Features and Occasionals

Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World

By Staff

A Marine Corps friend of mine defines resilience as the ability to take a gut punch and come back swinging. More formally, it is said to be the capacity to maintain core functions and values in the face of outside disturbance. Either way, the concept is elusive, a matter of more or less, not either/or. The combination of slow, cumulative changes like soil erosion, loss of species and acidification of oceans with fast, “black swan”* events, such as the Fukushima disaster, like intersecting ocean currents, will create overlapping levels of unpredictable turbulence at various depths.

Against that prospect, the idea that we can improve resil­ience at scales ranging from cities to global civilization is becoming an important part of policy discussions, but mostly in reaction to major events like the global economic crisis of 2008 and the prospect of rapid climate change. If we are serious about it, we will have to improve not only our capacity to act with foresight but also develop the wherewithal to diagnose and remedy the deeper problems rooted in language, paradigms, social structure, and economy that undermine resilience in the first place.

The theoretical underpinnings of the concept go back to the writings of C. S. Holling on the resilience of ecological systems and to metaphors drawn from the disciplines of systems theory, mathematics and engineering. More recently, scholars such as Joseph Tainter, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Jared Diamond have documented the histories of societies that collapsed for lack of foresight, competence, ecological intelligence and environmental restraint.

The concept of resilience is related to that of sustainability, but differs in at least one crucial respect. Sustainability implies a stable end state that can be achieved once and for all. Resilience, on the other hand, is the capacity to make ongoing adjustments to changing political, economic and ecological conditions. Its hallmarks are redundancy, adaptation and flexibility, as well as the foresight and good judgment to avoid the brawl in the first place.

While better technology is certainly a large part of societal resilience, the definition of “better” is seldom obvious. The reason is that we do not simply choose to make and deploy single artifacts, but rather, unknowingly, we select devices as parts of larger systems of technology, power and wealth.Orr David1 David W. Orr is keynote speaker at Weber State’s 6th Annual Inter­mountain Sus­tain­ability Summit in Ogden (March 5-6).

The plow, for instance, represented the ingenuity of John Deere, but also an emerging, yet seldom acknowledged agro-industrial paradigm of total human domination of nature with commodity markets, banks, federal crop insurance, grain elevators, long-distance transport, fossil fuel dependence, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, crop subsidies, overproduction, mass obesity, soil erosion, polluted groundwater, loss of biological diversity, dead zones and the concentrated political power of the farm lobby representing oil companies, equipment manufacturers, chemical and seed companies, the Farm Bureau, commodity brokers, giant food companies, advertisers and so forth. The upshot is a high output, ecologically destructive, fossil-fuel dependent, unsustainable and brittle food system that wreaks havoc on the health of land, waters and people alike. Farmers did not just buy John Deere plows, they bought into a system. The resilience of that system had nothing to do with their choices.

There is little in the modern world that is either resilient or sustainable. The idea of resilience is largely alien to our cultural DNA. As a result, the drive toward globalization, more economic growth, faster communication, robotics, drones and ever more interconnectedness has created a global world without firebreaks or even fire departments.

While there are some obvious things we can do at the national and international level to improve resilience, such measures are no more than temporary stop-gaps that conceal deeper flaws rooted in our paradigms and worldviews.

We are prone to tinker at the edges of the status quo and then are puzzled when things do not improve much and even larger disasters occur. If we are serious about designing and building resilience, we will face a long and difficult process of rebuilding not just our hardware and infrastructure, but rooting out the ideas hidden in our paradigms, language, political systems, economy and education that undermined resilience in the first place.

Perhaps when we come to a fuller understanding of the discipline and restraint that sustainability and resilience will require of us, we may, like Thelma and Louise, prefer to go off the cliff in a blaze of glory. If we decide otherwise, the conversation about resilience must advance from a focus on the coefficients of change to the structure of larger systems and ideas of human dominance, which is to say from symptoms to root causes.

Among other things, this will require revisiting earlier conversations that go back to the likes of Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill and many others who first noticed the cracks in the hard-shell presumptions of the modern project.

Aside from the permanent threat of nuclear war, rapid climate change resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels tops many lists of global fears. The scientific evidence supporting that fear has grown dramatically in recent years. There is little doubt that if business as usual continues, we are heading for a 2° C. warming sometime around mid-century. Recent evidence suggests temperature increases of 4-6° C by the year 2100 or even sooner are possible. Somewhere along that trajectory, many things will come undone starting with water and food shortages, but eventually entire economies and political systems. Nearly everything on Earth behaves or works differently at higher temperatures. Ecologies collapse, forests burn, metals expand, concrete runways buckle, rivers dry up, and people curse and kill more easily.

