Here is what one emergency manager said of what many of our interviewees treated as an inevitable Magnitude 9 earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the shores of the US Pacific Northwest:

A lot of my contemporaries and planners on the emergency side have all said that the devastation is going to be so great that the ability to get resources in to help out survivors is going to be so limited that this thing is going to be so protracted that there is not going to be enough preparation in the homes of people—the individual communities are not prepared enough to last long enough and there’s going to be a lot of subsequent deaths after day-7 of the event. There’s not going to be enough response ability to come in because infrastructure is so broken. There’s no roads, no bridges, no airports, no shipping ports, no communication, no electricity, no freshwater, all that stuff. It’s going to be one of those biblical proportions kinds of disaster.
(A federal emergency manager working in the two states.)

This is not hyperbole to interviewees. An M9 Cascadia earthquake (when combined with magnitude 8.0 aftershocks and massive tsunami impacts) will be unimaginably catastrophic precisely in light of prior experience and training with lesser emergencies such as wildfires, winter storms and flooding.

Given these many uncertainties, isn’t anyone’s guess as good as the next? “Why are we even planning? It’s going to be that bad,” one interviewee reported county officials asking. It can feel like an avalanche you’re just not going to get ahead of, reflected a state senior emergency management official.

Given so much uncertainty that comes with the M9 earthquake, it is no surprise emergency managers rely on their pre-disaster plans and processes as a starting point. The importance of activating the federal an state Incident Command System was repeatedly mentioned. This means that instead of concluding you can’t really be prepared for something as unimaginable as the unfolding M9 events, what concerns most of the emergency managers we interviewed is the lack of further preparedness in respect to what can still be prevented regardless.

Some fires are clearly preventable, e.g., through prior vegetation management. So too if pre-disaster efforts such as mitigations, two-week ready supply programs of essential materials including food and water for households, and other preparedness planning can help reduce the pressure for immediate response. Or reduce the recovery period after events through the reduction of damage that would have otherwise been incurred in the absence of such measures, these too should not be neglected.

The insight here is that, for those interviewed, the real-time unpredictability and unexpected contingencies ahead in the M9 events carry their own information about interconnected infrastructure systems in failure and that information can be useful for managing or coping ahead. This is especially true for those real-time professionals whose core competencies revolve around systemwide failures: They are likely to know beforehand something about how the system in failure will affect other interconnected infrastructures.

Interviewees stressed the need to focus on infrastructure components and facilities they know will fail in the M9 events, whether or not the knowledge has been formalized into an agency’s risk register and risk assessments. That there are no guarantees pre-disaster efforts will actually mitigate is beside the point for experienced emergency managers who have witnessed or been directly involved in disasters elsewhere.

They have seen how better pre-disaster efforts would have made a difference there. That is their job. One core competency of emergency managers is to identify pre-disaster opportunities—including new options and strategies for increased requisite variety to improve real-time disaster response, and not just in their own infrastructures. Seismically strengthening a water infrastructure, as one interviewee confirmed, would better inform emergency planning and projects for the road and wastewater infrastructures adjacent to the water lines.

---

Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.

Climate Migrants

“The discourse of apocalyptic climate change-induced mass migration is now past its prime. Particularly since the early 2010s, it has been extensively critiqued (see Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013; Piguet, Kaenzig, and Guélat 2018; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), and the majority of migration scholarship no longer expects a linear, massive and world-transforming movement of people under climate change. Indeed, an ever-rising number of studies shows the opposite is the case: that relations between climate change and human migration are often indirect, small-scale, and taking shape in context-specific ways, influenced by a host of other socio-economic and political factors. The ways in which people move in a changing climate are diverse, and typically consist of relatively local mobilities (for overviews see: Black et al. 2011a; Foresight 2011; McLeman and Gemenne 2018; Hoffmann et al. 2020; De Sherbinin 2020).”

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2066264#abstract)

Migrants into Europe

“Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.”

(accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/glob.12312)

Latin American Mobility and Border Controls

“While this spectrum defines the cognitive horizon within which most migration law operates, it misses what the infrastructuring perspective is able to show, namely that border regulation in practice is less hermetic and controlled (by states), and that those on the move have considerably more agency than is often assumed, and that the particular legal configurations that enable or disrupt mobility are constantly being infrastructured and (thereby) changed. Again, Latin America is a prime case study here as it features all the factors that allow for such legal infrastructuring.”

(accessed online at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qm9pr_v1)

Digital Networks

“With all the usual caveats about surveillance and manipulation by the big tech companies, digital technology has played a transformative role in the mobility and organisation of refugee, migrant and diaspora communities. People on the move make impressive use of GPS technology, increasing their capacities to anticipate danger, plan new routes, connect with family and communities at home and in their planned destinations, and liaise with sympathetic citizens in host settings. As well as for functions like sending remittances, refugee networks have turned to digital platforms to mobilise resources, share information, and advocate for their rights. For example, WhatsApp groups enable refugees to use digital tools to take control of their circumstances, particularly in regions where state infrastructure is weak or non-existent. Among Somalis, this use of digital technology has enabled a form of ‘platform kinship’, where online networks function as substitutes for state-based social welfare systems and even some functions of governance and justice – in the latter case, exclusion from a digital group provides a sanction for infraction and dereliction. In the Somali case this has been dubbed a ‘WhatsAppocracy’.”

(accessed online at https://reliefweb.int/report/world/rsc-working-paper-series-no-143-refugia-reflection-five-years-june-2025)

Remittances and the COVID Pandemic

“1.6% — The decline in global remittances, or money that foreign-born workers sent back to their home countries, to low- and middle-income nations last year. That drop was far less than the 20% decline projected by the World Bank early in the pandemic. Migrant remittances have become crucial economic lifelines as the recoveries of rich and poor countries diverge.” (accessed online at https://whatsnews.cmail20.com/t/d-e-qidpld-jdkdtdwtj-r/)

“Remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries in 2020 as a whole remained resilient, contrary to initial projections and despite having recorded a strong decline in Q2 2020. The latest available data shows remittances are estimated to have reached USD 540 billion in 2020, just 1.6% below the 2019 total of USD 548 billion. . .The decline was smaller than that recorded in 2009 during the global financial crisis. Fiscal measures in migrants’ host countries, including cash transfers and employment support programmes implemented in many large economies, the widespread use of remote work, and migrants’ commitment to continue providing a lifeline to families by cutting consumption or drawing on savings contributed to this better-than-expected outcome. However, there are important regional and intra-regional differences, including between the countries covered in this study.” (accessed online at https://www.esm.europa.eu/system/files/document/2022-11/ESM_DP_18.pdf)

Children’s Labor

“We examined a number of dimensions of children’s work in African agriculture in papers published in 2020 and 2022. It is certainly the case that some children are harmed by the work they do, and others may be forced to work, exploited or trafficked.

Yet, based on this and other work informed by extensive literature review and initial research, children who are harmed by working represent a minority of working children. And critically, neither their interests, nor those of other rural children, are necessarily served by ongoing efforts to eradicate child labour from African agriculture.”

(accessed online at https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/child-labour-on-farms-in-africa-its-important-to-make-a-distinction-between-whats-harmful-and-what-isnt/)

COVID Pandemic in Africa

“Viewed through the lens of the COVID-19 crisis narrative, Africa’s exceptionally low rates of COVID-19 mortality amid pervasive informality have widely been regarded as a delayed reaction, or a product of low testing capacity, masking a ‘ticking time bomb’. Yet, the statistical evidence shows that, nearly two years into the pandemic, high levels of informality remain inversely related to levels of COVID-19 mortality in Africa, and this pattern has continued to the present. The reality is, for a variety of reasons, larger informal economies are not associated with a higher level of COVID-19 mortality, either at a global level, or at the level of African sub-regions. However, social policy measures to facilitate lockdowns for precarious workers have been more problematic, supporting efforts to crowd the poor together in informal settlements and social provisioning activities.

