Wicked Problems

Mina on May 8, 2018

“The world has always been a hard and dangerous place; human mistakes and human cruelty have made it more so.”

***

Reading the subsection “Working with despair” is an easy way to ruin a morning. I thought “bummer” might be an unfair description for a book that contained in it so many moments of healing and hope; by the time I got to reading about “environmental hospice,” I realized it had been a warning for the chapter to come.

Much of “Working with despair” calls to mind my conversations with Stephanie Wakefield in class last semester. The statement “sustainability implies the question of what, above all else, should be sustained” reminds me of a recurring question of hers: what do we want to bring into the new world? Despite having a more despair-focused worldview in which the end was near and getting nearer, Stephanie always encouraged us to mine that glimmer of hope.

I thought about one of her methods when thinking about “environmental hospice,” and also about a prayer I have heard used during end-of-life care. While I couldn’t begin to repeat the words verbatim, the idea of the prayer is that no matter, no energy is every truly lost; all things return, just differently. Stephanie’s work with the adaptive cycle, the teaching of how an end actually just means the abrupt reorganization of energy and matter into a new configuration, seems strikingly similar. Perhaps this way of thinking too is an attempt at avoiding the finality of an end, of easing our way into death– but if we accept that death is inevitable, what’s the harm?

Despite being the most depressing, the first path Bauman presents seems the most sensible. The second path and a focus on bioregionalism, a perspective I’m actually partial to, seems kind of hopeless in New York City, where “living simply” and “getting to know one’s neighbors” seems like madness if not totally impossible. While clearly the kind of personal accounting and peace-making described in this section is mentally and emotionally important, I wonder if it actually has any use beyond the strictly personal. The section describes this cultivation of hope as “modest,” and it is– depressingly so. If change can really only be effected on such a small scale, what’s the point of doing it at all? What’s the point of learning how to live in one specific place when it may be gone tomorrow? (I admit I may just be a grump– I haven’t had my coffee yet).

Regardless of my opinion of the first two paths, I agree with Bauman’s assessment of the third. We have already tried to induce a broad, revolutionary hope for the earth countless times, and no matter how glitzy the ad campaigns, it’s never really stuck. And totalizing discourses never work. I can only nod along when Bauman writes “we believe that the type of ‘wicked’ problems faced by human communities leave little room for more than partial and incomplete answers to global problems, so a sweeping hope for global solutions is inappropriate.”

(sorry this is late, I locked myself out of the damn blog)