Climate deniers, of course, remain unmoved by science and the evidence before their eyes, but they are doomed to roughly the same status as, say, members of the Flat Earth Society. More serious problems arise from those who presumably know what lies ahead, but choose not to speak about the harsh realities ahead for fear of alarming the public. As a result of both denial and evasion, there is a large chasm separating the science and the public discourse about planetary destabilization now well underway. Whether we face it or not, we will have to contend with the remorseless working of the big numbers that govern the biosphere. The “long emergency” ahead is caused by the fact that carbon from the combustion of fossil fuels will stay in the atmosphere for a very long time. As a result, temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise for hundreds or even thousands of years.

The problem is not solvable in any way that we would normally use that word. What we can do, and must do, is to head off the worst of what lies ahead by making a rapid transition to energy efficiency and renewable energy. Humans have never faced a more vexing and dire problem. Why have we ignored increasingly urgent and detailed scientific warnings for so long?

Historian Ronald Wright describes our autism as the result of a progress trap. “Technology,” he writes, “is addictive. Material progress creates problems that are, or seem to be, soluble only by further progress.” It is an old story, “Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success.” The problem, Wright believes, is the inherent “human inability to foresee long-range consequences.”

We are preoccupied with the here and now. What lies beyond is confusing and veiled and so we procrastinate. We exist amidst the interlocking systems of different temporal and spatial scales and navigate by often conflicting and competing value systems that direct our attention to one thing while making us blind to another. The headlines report the fast news from the latest scandal to the daily jiggles of stock market trends. The brown color of the local river, on the other hand, reports the slow movement of topsoil seaward. The former captures most of our attention, but soil erosion, literacy rates and retreating Arctic ice say much more about our long-term prospects. As those inexorable slow variables work over decades or centuries, baseline expectations and memories of better things shift downward to a new normal and we forget what once had been. And, mesmerized by ever more powerful technology, we fail to notice vulnerabilities silently multiplying and ramifying all around us.

Looking ahead even a few decades, the progress trap will lead to more difficult and unprecedented problems for which we are ill-prepared. We are unpracticed in foresight, precaution, and the discipline necessary to re­strain and redirect our technological drive. The merest suggestion of caution has become the modern version of religious heresy. We now have new and more powerful gods.

A still more fundamental progress trap is inherent in the dynamism of a continually growing, energy- and resource-intensive, consumption-oriented market economy. The market economy has also attained a kind of divine status—worshipped, worried over, and appeased with sacrificial offerings (e.g., Detroit).

There is good reason to believe that the economy has already exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth. But the ideas that there are any limits to growth or fundamental differences between quantitative and qualitative growth are still incomprehensible to most economists, corporate chiefs, bankers, financiers, managers of the economy and media talking heads.

What would a sustainable, fair, and resilient economy be? What energy sources will dependably and benignly power it? How large an economy can be sustained within the limits of the earth? How large an economy can fallible humans safely manage? What would it mean to give up our fatal obsession with the domination of nature? How will we distribute wealth? What would it mean to develop an economy for ‘Gross National Happiness’? How will we subtract the $20 trillion of fossil fuels that cannot be safely burned from corporate balance sheets? Who will decide such things? Such questions have been shunted aside in the manic phase of economic expansion, but if not for the wellbeing of all of the people and all of those to come, what is an economy for?

Such questions are first and foremost political, not economic. They have to do with how we provide food, energy, shelter, materials, transport, healthcare and livelihoods, and how we distribute the risks and benefits resulting from those choices, but these issues are often excluded from public deliberation and democratic control.

From the beginning, the deck was stacked to protect wealth, individual rather than collective rights and, perversely, the rights of corporations as much or more than those of flesh and blood people. Further, it gives little or no protection to future generations even when their life, liberty, and property are put at risk because of the actions of the present generation. In short, the system is rigged to protect power and wealth and not to foresee or to forestall obvious risks such as climate disaster looming dead ahead.

Our manner of governance seems incapable of reforming itself, let alone dealing proactively and constructively with the scale, scope, and duration of the perils ahead. Even at their best, however, it is debatable whether democratic societies are capable of exercising the foresight and precaution necessary to make resilience a priority in difficult circumstances.

Here is the nub of the issue. The founding ideals of America had to do with equality, liberty, and justice but these have always competed with other values embedded in the American dream, which were mostly about individuals getting rich quick.

Do we have the right stuff for resilience? What is to be done?

Resilience arises,” in Donella Meadows’ words, “from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation.”

