Don't Say Drought

The stories we tell about the changes we are experiencing are profound and important, even to the level of the words we choose. Is the Murray-Darling or the Colorado or the Western Cape in drought? If these regions face a “drought,” then the story we hear is that the drought will end and conditions will go back to normal. We endure short pain now. Indeed, in all of these areas, the word drought has itself become politicized and contentious, because so many groups want the conditions today to be a drought.

The reason for the controversy is that there are other stories we could tell. We could also say that we are in a “new normal,” and that we’ve reached some different, drier stasis point than the past. We can adjust our institutions and expectations to having less water, to reducing competition, to more efficiency and effective sharing. We have a new baseline.

A more bold story would be to say that these regions are becoming more arid for the foreseeable future. Then the story is that we need to get ready — that there is not a clear endpoint, and trends are likely to continue for decades. That wetter conditions are a short-term deviation rather than a return to older norms. That many of our rules need updating. We need to consider some fundamental aspects of what we do, how we organize ourselves, how we work. These choices are probably also much harder, and they certainly go against a story of endless economic growth and prosperity. We need to get ready.

The fight over the story we choose — do we say drought? — is really a fight over our solutions. Which story is “correct”? Without data from the future, we can’t really be sure. But I read the evidence as saying that we are in a long-term trajectory of change, that any new normal is only temporary.

Similar issues around our narratives and choice of words exist for ecosystems. I sat in a foresight strategy session recently that focused on ecosystem loss from climate change. That’s quite a strong narrative and perhaps just as deeply entrenched as drought stories. There are indeed ecosystems being lost, but climate’s role is complicated. My intuition is that we are more likely to lose ecosystems from outright destruction of ecosystems, such as channelizing a river. As an ecologist, I see climate change doing what it has always done to ecosystems: disassembling and reorganizing them. A glacier melts, becoming grassland or savannah. A forest burns, becoming a different type of forest. A desert is still an ecosystem, even if it used to be a wetland. We may experience these changes as loss, but reorganization is a more powerful framing, because it also implies that we may have some choice in how that ecosystem reorganizes. And choice is a powerful mechanism for communicating endurance and hope.

Choose your words carefully. Tell a better story to enable better outcomes.

John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA