I

During her last years, artist Joan Eardley (1921-1963) painted seascapes at Catterline, a fishing village on Scotland’s coast. I especially like her The Wave (1961), Seascape (Foam and Sky, 1962), and Summer Sea (1962). What intrigues are the recurring smudges of light and cloud—center or just off center, at or above the horizon. (In other paintings, her glimmers are recognizably moon, sun, blue sky, or sea-spray.)

Four examples give an idea of what I’m talking about (mindful here of the variable quality of digital reproductions):

My eye locks on the rush and scatter of waves, but I’m distracted by those lit clouds above.

I end up thinking about the smudges and glimmers, where this thinking is itself a distraction—here the distraction of leaving the painting too early. I return and the clouds are luminous and I wonder, what kinds of reflections do they cast on the seascape below, or on me, out of sight?

II

This version of a sensibility is more like the matrix of conscious connections that would not have otherwise been made were it not for the distraction and an attentiveness to that distraction.

III

Let’s see if we agree and can push the point further.

Below are links to three brief performances. The clips show performers and music taking place on stages of sort and sorts of instruments. I wager you’ve not seen the clips before or imagined something like them in this sequence.

I’ve chosen them because the individual pieces seem to reflect–and reflect on–one another, e.g,, Kyung Namchul’s fingers moving across the strings parallel the hands and feet of Denis Matvienko and Leonid Sarafanov moving across the floor parallel Lin Yi’s fan and body flicking together.

(I claim no copyright privilege over the below.)

The sequence serves as one intertext: Sarafanov plucks floor and air, Kyung flicks the strings, Lin Yi dances the fan. Each is inscribed onto the music. Each illuminates the other, and each-together reflects back onto me, its out-of-sight viewer.

That sensitivity feels very much like a sensibility to me, while cognitively the resonance is very much like reflection. Refracted through the brain-prism, it is difficult to tell if what’s written is “live” or “love,” “hype” or “hope,” “could” or “would.”

I believe in a politics of complexity. One which you cannot homogenize or leave undifferentiated. A politics reminding us that what works is often at the smaller scale, where the gatherers of information are its users. A politics that starts with cases in their own right. A politics that resists getting lost when scaled up but compels asking at each scale, What am I missing right in front me?

A politics where no matter how tightly-coupled other things are, people’s stories are not as connected. A politics that insists if you believe everything is connected to everything else, then nothing is reducible to anything else, and if you believe both, then the starting point is not interdependence or irreducibility, but the kaleidoscopic granularity in between. If everything is connected, not everything adds up.

As I remember the too-ing and fro-ing over the introduction of Bt cotton in India, saving on insecticides was the putative plus and runaway GM crops its negative. I know nothing about the subsequent record but suspect that the findings must be mixed and differentiated by region and other demographics.

All this came back to me when I read the following passage describing a recent conference paper on Bt cotton:

Ambarish Karamchedu presented on Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India. Proponents of this ‘technical fix’ position GMO crops as a triple win. India has semi-arid and arid areas where rural poverty is concentrated, with an intense monsoon season (3-4 months), making farming a challenge. BT cotton introduced around 1995, thrives here. India is the biggest cotton cultivator and Bt cotton is grown by 7 million smallholder farmers, 66 percent in semi-arid areas with poor soils and low rainfall prone to monsoon. In Telangana, 65% of farmers across all classes produce BT cotton, with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline. Failure of farmers who face increased input prices have to resort to non-farm incomes. The triple win technological fix narrative perpetuates and exacerbates the problems it seeks to solve, and benefits farmer institutions rather than enriching farmer knowledge and practice.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VfvjJlxB9VPKQj55dNbZ_VH6oPi2IEVd

It’s that “with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline” that grabbed my attention.

Did anyone predict that, be they proponents or opponents of Bt cotton?

This matters, because in the absence of any such prediction, why not also conclude: “Well, five years is five years more than expected, right?”

