"Most of my neighbors don't have flood insurance either."
When we can't make sense of a world growing exponentially weirder.
A few thoughts.
When ignoring brittleness becomes the local norm: "I don't have flood insurance. But I don't feel alone as most of my neighbors don't have flood insurance either."
I first wrote about the idea of a gap between the value we claim for places and assets and what they're actually worth if we price in the risks of climate chaos and ecological collapse — the "brittleness bubble," though I wasn't calling it that then — back in 2002, when I was working on Wild Green Yonder1.
If you told me that 22 years later experts would be widely acknowledging the crisis, but the public remained clueless and/or in denial, I wouldn't have believed you.
I really thought we were smarter than this.
I really thought that when the rising waters were lapping at our front doors, at least then we'd see emergency-scale efforts to save what we can. The crisis is here now, though, we're still barely responding — and nowhere are we doing enough.
(I was also optimistic that we'd hold warming to two degrees, but that's another story.)
A while back I explored the idea that the planetary crisis is forcing on us a sort of involuntary devolution.
The kinds of impacts, erosions and disruptions rolling through our lives and communities were — not long ago — assumed to be national problems, solved by nations (in conjunction with other nations) for the benefit of all their citizens. Big problems, we thought, would be met with top-down mobilizations of resources at the massive scales needed to provide an orderly transition for all.
Even if we had the political will to act at the scope, scale and speed demanded, though, we no longer have the means. We may yet accelerate the end of fossil fuels (though this year has not been overly promising), but even with the boldest action, we now face dangers and discontinuities too large to resolve everywhere and for everyone.
All national climate response plans will, of necessity, now be partial and uneven: saving some places and not others, benefiting some people more than others, abandoning (officially or unofficially) some systems and communities in order to protect ones leaders regard as more essential.
But it’s also likely that almost no place will get everything it needs to ruggedize itself from the national government, no matter what country we’re talking about. States and provinces, regions and cities will increasingly have to make critical decisions they’re unprepared to make: how to keep their residents safe from heatwaves and floods and storms; how to secure the creditworthiness and insurability of their communities’ homes and businesses; how to handle economic upheaval, swelling numbers of migrants, unprecedented housing crises.
Where those subnational and local jurisdictions fall short — and they will often fall short — individual families and communities will be left to navigate fearsome tides of change with insufficient support and whatever resources and acumen they themselves can gather together. Many decisions of the sort that once were the purview of parliaments and congresses, are now being brought to the kitchen table. That’s what failure looks like.
And given that failure, how often will people simply decide to do nothing and trust their luck? Who could really blame them?
More importantly, who could change the way they see the future? How? To what effect? What remains possible — or even has become newly possible — in the midst of this mess? Stay tuned!
I had the pleasure recently of having a conversation with Omar El Akkad for his Without podcast. We covered a lot of ground — what planetary futurism means, how our lives are changing amidst climate discontinuities, what a world without oil might look like, and so on. You might find it interesting!
This is only the beginning, kids.
Cinch those seat belts tight.
My most popular travelogues from those years were Recycling Arcosanti and Night, Hoover Dam.