The statement above establishes time/space between at one end, “When one dog takes a leak, all dogs around take a leak,” and at the other, “It’s not as wet as the forecast predicted,” something the Irish say to others on their routine walks.

I

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

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

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

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

II

So what?

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

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

Source

S. Bose (2023). Photovoice With Pastoralists: A Practical Guidebook. PASTRES, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and the European University Institute in Florence. Reproduced with permission and accessed online at https://pastres.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/photovoice-guide-digital.pdf (Photo by Malicha, used with permission of the ERC PASTRES project)

I

Graduate students in public policy analysis and management will know the idealized sequence for undertaking a professional policy analysis, e.g., first define the problem, then assemble the evidence, then analyze it so and so on until we make our recommendation. This sequence, or something like it, is cast in the present tense.

My experience is that the idealized steps are markedly not in the present tense, but rather:

Having completed the analysis, I wrote the memo with my recommendations.

The past gerund, “having completed the analysis,” indicates something finished, a hope that stands in sharp contrast to real-world policies in their persisting incompletion—a very different kind of “present tense.” The gerund also serves to situate analysis within an ongoing context without which there wouldn’t be analysis.

In turn, the prepositional object , “recommendations,” introduces its own promise that our memo will be dealt with, albeit beyond our control but still within that context of which we analysts are part. Indeed, the point of the past gerund/past tense/object formulation is to make clear that, “objectively speaking”, analysts in the present are not to blame for anything like the real-world incompletion all around us.

II

Here’s another way to look at the incompletion.

It’s also common enough that today’s accounts of policy and management be presented from not just one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but many—including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more.

Yet what frequently gets missed are the implied hyphens, i.e., “from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”. How so?

Consider Polonius in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”

The hyphens there function as the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness. Interdisciplinary accounts of policy analysis and management, however, insist that you take their added wordage as anything but long-windedness.

Or another example: “It is obviously a highly complex phenomenon that needs global cooperation as a response as well as a holistic approach because the potential collapses are interrelated” Each word is written as if it anchored, resolute, placed there to resist being dragged elsewhere. In fact, each word functions as a cowpat to be stepped into and distract us into something that looks like. . . longwindedness as another form of incompleteness.

Source

Moretti, F. (2013). The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. Verso: London and New York

————————

I

This week I attended an informative conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades.

Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate change mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, several wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.

In addition to these specifics, I was told:

• that Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
• It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
• To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.

Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met?

It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.

What to do? How to respond?

II

These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to underscore the urgency of the matter, to stir us to action that matches the unparalleled magnitude of the crisis. Such numbers do that for some people, but others instead respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating action.

More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least we know and can see hard work achieves this!

III

And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.

The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.

Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.

IV

We have a pool of such professionals already. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.

————————

You’d think that with the catastrophic disaster scenarios the planet is said to face, we’d see more investigations of how large critical infrastructures actually do avoid or avert massive system failures. You’d also think that the costs to society of confronting limitless disaster scenarios is set by the dangers of ignoring disasters, like earthquakes, floods and fires, easier to identify and assess.

So what?

Appeals to processes or state conditions such as “globalization,” “financialization,” “disaster capitalism,” and the like leave us assuming these processes are indeed the peoples’ chronic crises. The latter, though, is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios detail how these broad processes are chronic because people have failed to avert all their own dreaded events.

————————

I

Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and other infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.

This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the implication: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and learn from.

Since there are real material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.

II

In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”

————————

I

An article starts with: “The climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid retooling of our economy and society.” Yes, surely that and more; but what do we do immediately?

Which means in the US setting, activating a city or county emergency operations center and/or incident management teams at the department level to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also do the same with respect to their own EOCs, IMTs or equivalent.

This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.

II

Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which know we are the climate emergency. And who are the distressed peoples and sites? Well, that’s not something you can answer a priori or universally. It’s up to the EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the climate emergency is leaving local people hungry, making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .

In thinking these things through, one rather counter-intuitive implication becomes clearer.

Those oft-mentioned “stop-this-and-that” (fossil fuel, biodiversity loss, and so much more) immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, ship goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are not uncommon.