–Many, including myself, argue that, when it come to contemporary critical infrastructures, there is need to manage latent vulnerabilities before they become manifest. The example is a set of cross-infrastructure interconnectivities that are invisible to those responsible until a disaster makes them all too evident.

There are however two other features associated with latency than require their own attention: dormancy and delay. The latent vulnerabilities, while inactive, may be gestating or altering. In addition, the length of delay in managing latency ahead must also be important to the identifying and achieving, or not, error avoidance.

–While it is common to use “control” and “manage” interchangeably, I’ve tried to make a point about that infrastructure operators seek to manage precisely because they can’t control. That is, they increase their process options as away of keeping output variance low and stable, given they can’t control a widening input variability.

But it also seems important to distinguish “manage because you can’t control” from “control that is ever about to slip away or disappear.” How so?

The more you have to lose, the less you can take for granted. That leaves us 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 in “One Art”: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster”.

–“Why don’t some things scale easily? Scaling up our collective response to climate change has been notoriously difficult because people neither agree on problem definitions nor solutions; because the effects of climate change and mitigation efforts translate into different real-world experiments depending on location; and because different constituencies in the global political economy don’t agree on how to value what. Any site where scaling is made to look easy should thus raise red flags about a likely lack of comprehension or inclusiveness of perspectives.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063127211048945)

–Globalization, marketization and commodification have indeed become lay path dependencies. But the answer to What-Happens-Next in path dependencies can only be, well, more path dependence. The more helpful point here is that different path dependencies when cast as scenarios are also represented via different and more-or-less granularity.

I

The admonition to manage ahead latent interconnectivities before they are triggered into manifest ones by a disaster is easier said than done. What are the practices to do so? Mitigations like retrofitting a bridge, installing automatic shut-off valves, 2 week readiness supplies in advance of an earthquake are examples. So too are table-top exercises, increasing one’s contact list for emergencies, and advanced contingency planning.

Each of these comes with no guarantee that they will actually mitigate once the disaster hits. It might be useful, then, to start with what is guaranteed to happen and see if that offers insights in what to do beforehand and afterwards.

II

One guarantee when major disaster hits: Latent interconnections unmanaged beforehand, particularly those that are invisible or dormant, necessitate improvisations in immediate emergency response afterwards. That is, disaster is the only way these vulnerabilities become visible for management, if any.

Obviously, not all latent interconnectivities are invisible beforehand. To bring to light what can be made visible and manage ahead for them is the function of contingency planning, table-tops, joint drills and other mitigations, like retrofitting. The only thing I have to offer here based in our Oregon and Washington State research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake is that a number of interviewees did not have specific response scenarios for their own departments or units.

This lack of granularity is understandable (i.e., the more specific the scenario the more likely it is wrong about actual events unfold), but it makes some M9 discussions, in the words of one state infrastructure coordinator, “theoretical”. To avoid that, increased granularity in what-if scenarios seems necessary in managing for vulnerabilities that are not hidden out of view. Think again of table-tops, but this time around multiple what-if scenarios and interconnections.

III

But what to do beforehand for those cases where latent vulnerabilities are altogether unknown until disaster makes them manifest?

One answer follows from the guarantee that, when it comes to major disaster, prior latencies are joined at the hip with subsequent improvisations. Managing ahead means the latter are to be more doable and effective. I think immediately of cross-desk or cross-position training, e.g., control room dispatchers have also trained on the scheduler’s desk or water department staff can clear a major road even if the roads department staff have priorities elsewhere.

But it must also be recognized that some improvisations would not happen, cross-training or not, without the disaster. One state coordinator involved in communications management during emergencies told us about convening an online group of competing companies and infrastructure providers:

During a winter storm we had a utility or provider say we’ve got fiber cuts in this area, we don’t have the fiber to replace it in that area, our resources are in this other area—that allowed us to look at the group and say now is the time for some teamwork: Can anyone else solve that problem and be a good team member? And we’ve seen a lot of that sort of problem-solving manifest among the agencies with very little input from us. Another example might be a cellular carrier who is a competitor of another carrier going “Hey, we’re going to fill our generator, can we top off your fuel tank while we’re up there?. . .But I don’t think [those kinds of cooperation] would occur if we didn’t coordinate it and get everybody on the same call and provide a platform for them to kind of air those sorts of things.

