Climate Change as a Supertask: or, Mapping the Territory with Delmar, the Geographer (#23)
The other day a friend and I drove up to a forest on a mountain ridge not far from the center of urban Honolulu. It’s small but lovely forest of ironwood trees, and to get there you can either take one super steep road straight up, or another that winds across a couple of smaller hills. My friend had never been to this forest before, and I was driving without navigation. At one point I missed a turn, and I said, “oh whoops I need to be over there” and I got onto the serpentine road. My friend commented that it was oddly exciting and nostalgic to drive without GPS — to actually look at the terrain and just travel in the direction of the trees.
This caused me to share a memory about driving a rented Mustang convertible from Las Vegas, where I’d just gotten married by Elvis, to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and across the desert on Route 66. It was a high point of the marriage, me in the passenger seat with my bare feet on the dash and a gigantic green and pink map unfolded in my lap. My friend and I reminisced about cross country road trips and life before cel phones. Pandemic, peak oil, and the abrupt cessation of travel to and from Hawaiʻi had recently shrunk our physical geographies.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “the map is not the territory”. It means that a representation can never achieve 100% fidelity to what it represents. The aphorism was coined by Alfred Korzybski in 1931 and I’m going to obsess on it slightly in this essay. Korzybski was interested in perception and defined a new academic field called General Semantics, intended as “a new extensional discipline which explains and trains us how to use our nervous systems most efficiently.” (I wonder what ever happened to that.)
In Science and Sanity, Korzybski wrote that transitions between eras of history and paradigms of science are bewildering. For instance, he said:
“The passing from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican, from Euclidean to non-Euclidean, Newtonian to non-Newtonian (Einsteinian), etc., systems. In all these transitions it took one or more generations before the upheaval subsided and an adjustment was made to the new conditions.”
This speaks to the current conditions of academia. We are in the process of changing maps. And yes, it is bewildering. Switching from a road atlas to an iPhone changes your relationship to the territory. While the GPS on my smartphone is more accurate and efficient, it actually diminishes my relationship to the territory.
Our perceptions of reality are “maps” and they not 100% accurate, or maybe not even 60% accurate…actually they are more of a pretty random guess based mainly on past experience and mental schema. The territory, physical reality, is real, but our sensory perceptions (our maps) of it differ.
In Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Map and the Territory, the protagonist is an artist who becomes famous for his photographs of maps. It’s a sophisticated but depressing novel that ends in the author’s fictional murder. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, is another novel (extremely strange, published in 1761) in which the author concludes that it takes one year to write the complete diary of one day. The diary is the map, and the day is the territory.
Researching Tristam Shandy, I discovered a new favorite word. The novel appears in a Wikipedia definition of a Supertask. A supertask (see also: ultra-task, and hypertask) is a “countably infinite sequence of operations that occur sequentially within a finite interval of time.” Supertask is a fantastic philosophical concept and also, I think, a quite handy new vocabulary word for the climate predicament.
Because climate change is the ultimate supertask. How could we possibly, in the nine years remaining to avert the worst version of hothouse earth, change how we do almost everything about almost everything: food, energy, transportation, housing, migration, borders, water, economics, wild animals, trees, pets, babies, lithium, space junk….Most days, I wake up and make a sort of loose to do list while I drink coffee, but I’m happy if I accomplish three or maybe four things on it. Even making the list of things that need to happen around climate change seems like a supertask. And now that we’ve been given a finite interval of time by the IPCC, the list seems to be, well, countably infinite.
The IPCC report is just about where my conversation with Delmar (a pseudonym, because this is an IRB approved research project), an Associate Professor of Geography and Environment at Community College of the Pacific (also a pseudonym) began. He said, “Under the 8.5 scenario you’re seeing portions of the planet warming up seven degrees centigrade, right? Versus under the 2.6 scenario where we’re seeing very little warming on the planet. And what is the difference between these two scenarios? Human behavior.”
You’ve got your climate scientists on the one hand, doing their job and telling us what the planet is doing, and then you’ve got social scientists working on the behavioral dynamics. Delmar said, “It seems like the one thing over which humans have the least control is human behavior…” which seems like a circular statement but is, nevertheless, so true.
But all we have to do is change everything.
As a discipline, Geography straddles the border of natural sciences and social sciences. Delmar called it “the discipline of explorers” which seems very exciting. I always thought of geography as labeling things on maps, but actually, it is the study of the territory, not the map. You can also think of Geography as the study of “Who What Where”. Delmar said he became interested in Geography when he was four, and his family moved from Wisconsin, which was flat, to California, which had hills. “Geography is about reading the landscape.”
We spent quite some time just talking about the scope of Geography. Delmar shared this graphic from his Intro class with me:
It’s complicated, right? No one person could ever “master” all of these fields. Geography is housed in social sciences, and climate science is definitely in its purview: it’s the study of forests and trees (physical geography) and also people (human geography).
