ChatGPT perfectly. I bet you it’s already got mimickable traits.
I very much like the last part of that answer. A neat turning of the tables while cleverly not classic oneupmanship.
–But there is that narrative discrepancy, namely: to mimic ChatGPT perfectly. Current research indicates large language models, including ChatGPT, produce unexpected mistakes: “LLMs exhibit unpredictable failure modes,” a recent comparison study phrased it.
Now, to err is human and we commit all manner of mistakes. So in that sense a mistaken ChatGPT is already mimicking and mimicked by humans
–But it’s Harrison’s “perfectly” that should stop us.
Perfectly with respect to what? Perfectly with respect to how a black box large data algorithm gets the answer wrong? Well, that can’t be for at least two reasons. First, all the stuff about our brain having 86 billion neurons and being vastly more complex than said algorithm. Second, black box means black box when it matters, right now: We just don’t know how the current mistake came about–albeit LLM developers have the same remedy: more training of the LLMs.
–Harrison, though, is onto something very important, I think: What’s better than humans mimicking ChatGPT perfectly?
It would be humans managing (not just designing) a ChatGPT that reliably avoids mistakes it can’t otherwise prevent. That is, ChatGPT is managed in real time so as to correct unavoidable mistakes of its own making before answer delivery. The effect of management is that it, the LLM, does this correction just in time even with the current level of training. Now that wouldn’t be science fiction!
Source
Every habitable part of the earth, in our time, has been discovered, surveyed, and divided up among nations. . .The age of the finite world has begun. . . .
The effects are already immense. An entirely new, excessive, and immediate interdependence between regions and events is the already perceptible consequence of this great fact. Henceforth we must see all political phenomena in the light of this new situation in the world; every one of them occurs either in obedience or in resistance to the effects of this definitive limitation and ever closer mutual dependence of human actions. The habits, ambitions, and loyalties formed in the course of earlier history do not cease to exist but being insensibly transferred into quite differently constructed surroundings, they there lose their meaning and become causes of error and fruitless striving. . . .
Henceforward every action will be re-echoed by many unforeseen interests on all sides; it will produce a chain of immediate events confused reverberations in a closed space. The effects of effects, which were formerly imperceptible or negligible in relation to the length of a human life and to the radius of action of any human power, are now felt almost instantly at any distance; they return immediately to their causes, and only die away in the unpredictable. The expectations of the predictor are always disappointed, and that in a matter of months or a very few years.
In a few weeks, the most remote circumstances can change friend into foe, foe into ally, victory into defeat. No economic reasoning is possible. The greatest experts are wrong; paradox reigns.
There is no prudence, wisdom, or genius that is not quickly baffled by such complexity, for there is no more duration, continuity, or recognizable causality in this universe of multiple relations and contacts. Prudence, wisdom, and genius can be identified only by a series of successes; once accident and disorder are predominant, an expert or inspired game is in no way different from a game of chance; the finest gifts miscarry.
Hence the new politics are to the old what the short-term calculations of a stock market gambler the nervous spurts of speculation on the floor of the exchange, the sudden fluctuations and reverses, the uncertain profits and losses are to the old patriarchal economy, the slow, careful accumulation of a patrimony. . . . The long-pursued schemes and profound thought of a Machiavelli or a Richelieu would today have no more reliability and value than a “stock market tip.”
https://archive.org/stream/outlookforintell013551mbp/outlookforintell013551mbp_djvu.txt
Our challenge is to push Valéry’s truth further by finding the positive in the nine decades of complexity since then and now ahead.
I
We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications. Think of the latter as part of their backbone or lifeline infrastructures.
What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?
The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists relied upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that begins with the pastoralist system instead.
Framework summary
The three principal elements of the framework are summarized here and based in previous research on large interconnected infrastructures. Each element will be treated separately in the sections that follow.
The first element has two parts. Different types of base-level interconnectivity exist between the infrastructures and the pastoralist system. Think of the base as “normal operations.” Then there are the points at or phases during which the types and configurations of interconnectivity shift. Think of the abrupt event or incident that disrupts normal operations.
The second element is the criticality of real-time operational behavior involving system control variables, which are shared or overlapping at times between different infrastructures.
Think of a system control variable as actionable features of an infrastructure or system—e.g. pumping rates and flows of water, frequency bands for cellphone signals and reception, real-time adjustments in grazing/browsing intensities (including off-take). Such control variables are used to adjust the condition or state of the infrastructure/system as operational requirements of the task environment change. Obvious example: Land fallowed now for uses later. Sometimes, however, the control variables of different systems intersect, with important consequences.
Third and last, all of this is managed to systemwide performance standards that can and do shift as changes in interconnectivity configurations and control variables occur. Before, the borehole owner couldn’t preclude grazing by herders nearby or from afar; now the owner can by means of a fenced ranch.
In focusing on shifts in interconnectivities and performance standards, the framework highlights the strategically important role of inter-system improvisations with respect to changes in shared or overlapping system variables. Think of those bush markets emerging ad hoc to connect the livestock of the herders and outside buyers or consumers of that livestock during Covid lockdowns. Now turn to each element in more detail.
Base-level interconnections
What are the baseline interconnectivities against which to gauge subsequent shifts in the links between the pastoralist system and the relied-upon infrastructures?
With pastoralism systems being as diverse as they are, there can be and is no one baseline worldwide.
Not only are base-level interconnectivities context-specific, the notion of a stable baseline is called into question when the operative context is and has been dynamic. This isn’t just because of the disequilibrium ecology of drylands. Fifty years of inter-group conflict, worsening recurrent droughts and their changing path dependencies mean it’s ludicrous for a socio-technical ideal to serve as any kind of baseline to compare against. Added to which are the induced changes from intervening forces like those of markets, crop agriculture and state interventions over the last half century.
Ironically, this means the really-existing baseline for such systems is the shifts in interconnectivity, in our case with respect to water, routes and communications. The framework focus on shifts is even more salient for these cases,
That said, given the numbers of different pastoralist systems across the globe, there must be some whose “normal operations” includes predictable herder mobility, herd movements and grazing itineraries, more or less familiar as before. Even these baseline operations or distinct temporal/spatial patterns are interrupted from time to time by sudden events (indeed that is part of normal herder operations). To the extent that shifts in interconnectivity happen in these cases as well, the framework is also relevant.
Types, configurations, and shifts of inter-infrastructural connections
Just what are the different types and configurations of interconnectivity that shift?
By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities as well.
There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),
Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13570-022-00265-1
What’s so important, you ask, about the shifting mix of different types of interconnectivities–note also the importance of roads and vehicles–and their configurations?
The point is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally. The shifts may be occurring at the same time, not just over time, in the pastoralist systems. One thinks of the prolonged drought instigating multiple coterminous shifts. But it is important to recognize that technology and regulation also are major inducers (e.g., pasteurization requirements for wide-scale milk marketing).
Shared or overlapping control variables of different systems
For our purposes, two or more system control variables can at times overlap or be shared.
Consider first non-pastoralist examples. Because they share the same waterway, clearing a river passage for onward navigation and re-opening the adjacent port for onward shipments offloaded there are important to both. Overlap of system variables can also be problematic. Firefighters setting their firebreaks under more accessible rights-of-way, which are the same rights-of-way created for electricity transmission lines, can create conflict between backfires needed by the firefighters and the voltage and flow paths along the transmission lines.
You see exactly the same tension in pastoralist examples. Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries has been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. Real-time grazing or browsing of agricultural stubble along with the dung of livestock can be depicted as sharing the same control variables for herders and farmers.
The problem is that the former is sometimes portrayed as net-negative (at least from a longstanding nation state perspective), while the latter is sometimes thought to be net-positive (yes there are invasions from both sides, but on whole some farmers and some herders concerned are said in the literature to mutually benefit).
But the framework suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going on at the borders of the farm and/or of the country. More this negotiation goes largely unrecorded. This can include even formal activities like periodically renting out different pastures as a kind of shifting boundary work.