Disaster shifts the interconnectivity configurations of staff and infrastructures not only in ways that open up opportunities to improvise but also in ways that make any such missed opportunities mitigable errors to be avoided.

IV

So what, practically?

Many interviewees reiterated they have no idea who or how many of their staff will be able to resume work immediately after the M9 earthquake. “The first 72 hours and you’re still trying to figure out who’s alive out there and those who can communicate,” said a state emergency manager. In other words, referring to “the M9 event” is misleading if it’s taken to imply one event and not thousands or more of them unfolding unpredictably.

One major implication is that it’s better to assume infrastructure cascades are part of the unfolding nature of the M9 earthquake, where just-in-time joint improvisations play an important role in addressing those cascades. Far too often “inter-infrastructure cascades” are assumed–and not just by modelers–to be instantaneous and unmanageable when in fact they are delayed and open to human intervention.

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For managing latencies ahead, please also see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/03/managing-ahead-for-latent-risks-and-latent-interconnectivity-2/

From our framework’s perspective (Roe and Schulman 2023), the key feature of a “trade-off” is that it is an inter-relationship between parties, more precisely: an interconnectivity between them.

Economists tell us more guns mean less butter, other things equal. Say this produces X amount of guns and Y amount of butter. But “change one causes the other to change” is only one type of interconnectivity, in this case sequential. Assuming both guns and butter require infrastructures to produce and distribute means that other types of interconnectivity could as well explain arriving at X and Y. For example, the parties reciprocated and so ended up there; or someone from the outside mediated the interchange between the parties, leading to those joint values for the time being.

We and the economist still see X guns and Y butter, but from our interconnectivity framework perspective, it matters greatly what type of interconnection that trade-off is (i.e., sequential, reciprocal, mediated). Two examples of key concepts in emergency management help illustrate why thedifferences matter:

1. Post-Disaster Evacuations. From our framework’s view, evacuations of people from a disaster area are efforts to shift the demands for major infrastructural interconnectivities from that area to sites where those demands can be met through interconnections involving electricity, water supplies, telecoms and other lifeline infrastructures.

This means that there is difference relevant for policy and management between a disaster area now without water, electricity or telecoms and a disaster area still with levels of electricity, water and telecoms but insufficient for population demands. Even with evacuation eventuating in the latter case, the trade-offs in its origin area differ from the former case where the infrastructures and their critical services have been eliminated. If, as they say, a thing is also defined by what it is not, then evacuation also means those remaining behind.

So what? Recourse to “trade-off” terminology can be too coarse for management purposes if it is without the granularity differences in interconnectivity impose on the analysis.

2. Pre-Disaster Mitigations. From our framework’s perspective, pre-disaster mitigations are efforts to manage latent interconnections before they become manifest by virtue of a triggering disaster. This challenge is compounded by the fact that not only are some latent interconnections extremely difficult to see or predict beforehand, they and others may also only become visible during the disaster or afterwards.

So what? Any vacuum produced by difficulties in prediction matters because the professional(s) whose job it is to make these predictions and calls for pre-disaster mitigation will always be confronted by politicians, whose politics ground and justify making such calls anyway. How is this relevant for policy and management?

One answer is to shift the issue to a different question: Who is better at improvising solutions once the latent become manifest in the disaster: Those politicians, those professionals, both depending on the circumstances, others? In other words, whose improvisation learning carries more weight when it comes thereafter to offering pre-disaster mitigations? Now that’s the trade-off–interconnection–of interest!

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Source:

E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science. Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616.

I

Interviewees frequently mention “classic examples” of communication gaps that emerge or recur in emergency response and recovery. Issues of interoperability across communication technologies is one. As for others, I don’t need to spell out all the acronyms for you to still get that déjà vu when reading the following passage from a recent draft after-action report for a Cascadia earthquake exercise:

Numerous resource requests in OpsCenter were marked as “Unable to Fulfill” without any follow-up communication from the ECC Operations Section. This lack of communication resulted in stalled requests, even though federal resources were available to address them. The FEMA Liaison Officer identified, submitted to the RRCC, and resolved this issue, but only after delays had occurred. ESF staff reported being overwhelmed with incoming requests, leaving little capacity for follow-up or escalation, while ECC Operations did not proactively monitor or coordinate these unresolved requests. Highlighting a siloed approach to resource management, where the absence of centralized oversight contributed to gaps in communication and missed opportunities for resolution.

Well yes, but there is a more subtle persisting problem here.

II

In terms of our framework, a communication gap is the absence of interconnections established when task demands and response capabilities match (in this case, with respect to the broad tent called communications). The problem is the backdrop against which the communication gaps emerge, namely: All manner of other gaps and matches come and go in the emergency. What is the relationship between persisting gaps and the more fleeting ones?

Here part of the answer lies in other interconnectivities. Part of the definition of a major disaster is that task demands and resource capabilities are highly unlikely to be isolated to the purview and authority of one agency. The disaster is too big for that.

The state and federal infrastructures for emergency management could never undertake the tasks of preparedness, response, restoration and recovery on their own without the major and active participation of the key lifeline infrastructures under threat. Task environment demands are so varied, numerous and unpredictable when it comes to immediate response and initial service restoration that requisite variety in options requires multiple sites (organizational, locational) of response capabilities—and even then there are no guarantees.

III

In fact, we were told, “Emergency management coordinates with anyone who can help.” For example, bringing community members into emergency preparedness, response and recovery isn’t just because members could well make infrastructure response and restoration more effective. It can also bring in different interconnectivity, i.e. restoring social and cultural relationships before or in parallel to immediate response. Either way, the emergency management priority, while saving lives and property, is to restore power and water for those remaining.

So now we have an answer to the Big Question: Why isn’t an Magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State a critique of economic system that leads to the earthquake being such a catastrophic failure with such catastrophic consequences there and beyond?

Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, rebuild, or renew–is such a high priority, now and not just ahead, for the communities, lifeline infrastructures and emergency managers combined. Plus, they want to get back to where they were before, if only to plan the next steps ahead. Let others critique the end of the world through capitalism or the climate emergency or the polycrisis. Now that’s what we might call a persisting gap in communications?

I

The admonition, “We need to get out of our organizational silos!,” is a familiar one. It is also said of immediate response and service restoration by the feds and state emergency management agencies. The causes and the consequences of human-made disasters are inter-sectoral and so too, the argument runs, should be emergency management.

That may be demonstrably true as far as it goes, but differences in contexts require going further by imposing all manner of caveats and qualifications. I focus here on one because of its surprising implications for policy and management.

II

Oregon and Washington State have separate and separately staffed Emergency Support Functions, e.g., in Oregon ESF-1 is responsible for transportation, ESF-2 responsible for communications, ESF-3 for public works and so on. The separate functions seem to be a welcomed way for inter-function coordination apart from but complementary to the formal federal and state Incident Command System.

One reason for this seems to be each ESF unit is small, a single staff-person with or without some support, who recognizes that the formal duties with respect to his or her function need to be supplemented by informal responsibilities to coordinate with other units and field staff. This is especially so when it comes to infrastructural interconnectivities emerging before, during and just after a major disaster.

In formal terms, you can think of each ESF undertaking their respective duties and responsibilities as a focal unit mediating between those on the ground and those in the Incident Command Structure (ICS) chain of command. Where so helps make sense of one conundrum we encountered in our research in both states on the huge and awful impacts of a Magnitude 9 earthquake there.

III

“If the earthquake’s going to be that bad, why plan for it at all?” Answer: Because it someone’s job–in terms of their duties and responsibilities–to do that.

