Warning: This post contains thoughts about a big, existential sort of topic, triggered, in part but not in total, by the recent devastating fires in Maui.  At the moment, I am able to approach it with curiosity, but that’s certainly not always the case, and it might not be the case for you right now.  If you don’t want to be thinking about climate change and other slow-moving disasters, and what some of the potential follow-on affects might be, even in broad strokes, maybe skip this post.

So.

I am curious what I am witnessing right now, in my niche, little corner of the science world.  Is it just a rough patch for my particular facility? or the beginning of its collapse?  Is it just a rough patch for the world? or the beginning of our collapse?  In ten years, what patterns will I see?  Will they have smoothed out? or will we really be in the thick of it then?

I’m a scientific programmer, and the facility I work for is long running and poorly funded (as so many long-running scientific enterprises are).  If you’ve provided a service for a long time, people begin to think it should come cheap – advances in technology and all that.  …But right now, I’m less interested in the Achilles heel of American science that is our funding system.  Right now I’m more curious how close to home this current wave of *something* is coming.

In 2020 the pandemic came, along with political upheaval, and I saw clearly how collapse is a layering effect.  Any one, any company, any country, any world order can weather a single disaster – it’s when they start to stack up that things get real.  And if you apply a long-term stressor to the system (like climate change, but that is certainly not our only boogey man) then statistically, things will start to stack up.

At the end of 2021 it got closer to home – my home, my town, where 1000 homes burned down.  And now in 2023, of course more fires continue to crop up elsewhere, some of them truly terrible.  And when they do I can’t help but feel how they live within this larger, terrible pattern of things.  Disaster on top of disaster.  Something burns down, and along with that big thing, you probably lose one or two other, smaller things.  Things you won’t miss right away, but their absence may be what lets the next fire catch all the quicker.  And for me personally, most of the fires are back to being mostly far away.  But still, right now, I can feel the ripple effects creeping in again.

I work for a long-running, poorly funded facility.  But it’s a facility that never-the-less has many global partnerships.  Because the global reach of science is one of our Great Strengths.  We have neighbors, and allies, and coworkers, and pieces of ourselves, spread around the world.  Precious neighbors, whom we depend on.  And some of the fires that are cropping up may seem far away, but they’re hurting them.

And, wouldn’t you know, sometimes it’s literal fires, and sometimes it’s metaphorical fires, but either way whooo boy do they add up.  We (my facility) are on some very interesting, shaky ground at the moment(*) – which is probably temporary.  Hopefully temporary.  Hopefully?  It could so easily turn either way.  And the scope of the thing that ends up turning it could be anywhere on the scale from something extremely specific and local to just us, to something that’s actually a (not-so) far-off ripple effect of one of the big, slow-moving catastrophes happening to the world.

Or probably both.  Probably many somethings, stacking up.

(* Note for those who want something slightly less vague: What do long-standing road closures, regular seasonal weather patterns, aging equipment, cyber attacks, and forest fires all have in common?  They all have the ability to (temporarily) shut down some fraction of the facility I work for.  And it turns out sometimes they all happen at once.)