This is important because a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements is to make the duality of stationary borders and mobile herders unavoidable in pastoralist policy and management. Unrecorded they may be, but unavoidable they are. Rather than pastoralism offering up the prospect of a borderless world, the policy and management relevance of that duality can only increase.
Why? Because the two-sided tension is also found in many other cases of overlapping or shared system control variables. These cases go well beyond sedentarization examples of conflicting land uses. Other examples range from more benign livestock scarification and dispersal of tree seeds (but whose trees to manage?), through herders’ riverine crop production (but whose water to be managed?) and young herders in school while not herding (but what does the child more harm?) to outright land enclosures that entail “incursions” by the dispossessed.
It then should be no surprise that terms like “resource scarcity,” “elite capture” and “green grabs,” let alone other terms like “conflicts,” fall short in depicting the conditions under which systemwide control variables of two or more systems are made to overlap, rendered shared, or are to be improvised around by one or more of the parties involved. Indeed, the latter concepts enable you to reframe some “conflicts” differently, even more positively, e.g., an ongoing spatial confrontation of herders and farmers can serve as a useful buffer zone against (further) peri-urbanization or worse in some cases.
Shifts in system performance standards
If research on large-scale socio-technical systems is our guide, there is no one performance standard for large-scale critical infrastructures. The precluded event standard for livestock ranching regimes–the ability exclude others from grazing–is not the same as the avoided events standard–herders seek to avoid but can’t preclude shortages or closure in infrastructures they depend upon, e.g., water supplies.
There is, however, another relevant and very major systemwide performance standard identified from more recent infrastructure research: the provision and utilization of requisite variety, particularly but not exclusively during disaster and response.
The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.
Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.
Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables. Think rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought (e.g., a major rangeland fire occurs nearby). The importance of improvisations is again highlighted when it comes to interconnected system-infrastructure operations.
But what does this tell us about interconnected pastoral systems and their relied-upon infrastructures?
For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.
Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety that is actually going on.
So what?
The key policy and management implications are many and deserve a separate venue. Here instead let me focus on two upshots for pastoralist development that may already be familiar to a reader but which reinforce their importance via this framework triangulation: .
(1) In framework terms, what has been called “longer-term recovery” differs in terms of its mix of shifts, configurations, control variables and performance standards, with “recovery” exhibiting:
In other words, it is easy to see why so many people say about post-disaster recovery, “All of this takes time.” From our framework perspective, it is better to say that shifting or emerging interconnectivities extend time and duration as they include new latent-to-manifest interconnections and tensions that lead invariably to “it took much more time and money than anyone thought.”
(2) In framework terms, vertical and horizontal communication between and among pastoralist systems and their relied upon infrastructures are characterized by shifts, e.g.,
In other words, it is essential to understand when and how communication patterns follow from, rather than determine, the interconnectivity configurations. This means any temptation to impose vertical-dominant communications is to be resisted when shifting interconnectivities demand horizontally-rich communication.
Other sources
Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of
Birmingham
Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of Food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16
Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies
It would be a grotesque exaggeration to leave you with the impression that “method” is the special purview of policy analysis, let alone science and the social sciences. “There is no method but to be very intelligent,” poet and essayist T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I take him to mean “intelligence” being those unique analytic sensibilities we find in the humanities and fine arts. These too have policy relevance.
Read the better essays of George Steiner, John Berger, Adam Phillips—or if you will, Helen Vendler, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jane Hirshfield, Lydia Davis—and you encounter in each an analytic sensibility, sui generis. No need here for a collective or shared point of departure to understanding complexity’s implications for public and private.
Indeed, there are times when the very different analytic sensibilities posed by the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham and Robert Lowell achieve actual policy relevance. I say this knowing it’s outrageous to demand policy relevance from poets, let alone others in the humanities. But I suggest you also can read them and others that way.
Ammons and regulation
Policy types fasten to knowledge as a Good Thing in the sense that, on net, more information is better in a world where information is power. Over an array of accounts, A.R. Ammons insists that the less information I have, the better off I am—not all the time, but when so, then importantly so. (To be clear, he is not talking about “ignorance is bliss.”)