We were told that it’s better to build a resilient cell-tower now, as long as you have done a detailed study showing on that cell-tower is instrumental to your post-disaster response/recovery. Why? A resilient tower is built to last, long after people and disasters come and go, we were told. But we were also told the M9 events would test any “built to last” assumption.

Yet even if the latter remains true, building more resilient cell-towers is still the job of someone or organization. This is true in the same sense that the question–“Whose ESF is responsible for ensuring mobile generate are provided?”–has an answer, including “Well, no one is doing this right now., so it’s our job. . .”

IV

This focus on whose job we are talking about means that the position holder (if there) carries an authority and expertise others don’t have. When he or she says, “That ain’t gonna happen,” that message conveys a level of certainty in the midst of uncertainties. “What percentage of electricity can we expect to be restored within 2 days after M9?” “Well, about zero,” has the ring of truth if it’s the responsible ESF or ICS person saying it. So too if these professionals say, “We won’t know where to start until we see what actually left to work with.”

Note another implication of whose job is it. It is also common to hear, and not just in emergency management: “Everything is connected to everything else.” If so, then the other side of “everything’s connected” is “nothing can be completely reduced to something else.” As in: “It would be crazy for the regulator to do the work of the utilities, when the latter are the experts.” (For example, “we can’t tell them where to de-energize lines,” a regulator told us.)

A last implication. It is one thing is to insist on unimaginable M9 impacts, but quite another to leave out those whose job it is think about those impacts with respect to other infrastructures. We were told that wastewater wasn’t at the planning and emergency preparedness table as often as other infrastructures like electricity, roads and potable water. “If there’s an earthquake and water is restored, here we’ll be calling for no flushing of toilets,” said a wastewater manager responsible for making this call. He didn’t need to add: Now, how would that look?

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Source: Interviews and research were funded by National Science Foundation grants BCS-2121528 and BCS-2121616. See also E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science.

. . . .SPIEGEL: Surely you would include here the communist movement?

Heidegger: Yes, unquestionably — insofar as that, too is a form of planetary technicity.

SPIEGEL: Americanism also?

Heidegger: Yes, I would say so. Meantime, the last 30 years have made it clearer that the planet-wide movement of modern technicity is a power whose magnitude in determining [our] history can hardly be overestimated. For me today it is a decisive question as to how any political system — and which one — can be adapted to an epoch of technicity. I know of no answer to this question.

SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?

Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.

SPIEGEL: . . .Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it?

Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us.

SPIEGEL: . . .The question, then, is this: isn’t it possible, after all, that suggestions come from the thinkers (if only as a by-product) either as to how this system may be replaced by a new one and what a new one would look like, or that reform must be possible — together with some indication as to how this reform could be possible.

Heidegger: As far as I can see, an individual [thinker] is not in a position by reason of his thought to see through the world as a whole in such fashion as to be able to offer practical advice, and this, indeed, in view of the fact that his first task is to find a basis for thinking itself. For as long as thought takes itself seriously in terms of the great tradition, it is asking too much of thought for it to be committed to offering advice in this way. By what authority could this come about? In the domain of thinking there are no authoritative statements. . .

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“By what authority could this come about? In the domain of thinking there are no authoritative statements. . .” BUT WHAT THEN IS THE STATEMENT, “ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US”?

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Source: https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html

. . . .Given the scope and scale of the financing (and divestment) required for mitigation and the support for adaptation, current financing gaps suggest transitions are not happening at the pace or scale they need to cope with catastrophic change. CPI find that global climate finance needs will amount to $6300 billion worldwide in 2030 (Buchner et al., 2023) and should have reached about $4200 bn in 2021. Yet in 2021, total climate finance amounted to $850 bn: a significant sum, but nowhere near what is required. This is hugely challenging, yet needs to be set against the costs of inaction. Without such interventions, warming will exceed 3°C, leading to macroeconomic losses of at least 18% of GDP by 2050 and 20% by 2100 (NFGS, 2022). . . .

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10245294251318468; my bold)

Excuse me, but is your point that the $850bn would have been better spent elsewhere?