Some of the first steps to improving resilience are obvious. The engineering principles and technology for a more resilient electrical grid, for example, are well understood. A resilient power system would be dis­tributed among many renewable energy sources. It would be highly efficient, carbon neutral, and organ­ized around interlinked “smart” micro-grids with two-way communi­cation between the grid and end-users. Energy prices would be based on the full life-cycle costs of energy including its externalities. Conse­quently, it would use a fraction of the energy we presently use while providing higher quality service.

The principles of resilient urban design are also well known. In Eric Klinenberg’s words, resilient urban areas consist of communities with “sidewalks, stores, restaurants and organizations that bring people into contact with friends and neighbors.” Healthy neighborhoods have many people watching the streets as Jane Jacobs once said, and many overlapping connections between churches, businesses, civic organizations, schools and colleges. More resilient communities are pedestrian and biker friendly with close proximity between housing, schools, jobs, theaters, clubs, coffee shops, and health facilities. They have multiple and interconnected layers of ‘social capital,’ an ugly way to say competent, caring, and engaged citizens who work and play together and understand the meaning of common wealth. Urban communities intending to improve their resilience recycle wastes, minimize their carbon footprints, grow by in-fill, and are stitched together by pedestrian walkways, bike trails, and dependable, clean, safe, and affordable light rail systems. Resilient cities will also have a growing percentage of locally owned businesses and community-generated wealth that stays put to create still more prosperity where it can be watched, tended, and nurtured.

At the national level, resilient economies have diversity, redundant supply chains, and the good sense to place controls on monopoly and the scale of enterprises for the public good. In the realm of national policy, resilience will require a larger definition of security than heretofore. We have spent trillions for defense against often exaggerated external military and terrorist threats while ignoring self-generated dangers that jeopardize access to food, energy, clean water, shelter, physical safety, health care, and economic livelihood.

It is impossible to make an unsustainable system resilient. Sooner or later, the careless exploitation of land, water, forests, biota and people will lead to disaffection, overshoot and collapse. There are many variations on the theme but the point stands. No system can be made resilient or durable on the ruins of natural systems or on the backs of exploited people. Design dictates destiny, but not in a straight-line way. The upshot is that if we intend to improve resilience, we will have to remedy the systemic flaws that have rendered our future increasingly precarious.

A second point is that the challenge of improving resilience must begin by re-forming structures of governance and political processes by which we decide issues of war and peace, taxation, education, research and development, healthcare, economy, environmental quality and the basic issues of fairness. The political reformation, I think, must begin in the United States in ways somewhat reminiscent of the revolution we led in the years 1776-1790. In Al Gore’s words, “The decline of U.S. democracy has degraded its capacity for clear collective thinking, led to a series of remarkably poor policy decisions on crucially significant issues, and left the global community rudderless.”

Corporations and markets do many good things, but seldom without rules, structures, oversight, enforcement and the countervailing power of government. Our inaction in the face of climate destabilization and virtually every Black Swan event and virtually every source of ecological, social and economic fragility is rooted in failures of regulation, politics, foresight and leadership that are attributable to the corrupting power of money that infects governments and the political process at every level.

As a result, a small group of well-funded interest groups holds our common future hostage.

There are deeper structural issues as well. The path toward resilience will require a substantial upgrading of our collective capacities of foresight, coordination, and enforcement while also improving fairness within and between countries and entire generations.

Thirdly, there are no purely national solutions to systemic problems of fragility. In an interdependent world, we will have to evolve institutions, laws, procedures and “habits of heart” that make resilience the default at both the local and regional scales and evolve formal institutions, non-governmen­tal organizations and networks at the global scale. In fact, an efflorescence of civic capacity is emerging in diverse ways from “slow” movements (food, money, cities) to organizations tracking carbon emissions of corporations, to women planting trees in Kenya, to transition towns, to the growing role of elders in tempering our adolescent enthusiasms.

Finally, we tend to equate solutions with technology without expecting or requiring any particular improvement in our behavior or institutions.

As important as better technology is to a more resilient future, real solutions will also require the rediscovery of old ideas, traditions, techniques, design strategies and even those quaint and mostly forgotten qualities of wisdom and humility. We are caught in a trap of our own making. If we are to escape the worst of it, we will have to disenthrall ourselves from our own unleavened cleverness and wean ourselves from the faith that even more of the same will somehow work differently this time.

David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Pro­fessor of Environmental Studies and Politics Oberlin College. He is the author of seven books and a founding editor of the journal Solutions, in which a version of this article recently appeared.

Editor’s note: David W. Orr is the keynote speaker at the Intermountain Sustainability Summit, March 5-6, sponsored in part by CATALYST. To register: www.IntermountainSustainabilitySummit.com

This article was originally published on January 31, 2015.