“Anybody studying climate change is not going to be able to just focus on physical geography, because you’re going to have to take into account the human component because humans are the ones creating the problem, at least at this point. So if you tried to study climate change without studying something about humans or their behavior, then you’re not going to get very good answers about what’s going on in the future, because everything has been affected by people.”
I confessed to my own poor understanding of Geography as a field. I have another friend who is a Geologist; she studies rocks and volcanoes and I often have to stop and think to use the right word when I introduce her. (She is a Volcanologist, and once I called her a Vulcanologist by accident. Live long and prosper!) One time, Delmar emailed me about a data chart from the IR department about student attitudes towards climate change, and he said he thought that GEO had been confused with GEOL. For the record, it was not my report, but I investigated the data informing the chart, and he was right. It was basically a typo, but still, understandably crazy-making. I don’t think anybody has ever confused ENG with ENGR. (Perhaps recognizing this difficulty, Geology and Geophysics courses were renamed this year as ERTH. Which is kind of like McKibben’s Eaarth?).
Delmar and I had also worked together a few years back to untangle some learning outcomes for an introductory environmental science course. One campus said the outcomes were in BIOL. Delmar was teaching them in GEO. Another campus said that the course outcomes didn’t exist and they were going to write a new course. Sustainability has always been a bit of a “turf war” between overlapping and related fields of environmental studies and sciences, biology and ecology, geography, oceanography, and I’m sure many others. When I interviewed Fred, one of our top climate educators, who is a geologist by training, he told me that meteorology is the actual academic home base of climate scientists. How you identify yourself depends on who you are talking to.
But if you really want to stay up past midnight, try reading some Eigenfactor analysis which maps the territory of journal citations in different academic fields.
The thicker the lines between dots, the greater number of cross-disciplinary citations. If that web becomes dense enough, the two fields spawn a new field, as in the case of, for example, Neuro-Economics. “When you think about the location and compartmentalization of disciplines within the university system, they don’t fit climate change very well,” Delmar noted.
Delmar has a background in climatology, and forestry. He is an avid hiker and rock climber — the disipline of adventurers! For fun, he does things like build weather stations on mountains to monitor fog and dewdrops. He was excited about collecting data during the shutdown of tourism in Hawaiʻi, because “you don’t often get experimental controls in climate studies.” A colleague had found some interesting anomalies in weekend rainfall when traffic was lessened, and Delmar was excited to collect data to see how the fog levels were responding to the shutdown.
He mentioned at least ten other scientists as mentors and collaborators. “I get passionate about this stuff,” he said, (although he’s usually in the acknowledgements on publications and not the co-author, because he’s just too busy teaching five classes a semester while monitoring the fog). “I get angry about what’s happening, too, but when it comes to teaching I’m usually trying to tone it down and present an objective view.” He had his students create a word cloud about their emotions related to learning about climate change, and he said
“The students really are having a visceral reaction to climate change,”
“Something I’ve been thinking about this past year is that I teach a lot about the problems in the science and not a lot about the solutions. So immediately I started thinking about solutions. For example, there’s a species of limu, which grows in Hawaiʻi and they’ve fed it to sheep and other livestock and they reduced the methane emissions of the sheep by up to 97%, which is pretty incredible.”
On the other hand, one of his own behavior changes has been using cloth napkins instead of paper napkins. Which is pretty far down on the supertask list if you think about it.
“My new thought is to find ways for people to see quantitatively how something they’re doing already is mitigating climate change. And then to ask them to do something more.” As an example, he was going to calculate emissions reductions from Covid 19 remote learning, since nobody is driving to campus.
“If we can show that something can shift, that would motivate behavior.”
One concern that Delmar and I share is a the new algorithm-based registration system called STAR GPS, which looks at a student’s intended major and then it shows the classes they need to complete it in the shortest time. That sounds helpful, and it is, but as Delmar pointed out “It’s designed for getting them in, and getting them out, and getting them a degree.” This push is related to national pressures to reduce time to degree. Hawaiʻi has its own goal called 55 by 25, which aims for 55% of adult residents to have a college degree by 2025. Again, that seems like a great goal, but it has unintended consequences.
“STAR is well on its way to eliminating a liberal arts education of which sustainability is a huge part.” It’s kind of spookily like The Social Dilemma, the Netflix film which is making many people I know verrrry uncomfortable about how we let an algorithm influence our behavior via our smartphones. Delmar said, “I spent eight years as an undergrad and then wound up really excelling in what I like to do. I still value a liberal arts education. But it’s all focused now on the job market. That’s the frustrating part of it. And all of that combines into this. I really think that there needs to be more room for sustainability and climate change awareness to be done in multidisciplinary teaching approaches.”
STAR is a student’s academic map. It is described as a “guide to create an academic pathway to graduation through the Guided Pathway System (GPS).” But….this map, too, is not the territory. Maybe we focus too much on the destination and not enough on the journey.
Because it might make sense to take the straight steep road up the mountain to get to the forest, but it just might be more important right now to take the winding one.
