So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been thinking about "Black Swan" events. For those who don't know the term, it refers to the fact that everyone took it as known that swans were white, and there was even some famous quote about it, but then black swans were discovered in Australia, and suddenly something that no one expected to be true was found to be true. Black Swan events are those that almost no-one expects, and they can have far-reaching and often highly disruptive effects.
We are of course living through a Black Swan event right now. Yes, there were warnings from those in the know that the world was unprepared for a major pandemic. Even the partial-false-starts of SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc in recent years were not enough to wake us sufficiently to do anything (except in East Asia). But for most of us, we never even thought about a pandemic. It never entered our consciousness, or if it did, we fell into that same mental trap (heuristics, if you want a long word for it) of assuming that "low probability" means "zero probability", and we dismissed it (or at least made no lifestyle changes).
I have a Masters degree in this and I did nothing to prepare for a pandemic. (It is kind of amusing, in a tragic ironic sort of sense, that the hand sanitiser we put in our emergency kit as an afterthought was actually the thing we most needed from it – so far).
As an aside, please, please make sure you have an up-to-date emergency kit. If you don't, get one now. If you don't, not only will you suffer, but us as responding organisations will have to carry you, while we are scrambling trying to get our own systems up and running. If you are not prepared, you harm others too.
(I would say that I don't think there is such a thing as "too prepared", but actually there is, and it was put well by one of my Uni lecturers: don't spend a thousand dollars to save a hundred – but do spend a hundred to save a thousand).
An interesting characteristic of Black Swan events is that while unexpected, and generally considered to be random and to have unknowable timings, they are not entirely impossible to predict. In fact, in many cases, a Black Swan event can even be expected, but merely have unknown timing. An example is a stock market crash: if you know the signs, you can tell when one is due, but you usually will not know the final "straw that broke the camel's back" event that triggers it. (Incidentally, some of the economic downturn we are currently experiencing was expected and due – although the catalysing event this time happens to have been a very big one).
So what does this have to do with all of us?
A lot, actually. There is another term closely linked to Black Swan events, and that is "resilience". This somewhat-nebulous term means the characteristic of a system of being able to bounce back from shocks to that system. We all probably know people who are mentally resilient: no matter what happens to them, they seem to be able to get back up and carry on (and we probably all know someone – usually ourselves – who isn't good at this at all). Resilience is hard to measure or quantify, and usually the only true measure is when something goes wrong. It is also hard to value in economic terms, which is one of the reasons why we don't see much focus on it. (Whether we like it or not, our current systems of government, business, and even some social interactions are measured in dollar terms – even human life is given a dollar value, as cold as that feels).
(As an aside: if this irks you – and it probably should – it is because money is a convenient measure of exchange and relative value; without any such underlying value system, it is hard to compare anything. I don't think it is the only option, but I cannot think of a better one that would actually work).
So resilience, as hard to define as it may be, is crucial for anything we want to last. Think of a marriage: no matter how good it seems during the good times, if it is not resilient, its days are seriously numbered, as life will always have hard times, sometime (it's why it's in standard marriage vows). We have seen, in fairly stark terms – because the currency this time is human lives lost – responses to this virus that show resilience and some that do not. A lot of these have been surprises. East Asia, not so surprising, because they had a few trial runs. NZ, a big surprise, because we were not actually all that prepared: but good leadership went a long way here (even though there is a long tail to this that even the most pessimistic of us are probably underestimating). The USA was a big surprise too, as they had (according to one group's measures) one of the best set of pandemic plans. It shows that resilience is more a human factor than an organisational or institutional one: a resilient person without a plan will always do better than a non-resilient person with a plan (though good plans certainly do help).
When I was younger, I was a fan of MacGuyver (and the fact that I almost always carry a Swiss Army Knife is probably because of this – it's amazing how often they are useful). While entirely fictional, he's the perfect example of personal resilience: no matter what happens, you don't give up, but you look at what is on hand and work solutions. You don't panic. More recently, what may well have become be my all-time favourite movie, The Martian, was all this again, and had a number of excellent quotes:
"At some point, everything's going to go South on you. You're going to say, 'This is it, this is how I end.' Now, you can either accept that, or you can get to work. You solve one problem, and then you solve the next problem, and the next, and if you solve enough problems, you get to go home."
"Work the problem." (I say this to my kids fairly frequently).
"You could call it a failure but I prefer the term 'learning experience'."
"If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that its found in every culture without exception." (I think this one only appears in the book).