(accessed online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877792/)

Deglobalization

“Globalization is past its peak, we are told. The rise of populist anti‐globalization movements and the return of geopolitical rivalries among great powers in the 2010s has put an end to free‐wheeling corporate global capitalism. Or has it? This article summons available data on cross‐border corporate investments at the level of countries (balance of payments), firms (subsidiaries and affiliates), and corporate managers (industry surveys). It pays special attention to the period between 2015 and 2021, which spans the election of President Trump and the outbreak of the Covid‐19 pandemic that have unsettled global politics. We analyze global patterns in foreign direct investment positions and in particular the evolution of investments by US corporations in China, arguably a ‘most likely case’ for deglobalization.

“Our analyses find no evidence that economic cross‐border integration is in decline. The global allocation of corporate investments across the world’s major economic regions has remained stable. US corporations have not notably reduced their global activities. If anything, their aggregate investment position in China has increased during the Trump administration’s trade war. Overall, the results cast empirical doubts on prominent narratives about the state of the global economy. Geoeconomic transformations in world economic infrastructures may well be underway, but they are better understood as new and adapted forms of internationalization rather than the end of globalization.”

(accessed online at https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/8092)

NB. In some cases, footnote numbers and internal citations have been deleted for ease of reading.

I

For me, the best starting point on the above topic is the literature review and analysis of in A. Sharifian, Á. Fernández-Llamazares, H. T. Wario, Z. Molnár, and M. Cabeza (2022) “Dynamics of pastoral traditional ecological knowledge: a global state-of-the-art review” Ecology and Society 27(1):14 https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12918-270114.

They conclude in part:

Notwithstanding the number of studies on pastoral TEK, our review showed that knowledge erosion may be the dominant type of knowledge transition occurring among pastoralists worldwide. However, knowledge adaptation and hybridization were shown to be critical in the implementation of solutions to new social- ecological challenges in many areas of the world, despite the fact that they continue to be under-researched. Changes in pastoral TEK are caused by many interwoven drivers. Although documentation of pastoral TEK in scientific papers and reports is a helpful start, safeguarding pastoral TEK requires a fundamental shift across sectors in how such knowledge systems are recognized, affirmed, and sustained. We argue that research on pastoral TEK could help advance policy on pastoralism (e.g., by highlighting the ways in which pastoralism contributes to planetary sustainability, and the contexts that facilitate or undermine such contributions). More specifically, research on TEK dynamics could bring into focus the different transition types and help avoid the common mischaracterization of all knowledge changes as symptoms of vulnerability and loss.

To repeat: Yes, TEK has been eroded, but to leave it at that is very much to mischaracterize what has been and is happening. Cases of adaptation and hybridization are also documented, the authors insist.

I want to suggest that cases of recasting this knowledge also merit attention. For example, terms like “traditional,” “indigenous” and even “local” knowledge do not adequately capture, I believe, the unique ability of some pastoralists to recognize systemwide patterns and formulate local scenarios so as to ensure provision of reliable (safe and continuous) pastoralist services, at least in real time (Roe 2020). Here I want to suggest another, but related, way of looking at TEK, this time from the crisis management literature.

II

Creeping crises have come into clearer focus during the last two decades (‘t Hart and Boin 2001; Boin, Ekengren and Rhinard 2020). Think of the Covid-19 pandemic, the overprescription of antibiotics, and the lead-up to the now Climate Emergency. Boin et al define these crises as follows:

A creeping crisis is a threat to widely shared societal values or life‐sustaining systems that evolves over time and space, is foreshadowed by precursor events, subject to varying degrees of political and/or societal attention, and impartially or insufficiently addressed by authorities.

(accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rhc3.12193)

Boin et al focus on a number of problems in catching these crises in time. A particular one is that of detection:

But it appears that the early phases of these creeping crises, when damage potential is building, are not always easy to detect. What we need are indicators of escalation and damage potential (some researchers speak of “precursor events”). . .

I want to suggest that TEK among some pastoralists is not an entire knowledge base, static or evolving, as much as it is a sub-set of detection practices activated because drought is always a creeping crisis waiting to happen, if not actually happening.

Knowing-how to catch precursor events is a special kind of knowledge and, more, its key is detection–not just identifying but also responding to–those precursors. Detecting when to move herds, detecting where wildlife are, detecting what are better grazing and water options, and detecting how to do all this and more in real time are ways in which the threat potential of dry seasons–and by extension, droughts–are managed.

III

So what? Even where it is true that “animals can sense, and in some instances, detect inconsistencies, changes, and occurrences in their surroundings and thereby predict coming climate events” (Hassan, Stites and Howe 2024), there can be no guarantees of detecting such in time. What then is the added purchase of seeing TEK as a special kind of knowing-how around that “detect”?

My answer returns us to the Sharifian et al quote above. The sentence that follows–and with which they conclude their fine review–is:

By focusing on knowledge hybridization and adaptation, future research efforts could pay justice to the immense and powerful cultural continuity that is a hallmark of pastoral societies worldwide, and affirm their ongoing struggles to foster social- ecological resilience over the long run.

That continuity is also immensely and powerfully sociotechnical. The constant search for better detection practices, at least among some pastoralists, shows why. By way of follow-on, I would appreciate any references to pastoralist literature, such as in Hassan et al, that centers on or discusses practices/processes of detection explicitly.

---

Other sources.

‘t Hart, P. and A. Boin (2001). “Between Crisis and Normalcy: The Long Shadow of Post‐Crisis Politics.” In Managing Crises: Threats, Dilemmas, Opportunities, eds. U. Rosenthal, A. Boin, and L. C. Comfort. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Hassan, R., E. Stites, and P. Howe (2024). Pastoralists’ Perspectives on Early Warning, Anticipatory Action, and Emergency Response. Boston: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University.

Roe, E. (2020). A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, Brighton: STEPS Centre.

My special thanks to Saverio Krätli for the useful tips.

“Underdog metaphysics,” coined by sociologist Alvin Gouldner, def.

On the assumption that truth is nothing more than the point of view of resourceful groups—imposed by these elite groups on everyone else—the conclusion ensues that powerlessness is more truthful than truth itself. That is, the absence of power becomes the new touchstone of what is true and valid. The new foundation is the group affiliation of marginalized identities. The “view-from-nowhere,” idealized by positivists, is replaced with a “view-from-the-margins.”

C. Wilén and Johan Söderberg (2025). “Against Underdog Metaphysics: Alvin Gouldner and the Marxist critique of post-theory.” Acta Sociologica (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00016993251356339)

And let’s not forget just who finds powerlessness to be an elite position:

American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.

P. Mishra (2025). “Speaking Reassurance to Power.” Harpers (accessed online at
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/speaking-reassurance-to-power-pankaj-mishra-easy-chair/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)

–The remittance-sending household member is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an Africa rangeland than was Austria’s Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the district outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans).

You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick for policies!

(This notion that boundaries change as the units of analysis change would be banal, were it not for this: Both household migrants in Europe and household members in African drylands frequently turn out not to have occupancy rights to where they live and work.)

–It isn’t just that pastoralist households have off-site activities with household members elsewhere who contribute from there to rangeland pastoralist activities.

Rather: It’s more appropriate to say that in some cases a great deal of the pastoralism is done off-rangeland just as what was once platform trading on the floor of a stock exchange is now done elsewhere (as in the case today of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange).

