New Seasons of Change

Last week we held a briefing of our global team with our Nepal-based colleagues to hear what had happened and how we might be able to respond as a team. Nepal was one of the very first Water Resilience Tracker countries, and the staff there are professional and serious, commanding respect. The images and — most importantly, the solemnity of colleagues’ voices — were quietly dramatic. By the end of the call, we all shared their pain and loss and a desire to be useful.

I wish that Nepal was the only country experiencing disasters over the past few months. The extreme heatwaves and burns of Europe, the massive waves of smoke from remote wilderness fires in northern Canada and Brazil among many others are hard to interpret, encompass, and respond too. Many people seem to have to come to an understanding that we are on the edge of big changes. The scales and images are also hard to reconcile: a child struggling to breathe at school in the dense smoke along the shores of Lake Ontario, a lost home and vineyard in France, a disappeared town in a Himalayan valley. These losses are not equal, but they can still be personal tragedies and losses at the same time that they feel like part of a global shift in awareness and immediacy. I am sure that many of us have gasped and wept at these images and experiences. We are connected to one another.

I have two personal responses: grief is both necessary and often an obstacle to resilience, and how we define our problem changes how we define our solutions. Now is a good time to consider where we are now and how to be useful going forward.

If you see smoke coming from a house, maybe there are flames actively spreading inside and we need to get everyone out, call an ambulance to manage injuries, and fetch a fire truck to contain the fire. But maybe the smoke is coming from a fireplace, and the family is inside playing a game in the warmth of the hearth. And perhaps I’m just grilling a lot of meat and you just need to come in and grab a plate. Seeing only one explanation may restrict you from seeing other options. It may also be dangerous.

I can see three different filters for how we find resilience in this time, with these kinds of experiences. These filters provide an interpretive framework that leads to certain kinds of solutions, not all of which are aligned, and some of which may actually be competing or even in conflict with each other.

Defend the Perimeters

At root, this option says that the world isn’t changing in terms of fundamentals and we can avoid making really big changes. We need to stop “losing” things — species, cities, flow regimes, dams. Defending the perimeters means at the most basic level that the boundaries we have right now are not just important and necessary but should remain and be permanent. In humanitarian groups, defending the perimeters means focusing on the changes necessary for “vulnerable communities” and not doing much for the communities who may be a little farther downslope or upstream (or higher above the ocean). For resource managers, this looks like traditional conservation science, steering ecosystems and management systems back to some baseline in the past. “Preserve, protect, restore.” For disaster scenarios, we need better early warning systems. More efficient use of water can help us manage increasing competition. At most, climate change is mostly about something that is happening gradually and — for the most part — in the future, and the most critical climate action we can take now is to reduce carbon emissions.

Brace for Impact

Nepal would have a serious problem with that last sentiment. Nepal has contributed very little to global atmospheric carbon, and indeed the intense floods destroyed a whole series of hydropower facilities. Nepal has gone quite far in the process of transitioning to low carbon issues. Bracing for impact is about non-stationary science and engineering. Moreover, ecological science sees climate change in a very different way than conservation science. Ecological science is highly aware that the climate has been quite different in the past and that often climate shifts occur in very short periods of time. In warming periods, sea level rise proceeds in millimeters, then a few centimeters, and then in meters — decades, then years, then weeks. Managing for past conditions is counterproductive. Despite even the most effective climate mitigation, thawing permafrost and methane emitting wetlands have been unleashed even as forests become savannahs and savannahs become grasslands. The carbon cycle is alive and awake in the same way that the water cycle is, and together they will take us into strange new places. Some things have to be defended, but we are reaching a transformational state now. The most exposed communities need evacuation. The groups exposed to serious impacts within a decade or two need serious attention now. Early warning systems would not have helped in Nepal and might even have kept people in the danger zone, with a false sense that they are safe with their alarms. Instead, people either needed to have a robust shelter in place strategy or whole communities must move away to safer places. Ecosystems are reorganizing, which includes loss in the short term and new growth in the medium and long term. We can build technical systems to help prepare for these new conditions and, ideally, shape the trajectory that we are on to enhance more favorable options.

Preparing for Deep Change

Ecological science can see that transformational change is coming, and we can evolve our cities, energy systems, agriculture, and transport systems to be robust and flexible through technical interventions as we brace for impact. Preparing for deep change is both easier and harder, and transformation calls all of us to action rather than just our technical professionals. You could call this spiritual resilience or, if you are more a little more secular, deep resilience: we must embrace a planet restructuring itself, unfolding in new directions around us. We need new psychological and cultural infrastructure, teaching our children to embrace and accept these changes instead of grieving a world they never knew. Helping them see and comprehend those things they can influence and those they must accept and submit to. How to feel inspiration and joy more often than loss, and to imbue them with robust and flexible hearts and minds, music and poetry. If we do a good job, they will be very different than us. But they will also match the world they are co-creating.

I wish all love and strength to the people of Nepal right now, the towns and farms and forests stressed from heat in Europe, the child struggling to breathe in the dark skies. They need immediate help. How we move into other realms, into new seasons of change, is the question I am trying to answer.

I am eager for your thoughts, passion, and fellowship.

John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA