Governing in the Anthropocene
All governing is now emergency management. And we aren't ready for it.
Hello,
Politicians are rhetoricians, capable of deploying sentence fragments, slogans, and succinct general bullet point-style solutions to all manner of public problems. Putting the right words down on paper, in fact, can change the world. What are laws, on first glance, but words on paper, giving the directive to do stuff: decrease this tax bracket; give authority to cut checks to the elderly, disabled, and the young; change this street name to a new name. These political and economic problems can be thought of as “tame.”
But what happens when problems need way more than precise words that allow big changes simply due to grammar, tense, and word position in a sentence. What happens when the problems are “wicked,” problems of country-wide planning, defined as problems that don’t allow for resolution in terms of aims and solutions that defy easy articulation and whose internal logic is anything but predictable. In fact, climate change has been placed into an even scarier category, the “super wicked problem.”
Scholars Levin et al. 2012 describe super wicked problems as having these additional characteristics:
There is a significant time deadline on finding the solution
There is no central authority dedicated to finding a solution
Those seeking to solve the problem are also causing it
Certain policies irrationally impede future progress
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The science of temperature increase due to the greenhouse gas emissions part of global warming is very simple and straightforward; first theorized, demonstrated, and quantified a long time ago, by the likes of Joseph Fourier (1824), Eunice Newton Foote (1856), and Svante Arrhenius (1896). We know why and how it’s happening. We know generals and specifics in terms of what is happening due to atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication, salinification, deoxygenification, tropicalification, urban heat intensification, and so forth. We know that cloud science and how clouds form and are changing due to climate change is going to be pivital in our understanding moving forward. All in the all, the science is kind of the easiest part of it.
Public Policy solutions and generating and educating and becoming the type of people who take the political, social, economic, and historical smart policy choices during the Anthropocene requires such a serious minded, almost monomaniaical focus and attention to detail and nerding out about flood plains, hurricane forecasting, the logistics of emergency management that it calls for an entirely new polity and politician. We are attacking bureaucrats, experts, nerds, administrators, data analysts, meteorologists, engineers, climatologists, and so on when we need these people, along with people who truly take political science, public administration and governing seriously, to run for office right now.
A polity who lets their governments off the hook for mismanaging even the smallest of weather related disasters is one not understanding the future. A politician who is more interested in personal ambition, going to fancy dinners, and cutting funding for civilization maintenance and progress is not the ones we need for the current monent and for the rest of our lives.
About ten years ago, I remember hearing Amy Goodman say on Up with Chris Hayes, that all weather forecasts should be mentioning climate change. She was right then and right now. Living through the Anthropocene requires metaphysical shifts in thinking that people just aren’t prepared for and that politicians, good at using words that don’t overly scare people, need to know how to discuss this. Better yet, they need to be passionate and curious and public minded in the pursuit of prevention, preparation, and managing the endless emergencies we are facing. We need abundance thinking, not zero-sum scarcity thinking. We need to take on climate change like it’s the existential threat that it is.
Instead, we are getting the gutting of public services; the destruction of scientific research institutions; and the absolutely nihilistic annihilation of the government’s disaster capabilities from the Trump administration. NOAA is a Western civilization achievement that is being erased by people with video game and Hollywood movie frameworks and understandings of the world they inhabit. Mayors, governors, presidents, representatives, both state and federal, senators the same, need to recognize and be fit for the mission: governing in the Age of the Anthropocene.
Drowing in a burning world,
Patrick M. Foran