Well, that title sounds a bit ominous I guess. Nevertheless, we have seen various events, some quite catastrophic, which indicate that our ability to ‘hold it together’ is, well, fragile. We have also seen evidence of remarkable human resilience in confronting catastrophe, which I observed directly a couple of weeks ago.
The Pandemic as Prolog
If we learned anything from experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, it was that the global industrial-consumer economy is vulnerable to severe disruption under some conditions. A pandemic like the one we experienced in the extreme for a couple of years had not happened in a hundred years. Few were prepared. Luckily, the government funded research labs had been working on some new vaccines for COVID type viruses. Once the researchers were aware of the rapid spread of the virus, they went into a ‘full court press’ and the drug companies were able to begin testing in a matter of weeks
The ‘transactional’ president at the time, since he measured everything by its effect on his personal image and power, at first dismissed the threat, then offered delusional ‘cures’ before finally realizing he could no longer avoid a full federal response to the actual threat to the people. The delay cost lives. Once a new president replaced him, the new genetically based vaccines were widely distributed, although various paranoid conspiracy theories prevented some folks from taking the vaccine.
Despite a variety of missteps and ‘snafus’ the pandemic finally tapered off. However, because of widespread illness and shutdowns of many businesses, including transport in a globalized complex of ‘supply-chains,’ all manner of shortages ensued. A lot of that might not have occurred if the economy had not become so dependent on the otherwise efficient ‘just-in-time’ model of global supply of materials and products, which had eliminated many of the costs of maintaining inventories.
The necessity of ‘hunkering down’ at home, wearing masks in public, having your kids out of school in come cases for months, losing your job, especially in the service sector, and getting vaccine shots that many told you not to trust, psychological damage was inflicted on many during the pandemic. Many came to understand the value of underpaid ‘essential workers’ when they could not work. As the threat subsided, job opportunities slowly came back, schools reopened, people gradually got back to a semblance of ‘normalcy.’ Yet, the world was not quite the same. All the disinformation and discord had taken a toll on public confidence in many institutions. Our resilience had taken on some damage.
The Power of Lidia
I had been unaware of the buildup of Lidia in the western Pacific until a few days before our trip. We were planning to go to a small town on the west coast of Mexico to take care of some business and visit some friends. Then, just as we were about to board our plane, the news reported a projected landfall for Lidia as Puerto Vallarta, PVR, our destination airport. At least it would not arrive until a few hours after our landing. We could be out of town before it hit, we hoped. As we drove out of PV, it began to rain. The traffic out of town was thicker than I had ever seen it, entirely stop and go for most of the way.
By then we knew that Lidia would make landfall as a Category 4 hurricane 15 or 20 kilometers south of Puerto Vallarta, and we were heading a similar distance to the north. Nevertheless, once we reached our destination at the very edge of the hurricane, we were in heavy wind and rain, and trees coming down outside our hotel window (which had bars, to our comfort). The damage, even at that distance from the center of Lidia, was significant. At first, we lost electrical power intermittently, along with internet service (no access to news); by nightfall, power was completely gone as was water service, which relies on electrical pumps.
The next day was beautiful along the coast north of Puerto Vallarta, except for the debris from the storm. Nobody had power or water, so all the restaurants closed to clean up and wait for restoration of services. All we could do to get some food was to find a small bodega where we could buy a few forms of junk food like chips and soda (not cold—no refrigeration without electricity). By that evening, it seemed unlikely that power would come back on soon.
So, we decided to see if we could find somewhere to move to where the power was back on. A friend helped us locate a nice small hotel in the next town, so we moved there just as the sun set. It was not until the next day that we were able to get a real meal in a café at the PV marina. Then, a day later, the power went out there too. I wrote most of this later, only to post it today, after returning home.
Fragile Systems and Us
Complex systems are just that: complex. They are complicated too, that is, when a key element fails, the damage can reverberate throughout the whole system. Increasingly, the world’s most complex human systems are becoming more and more vulnerable to the consequences of our own impact on the various elements of the Earth System. It is time to face the fact that the global expansion of the industrial-consumer political economy has already had major impacts, disrupting atmosphere, oceans, land, and biosphere, all of which are crucial for the survival of human and other life forms.
I’m not saying Lidia was a direct consequence of anthropogenic ‘climate change,’ since hurricanes have occasionally hit the west coast of Mexico in the past. But extreme weather events worldwide have clearly grown in both frequency and intensity in the past few years, and the data and projections of climate scientists are not only more accurate, but increasingly confirmed by our own experience of extreme weather events. People who have lived in the area all their lives told me that they had never seen a hurricane hit landfall in or near Puerto Vallarta with the intensity of Lidia.
The scary part is that the impacts of the ‘technosphere’ on the Earth System tend to lag behind the cause (the destructive actions and effluents of the global industrial-consumer economy of growth), so that we see the damage sometime after its cause. That is just one factor delaying a reasonable response to an extreme set of changes that added together constitute a climate/ecological emergency.
The buildup of carbon in the atmosphere above pre-industrial levels and the destruction of ecosystems by extraction, construction and manufacturing, travel by air, sea, and land, as well as modern warfare, have taken a couple hundred years, most of which, however, has happened in the last half century. We are only now beginning to feel the impact of decades of failure to deal with the real consequences of messing with Mother Nature.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 