Indeed and more globally, years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options, like eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and other alternatives. Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means, e.g., using petrol to get them there?

————————

Below in full and without edit is a letter to the editor of the TLS:

Sir, – Unless a substantial proportion of the world’s scientists are deluded and are (innocently) deluding us, articles that blithely project a long-term future extrapolated from a continuing present need to be challenged (see “The last mortals” by Regina Rini, May 17). Or rather the publishing of them. To make predictions based on the present could be an act of climate catastrophe denial, an act that recursively makes the catastrophe more likely. This article is particularly odd in that it posits the exact opposite problem to the one we (almost certainly) face. It’s not how we cope with watching the next generation sail off into immortality, but how we cope with leaving them to face the conclusion of our civilization. Even the most sophisticated actuarial programs would struggle to tell me my grandchildren’s life expectancy, but I’d bet it’s shrinking by the day. A more useful challenge for philosophers would be to ask why environmental and social collapse are increasingly inevitable now, why we don’t care, and perhaps why we seem not to care that we don’t care. Are we incapable of seeing the world as real? Better to deal with these sorts of questions than to go floating off into Elfland.

MARK STEINHARDT
Bedford.

I wonder if Mr Steinhardt and like-minded people fully appreciate the equally strident policy implication that directly follows from the climate emergency being so catastrophic that thinking about anything else is irresponsible?

Namely: Such persons should be publicly shamed and humiliated, if it turns out that, of course the climate emergency is going on and yes, it is disastrous, but that does not excuse humanity from thinking about other existential disasters.

————————

I

It’s not surprising that those who don’t “give whatever it takes to save the planet” justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed or realized for the climate emergency. 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 at least has the merit of recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, quite unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes, full stop. Nor is the quoted passage on its own. 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 immiserated minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).

II

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?

I

Recently, I attended an informative conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. It was held by the Propeller Club of Northern California and the Society of American Military Engineers (San Francisco Post), both long established marine-focused institutions in the Bay Area.

Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate change mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, several wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.

In addition to these specifics, I was told:

• that Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
• It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
• To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.

Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met?

It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.

What to do? How to respond?

II

These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to underscore the urgency of the matter, to stir us to action that matches the unparalleled magnitude of the crisis. Such numbers do that for some people, but others instead respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating action.

More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least we know and can see hard work achieves this!

III

And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.

The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.

Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.

IV

We have a pool of such professionals already. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.

GMM-TV just announced their new line-up of Thai shows for next year, including a remake of the Japanese “My Love Mix Up.” Some netizens worry that the actor in the Thai trailer doesn’t get the Japanese “ehhh?” right. This may seem esoteric, but it’s not.

If you go online, the Japanese “eh?” is often equated to the English, “huh?”. Not so in the Japanese tv series I’ve watched. There, the elongated “ehhh?” can mean wtf? or really! This difference between a simple, huh?, and the incredulous, what?!, finds a parallel in public policy and management.

As a start, I don’t think I’ve heard “ehhh?” pronounced, let alone expressed as the Japanese do, in the other Asian tv series I’ve watched. More, there is something of the German komish in that “ehhh?”: funny but now responding to something also strange or weird.

I think a good number of us, wherever we are, respond this many formal policy pronouncements today. “Ehhh?”

Think: The New Weirder as a policy regime.

—A risk-averse farmer keeps multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites so that, if one fails, s/he has others to fall back on. The more different crops, livestock and sites a farmer can muster and maintain, the greater the chances s/he won’t lose everything. Where possible, the risk-averse farmer avoids hazards whose probabilities and uncertainties cannot be managed so as to maintain a survival mix of crops, livestock and productive sites. The risk-averse farmer faces a land carrying capacity that sets exogenous limits on the total crops and livestock produced.

—A reliability-seeking farmer keeps multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites because any single resource—e.g., the soil that sustains the crop, site and livestock—is managed better if it provides multiple services. The more crops, livestock and sites a farmer can muster and maintain, the greater the chances s/he can meet peak demands made on his or her entire production system. The reliability-seeking farmer seeks to manage the probabilities and uncertainties of hazards that cannot be avoided so as to maintain a peak mix of crops, livestock and sites. The reliability-seeking farmer faces a carrying capacity whose endogenous limits are set by farmer skills for and experience with different operating scales and production phases.

Upshot

Farming behavior, no matter if labelled “subsistence” or “traditional,” that

• is developed around high technical competence and highly complex activities,
• requires high levels of sustained performance, oversight and flexibility,
• is continually in search of improvement,
• maintains great pressures, incentives and expectations for continuous overall production, and
• is predicated on maintaining peak (not minimum) livestock numbers in a highly reliable fashion without threatening the limits of system survival

is scarcely what one would call “risk-averse.”

Here is my rearrangement of separate quotes from philosopher, Akeel Bilgrami:

[I]t is often felt that. . .the commons is not doomed to tragedy since it can be ‘governed’ by regulation, by policing and punishing non-cooperation.

Who can be against such regulation? It is obviously a good thing. What is less obvious is whether regulation itself escapes the kind of thinking that goes into generating the tragedy of the commons in the first place. . . .

To explain why this is so, permit me the indulgence of a personal anecdote. It concerns an experience with my father. He would sometimes ask that I go for walks with him in the early morning on the beach near our home in Bombay. One day, while walking, we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking out of it. My father stopped me and said somewhat dramatically, ‘Akeel, why shouldn’t we take this?’ And I said sheepishly, though honestly, ‘I think we should take it.’

He looked irritated and said, ‘Why do you think we should take it?’ And I replied, what is surely a classic response, ‘because if we don’t take it, somebody else will’. I expected a denunciation, but his irritation passed and he said, ‘If we don’t take it, nobody else will’. I thought then that this remark had no logic to it at all. Only decades later when I was thinking of questions of alienation did I realize that his remark reflected an unalienated framework of thinking. . . .

From a detached perspective, what my father said might seem like naïve optimism about what others will do. But the assumption that others will not take the wallet if we don’t, or that others will cooperate if we do, is not made from that detached point of view. It is an assumption of a quite different sort, more in the spirit of ‘let’s see ourselves this way’, an assumption that is unselfconsciously expressive of our unalienatedness, of our being engaged with others and the world, rather than assessing, in a detached mode, the prospects of how they will behave. . . .

The question that drives the argument for the tragedy of the commons simply does not compute. . .

https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/what-is-alienation (my bold)

To repeat: The question that drives the argument for the tragedy of the commons simply does not compute in such cases.

There is no more fundamental way of freeing Hamlet from the constraints of text than by removing words altogether, as ballet of necessity does.

Michelle Assay (2022). “The late- and post-Soviet trials of Hamlet in song, ballet, and opera.” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 108(1) 35–52 (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01847678221092791)

The artist as the created; Mona Lisa’s Leonardo, Beatrice’s Dante. Curious concept.

Guy Davenport in a letter to Hugh Kenner, 1963 (Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Edited by Edward M. Burns, 2 volumes (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA; 2018).

If anything, the notion of “Hamlet‘s Shakespeare” looks to be a way of textualizing Shakespeare. Not just his becoming the playwright through writing Hamlet, but also writing his own narrative self by thinking through Hamlet. As if in referring to Satan’s Milton, I am positing how John Milton might have worked out his own personal theology by having to dictate (verbalize) that Satan into Paradise Lost.

If so, then freeing both Hamlet and Shakespeare from the textual is to imagine something altogether different, like those ballets called Hamlet.

Here the upshot is that there are multiple versions, not just necessarily unique performances, of the single play, e.g., Robert Helpmann’s 1942 version for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles, Stephen Mills’ 2000 Hamlet, and the 2015 Hamlet of Radu Poklitaru and Declan Donnellan’s for the Bolshoi Ballet (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0184767820913797).

For policy and management to have multiple versions, rather than many unique implementations, is also to imagine policy and management through different genres than those of the textual.

One great example is that of the refusal. There have been those whose rejection to involvement in policy and management, let alone in politics, has been uncompromising: “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight.” This silence and isolation includes refusing to “to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution”(quotes from https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal)

The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say this is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the functions of silence depend on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is. Or better yet: In what ways do you want voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?