–Isn’t it odd that on one hand, conventional economic growth and its national measurements are excoriated for a wide range of sins (promoting environmental destruction, rising inequalities), and yet the very same nations are excoriated for having marginalized vast portions of their populations by excluding them from that economic growth, and measurably so?

Isn’t it odd that on one hand there are more and more calls for revising macroeconomic statistics because they don’t take into account all manner of labor (e.g., care or digital work), while on the other hand we quite sensibly continue to take seriously measured declines in economic growth in developing countries, even though we all know household labor is under-accounted for there.

It’s as if we’re to assume that excluding Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands from the infrastructure development of 1960s economic growth in the Highlands was, well, less deplorable than many of us thought.

–Do you see that disturbing parallel between those who want to save Planet Earth from further harm and pain by means of seductively straightforward “treatments” like getting rid of fossil fuel or methane-producing cattle and, on the other hand, Purdue Pharma’s promotion of OxyContin for reducing chronic pain while masking the lethal addiction to such “straightforward” treatments?

In late 2020, the Stop Ecocide Foundation, created by the late British jurist Polly Higgins, convened an independent expert panel as part of their ongoing efforts to amend the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to create a new, stand-alone international crime of ecocide. Chaired by international lawyers Dior Fall Sow and Philippe Sands, the panel published its proposed amendment defining “ecocide” in June of 2021, the full text of which is as follows:

Article 8. . .Ecocide

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:

a. “Wanton” means with reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated;

b. “Severe” means damage which involves very serious adverse changes, disruption or harm to any element of the environment, including grave impacts on human life or natural, cultural or economic resources;

c. “Widespread” means damage which extends beyond a limited geographic area, crosses state boundaries, or is suffered by an entire ecosystem or species or a large number of human beings;

d. “Long-term” means damage which is irreversible or which cannot be redressed through natural recovery within a reasonable period of time;

e. “Environment” means the earth, its biosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, as well as outer space.

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5273187)

---

It’s common enough today to recognize the huge environmental costs of the military (e.g. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/entropy-economics-of-military-spending). Far less recognized are those ongoing discussions and debates over military strategies as if the environmental damages were irrelevant to the merits or not of the strategies.

Take a 2025 article published in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Lim and James Fearon, “The Conventional Balance of Terror: America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/conventional-balance-terror-lim-fearon). Here the authors argue for a US defense strategy of heightened deterrence similar to its USSR strategy in the Cold War but now with respect to the Peoples Republic of China’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific:

[M]any of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

Threats are mentioned, but the only occasions environment is referenced is with respect to the “threat environment” of China’s precision-strike missiles and related capabilities.

Not a scintilla–not a homeopathic whiff–of the massive environmental costs associated with this new balance of terror, let alone on the US side:

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

And so here we are, once again, in a world whose MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACT is that it’s no longer the 1960s and 1970s where military strategies can be debated as if ecocide were beside the point.

1. The language of risk is now so naturalized that it seems the obvious anchor point of analysis, as in: “Ok, the first thing we have to do is assess the risks of flooding here. . .”

No. The first thing you do is to identify the boundaries of the flood system you are talking about as it is actually managed and then the standards of reliability to which it is being managed (namely, the events must be precluded or avoided by way of management) and from which follow the specific risks to be managed to meet that standard. (Note a standard doesn’t eliminate risks but instead identifies the risks that have to be managed in order to meet the standard.)

2. Economists, engineers and system modelers with whom I’m familiar tend to conceptualize interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) along the lines that Garret Hardin did 50 years ago for what he called the Tragedy of the Commons (“imagine a pasture open to all”).

In our case, imagine an ICIS open to all manner of vulnerability and complex interconnectivity. Our research insists that this too is precisely what you cannot assume empirically or conceptually. Rather, another anchor point is that these systems are far more differentiated than they are alike when it comes to “interconnectivities” by virtue of their different configurations and shifts from one configuration to another.

3. Just as a major work of art is always in excess of a single interpretation, the major management of a critical infrastructure is in excess of its technology. And “excess” is exactly the word, as its use here is antithetical to any claim that “excess capacity undermines technological and economic efficiency.”