By the way, if you haven't, you should read the book. It's great. I know it's a tired cliché, but the book was better. You might even learn some science! :)
Another aside: did you know the author of that book (Andy Weir) lost about a year to debilitating depression and anxiety? So you don't need to be a super-star to teach yourself these lessons.
(Also, depression sucks).
We are in a world now where some of the foundations have been a little shaken. I say "a little", because as bad as this seems, it could be far, far worse – and there are institutional issues we are yet to address, yet untouched by the current crises. This is only a small Swan, as far as Black Swans go. It is a good time to reflect, to consider what else needs to change, what else lacks resilience and is at risk of failure.
I think The Martian was right: cooperation and compassion are fundamentals of being human. It's why we hate the sociopathic or psychopathic villain: we instinctively know that a lack of compassion is inhumane, that it's somehow not right. But, weirdly, we have celebrated a culture that elevates selfishness and self-interest and ego. That isn't sustainable, not in a time when things might go wrong – or already have gone wrong. In NZ, we saw the human responses everywhere after the earthquakes in Christchurch: people just coming out to help each other. That crisis actually made us better neighbours, better people. Crises often do this: they make us face ourselves with a level of harsh truth we usually shy away from, and give us an opportunity to choose to do good – but more than that, they bring out what we hide, even from ourselves, both good and bad. Thankfully, for most of us, we are too harsh a critic of ourselves, so we find we're not as bad as we thought.
This current crisis is not going away. In the last 24 hours I heard the head of the World Health Organisation stating that they had the single largest increase in number of cases in a single day. While I can sit comfortably here in New Zealand knowing that things are getting back to a version of normal, that is not the reality for many parts of the world: it's still ramping up. This will be something with a long tail: until we see a widespread vaccine deployed, "normal" will not happen. That will take at least months, and possibly years; timescales that mean that by the time we get back to "normal", normal will no longer be the same thing it was. I don't think any of us can properly predict what that means. It will mean a lot of things, and different things, and many of the choices that determine what those things will be have not even been made.
The economic impacts of this will probably last the decade.
And what then? What if we are hit by another Black Swan before this one has fully played out? Empires seldom fell because of a singular problem, but more often because of the intersection of a range of problems, all converging to bring it down. Our current globalised world is likely the same: one event won't break it, but too many at once might.
And that brings us to the real kicker: we are not living in a resilient world.
Look at any measures of environmental impact or global carrying capacity, and we are in overshoot. Multiple measures in multiple key resources tell that we are taking more than the Earth can support in the long term. If we imagine a lake used for fishing, if you take fewer fish than are born each year, the fish stocks can keep replenishing and your fish supply is secure, but if you begin to take more fish than are born, the total fish numbers will decrease, meaning even fewer fish are born, and before you know it, you've crashed the entire fishery.
For anyone wondering, I did not pick overfishing arbitrarily. It's one of the areas currently in overshoot.
We can argue about whether or not certain measures are accurate or not (climate change is a contentious one, though it shouldn't be), but when multiple measures of multiple resources are telling the same story, that is when you need to sit up and take notice.
I don't have answers for every problem. I struggle to have answers to my own problems! But I think it is important to at least be aware that there are problems, to live with a conscious acknowledgement that doing the same as we have always done is causing problems, to think about how we can change, and what we can do to build resilience into everything we do.
The first step in change is a recognition that change is needed.
If I was a betting man (I'm not – too aware of maths to get suckered in to gambling), I would say that we have a roughly even probability of seeing the next big Black Swan before we see the final end of this current one. We have a close to certain chance of seeing one within the next half-century, and even a fair chance of another big one before this new decade is out. A lot of this is to do with ecological overshoot and climate change, but that's not to say those are the only options (though they are why I'm putting such high odds). These are total stab-in-the-dark blind guesses, except that I have studied the subject, so maybe there's a bit of informed intuition there too. I could be utterly wrong. I really do hope I am. I kind of feel I may not be.
In any case, what can you do today, in whatever counts for normal for you right now, to build a little resilience? What can you do to take a little less, use a little less, waste a little less? What can you do to help someone else, especially someone in a worse place to you? The future relies on us cooperating, living with compassion, caring about how we treat each other and the beautiful, delicate systems on the Earth that we rely on.
The coming world will need us to be better humans, as it may not be as comfortable a world as we've grown used to.
[Photo: Michal Klajban, CC-SA-4.0-Intl, Wikimedia Commons].
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