For those working in policy and management, how could it be that “the less we know, the more we gain”? More, in order to make our exercise here more interesting, what would that mean when it comes to the heavy machinery called official regulation? Is there something here about the value of foregrounding inexperience—having less “knowledge”—as a way of adding purchase to rethinking government regulation?
–By way of an answer, jump into the hard part—Ammons’s poem, “Offset,” in its entirety:
Losing information he
rose gaining
view
till at total
loss gain was
extreme:
extreme & invisible:
the eye
seeing nothing
lost its
separation:
self-song
(that is a mere motion)
fanned out
into failing swirls
slowed &
became continuum.
You may want to reread the poem once more.
Part of what Ammons seems to be saying is that by losing information—the bits and pieces that make up “you”—you gain by becoming less separate, your bits and pieces slow down, fan out, spread into a vital whole. We empty our minds so as to attend to what matters—emptying the eye to have the I.
So what? How, though, is this different from ignorance is bliss or, less pejoratively, seeking to know only what you need to know?
–When pressed by an interviewer, Ammons’s answer illuminates much about how knowing less is gaining more: “I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do”.
Imagine policymakers and regulators, when pressed, recognizing that not getting it right today places them at the start of tomorrow’s policymaking—not its end but its revision of even the categories of “policymaking” and “regulation.” Ammons, if I understand him, is insisting that in the compulsion to “get it right the next time around” there is more importantly a next time to make it better. Again, not just to make a specific regulation better, but to revise what we mean by “regulating.”
To recast (revise, redescribe, rescript, recalibrate) the categories of knowing and not-knowing is to make room for—empty your mind for—resituating the cognitive limits of “regulation.”
Jorie Graham and the climate emergency
No one could accuse Jorie Graham of being hopeful about the climate emergency. There is not a scintilla, not a homeopathic whiff, of environmental optimism, techno-social-otherwise, in the poetry I’ve read of hers.
Which poses my challenge: Can we readers nevertheless find something to move forward with from her recent poetry? Is there some thing that I can see of possible use in my own response to the climate emergency?
In answer, consider the lines from her 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. . .
There’s that tumbling out and after of words and the turns of phrase that deepen the rush. Witness though how the rush of phrases bounces off and back from, in this case, the hard left-side margins and that right-side enjambment.
Some might call her rush of words a compulsion to continue but for someone with my background and training, it’s difficult not to see this as resilience-being-performed in light of the dark messages all around. Like Graham, we make resilience happen.
Robert Lowell and alertness
“Design” too often assumes one macro-design the micro. Anyone who has tried to implement as planned knows how plug-and-play designs don’t work in complex policy and management, as contingency and context invariably get in the way. (For my part, it’s difficult to imagine two words scarier in the English language than business schools’ “designing leadership.”)
To see how this matters for policy and management, consider a late poem of Robert Lowell, “Notice,” and a gloss on it by Helen Vendler, the literary critic. Here’s the poem in its entirety, centering around Lowell’s leaving an asylum after a manic-depressive episode:
Notice
The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm –
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression –
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”
The doctor is forgotten now
like a friend’s wife’s maiden-name.
I am free
to ride elbow to elbow on the rush-hour train
and copy on the back of a letter,
as if alone:
“When the trees close branches and redden,
their winter skeletons are hard to find—”
to know after long rest
and twenty miles of outlying city
that the much-heralded spring is here,
and say,
“Is this what you would call a blossom?”
Then home – I can walk it blindfold.
But we must notice –
we are designed for the moment.
I take up Vendler’s gloss when she turns to Lowell’s last line:
In becoming conscious of his recovery by becoming aware, literally moment by moment, of his new capacities for the most ordinary actions of life, the poet sees that ‘we are designed for the moment’—that our consciousness chiefly functions moment by moment, action by action, realization by realization. Biologically, ‘we are designed for the moment’ of noticing.
–For my part, what Lowell is doing in the last two lines is also revisiting the second line, “We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm” and making this point: The designs put upon us by ideas and enthusiasms differ from the noticing designed into us in at least one major respect: We notice the ideas-that-design because noticing is not an idea. It’s an alertness.
Knee deep in noticing is not being knee deep in ideas or enthusiasms because noticing is a kind of watchfulness—“Is this what you would call a blossom?” If you will, alertness in policymaking and management is, methodologically, first and foremost an analytic sensibility, whether or not the textbooks in policy and management call it that.
–We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!” when it comes to saving the planet, we miss that the reality is somewhat the other way around: We manage complex critical systems as reliably as we do because the systemwide failure up ahead must be prevented. Focusing on what could happen by way of possible management to save the planet is not the same as focusing on what would have happened by way of actual management in saving critical infrastructures.
This means it’s more than of passing interest that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe we all are not trying hard enough. If we did, they want to believe, we all might have a chance to save it.
Yet it’s just as likely to conclude that, when it comes to managing like we do for critical infrastructure whose failure triggers widespread social dread, the planet is not that kind of system or system of systems. It’s not be managed or even manageable that way, even if there were widespread social dread triggered by the prospects of catastrophic climate breakdown and failure. Which there isn’t.
–It’s thus not surprising that those who refuse to “give whatever it takes to save the planet” justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed or have better chances, even while admitting the climate emergency we find ourselves. Consider one such example:
We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/122/1/181/319765/Taking-Political-Time-Thinking-Past-the-Emergency
Note this dissent has the merit of at least recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes to save the planet, full stop. Nor is the quoted passage a lone dissent. Others just as well insist the pre-eminent fact is that “doing whatever it takes” will be on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and impoverished minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).
–So what?
“In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive,” so wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.
How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if there were not alternatives?
–Let’s start with a quote:
Zambia defaulted on interest payments to some of its private lenders in November 2020 when private creditors refused to suspend debt payments. In February 2021, Zambia applied for a debt restructuring through the Common Framework, but little progress has been made on the negotiations as large private creditors, such as BlackRock, have so far refused to reach an agreement on debt relief. BlackRock, headed up by Larry Fink, is the largest of a number of bondholders who are refusing to cancel Zambia’s debt, despite lending to the country with interest rates as high as 9% (in comparison to wealthy countries like Germany, UK and USA who were given loans at 0-2% interest in the same time period) potentially making huge profits. Debt Justice estimates that BlackRock could make up to 110% profit if repaid in full. Meanwhile, Zambia is experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis such as flooding, extreme temperatures and droughts, which are causing significant disruption to livelihoods and severe food insecurity. Unsustainable debt levels mean the country lacks many of the resources required to address these impacts. This decade, Zambia is due to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis.
https://debtjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Debt-and-the-Climate-Crisis-Briefing-October-2022-UPDATED.pdf
It’s also been reported that only two nations, the USA and PRC, have GDPs greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock, whose recent assets have been around $10 trillion. It’s also said that the ten largest asset-management firms together manage some $44 trillion, roughly equivalent to the annual GDPs of the USA, PRC, Japan and Germany.
Now, it’s always good to check the numbers, be they for Zambia, the globe or points in between. But let’s assume the orders of magnitude are correct.
–Yes, of course, we could say that the current sovereign debt crisis could be better managed. Fair enough.
It would be more accurate to say that BlackRock could be managed for the better, because, well, BlackRock is actually being managed in ways the sovereign debt crisis can’t. (Think BlackRock’s C-suite, starting with Larry Fink.) Why then not start with BlackRock being managed differently? After all, it rose to an undisputed shareholder superpower only after the last financial crisis of 2008. Nothing is set in stone here.
–In other words, think of BlackRock as the global financial crisis currently underway and the “sovereign debt crisis” as its smoke-and-mirrors to get the rest of us to believe otherwise.
We know exactly who benefits from placing the blame on the Government of Zambia’s fiscal and monetary management, when the Global Behemoth BlackRock is managed even worse in terms of self-interest.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 