4. Real-time infrastructure management requires very, very smart people, and ones who are decidedly not automated ciphers that need only know the difference between two prices in order to act rationally. What is irrational are those leaps from macro-design to micro-operations or back that ignore, when not altogether dismissing, the unique knowledge bases and learning of the reliability professionals that anchor operations in between.

If the US Civil War over southern separatism is our guide to any forthcoming break-up, most state constitutions will remain in place as governing documents, while any interstate confederation would most probably be modeled on parts of the current US Constitution—though with the significant changes.

Constitution-making in the Confederacy witnessed not just further entrenchment of unconscionable chattel slavery, but also the first Department of Justice, a national citizenship requirement for voting, no functioning supreme court, a six-year term limit for president, civil service reform, strictures against protective tariffs, a district court structure, disavowal of the Monroe Doctrine, and provisions for a presidential item veto, executive budget, and no recess appointments.

Am I recommending all that? No.

What I am doing is asking this question: How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of substantive change without breaking up the country? (And those appalled by any reference to the Confederacy might want to remember that four states—Vermont, Texas, California and Hawaii—opted to give up their sovereignty to join the Union. So why is the reverse out of the question?)

The immediate decline in security and economic growth that comes with the break-up means priority would have to be to keeping the control rooms of our critical infrastructures in hospitals, energy, water, telecommunications, transportation, and public safety operating as reliably as possible. These systems frequently cross current state borders, and the challenge will be to continue inter-regional collaboration for their operation until alternatives—if needed and on the fly—are devised.

Principal sources

My Confederacy material draws from: (1) W.B. Yearns (1960), The Confederate Congress, University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA; R. Bensel (1990), Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK: Chapter 3; P. Van Riper and H. Scheiber (1959), “The Confederate Civil Service,” The Journal of Southern History, 25(4): 448-470; C.R. Lee (1963), The Confederate Constitutions, Greenwood Press Publishers: Westport, CN; and E. Thomas (1979), The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865, Harper & Row: New York, NY.

–Yes, earthquakes with unimaginable impacts are predicted all the time. So too are other disasters and doing so is no more oxymoronic than “thinking the unthinkable.”

There is also the predictably unimaginable that comes with the open faucet of new categories and concepts. Think of “violent crime” as a legal category in the US that didn’t by and large exist prior to the 1970s (Sklansky 2021). “Talking about ‘political prisoners’ had become such an important political criticism that it was no longer possible to imagine it as a legal category,” concludes another (Hermann 2020).

So too hitherto-unthought-of analogies are always being used to redescribe current policy problems. Not only was Green New Deal, in its fleeting notoriety, likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal; it was also compared to the Civil Rights Movement, 19th century abolitionism, and the war economy of the Bolshevik Revolution. There should be no doubt that the Climate Emergency and responses will be compared to many other events you and I won’t imagine until those comparisons have been made.

–So what? In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.

Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.

Current practice is we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.

Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order even to think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. Possibilities and impacts aren’t equivalent to risks and uncertainties, but closer nevertheless.

–Again, so what?

It’s one thing to say a catastrophe today is “the unimaginability of an alternative to the neoliberal status quo.” It is quite another thing to say this complex tangle called neoliberalism generates such contingency and side-effect as to undermine any status quo. If we are meant to suppose the absence of a status quo or status quo ante is dangerous or even catastrophic, then to paraphrase the international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Excuse me, but just what status quo have the people committed themselves to?

---

Sources

Hermann, L. (2020). 50 Unimaginable Criminals: The Disappearance of “Political Prisoners” in Spain and the West after 1945 (accessed online at https://ruidera.uclm.es/items/011230ff-b807-4fdc-9b14-273f83590066)

Sklansky, D.A. (2021). “An American Invention” (accessed online at https://inquest.org/an-american-invention/)