October 2020 Newsletter Essay

Greetings!

My professional training in grad school was in biology. One of the recent issues over the past 20 years with the development of inexpensive and accurate genetic processing has been comparing the relatedness of different lineages. In the family tree of life, are a group of lizards collected in East Africa more related to local groups? Are they a distinct species? Are they perhaps more related to species in Asia or Australia? Looking at relatedness can tell us a lot about how continents and populations have moved as well as how ecosystems and the pulse of evolution have varied over space and time.

A curious side effect — relevant to AGWA and water and adaptation more generally — has been “culture” of the biologists who look at these lineages. No absolute rules really exist for these analyses. Many researchers have become characterized as either “lumpers” (who tend to group different populations together into a fewer number of species) and “splitters” (who tend to divide populations into more distinct species and subgroups). We cannot read the masterplan of Earth or the mind of God; there is no absolute answer. So lumpers and splitters argue a lot. Their arguments are often about deep assumptions about the nature of life itself.

The water community, especially those of us who depend on quantitative analysis, are very much splitters: historically, we like little, distinct problems. Divide and conquer. If we can make the problem smaller, we are more likely to solve the issue. Some disciplines such as engineering are even trained to develop splitting skills.

The pushback usually comes from people who work on systems: ecosystems, hydrology, governance and law, conflict, whole communities. Conservation, WASH, and DRR have a lot of these folks. Systems are hard to break down into discrete pieces. And even if you can, the lumpers say you may solve one problem while you ignore big issues or even create new problems.

Climate impacts and especially the uncertainties of climate change are a conflagration between lumpers and splitters. Lumpers want to fix whole systems, which can be overwhelming. Splitters want to solve problems, with solutions that may be temporary and overly narrow.

COVID-19 has altered the calculus between lumpers and splitters. Through the grand global stress test we are all facing, systems are suddenly visible and clear. System vulnerabilities are exposed, sometimes tragically so. And the added stressors around active protests for racial equity, extreme wildfires and reduced air quality, and political and economic insecurity bring these philosophical and analytic differences into stark relief. They force us to confront what we value. What we need. And — to stretch Bismarck’s famous phrase — both the art and the limits of the possible.

We need a bigger view of resilience now, one focused on the great insight common to almost all of us working on climate adaptation over the past decade or more: systems matter. We need to be aware of how systems work and their inherent vulnerabilities. By lumping multiple vulnerabilities and risks together, we can often redefine a problem to see new solutions. Urban wetlands may not provide the same type of flood defense as a dyke, but those wetlands can also store water for dry periods, and they can improve the water quality and livelihoods of downstream cities. They are also a reversible and extensible solution, that can be altered over time in the way a rigid investment might be unable to perform. Single-purpose “split” problems seem very limited right now — potentially even dangerous. Lumped problems can lead to more comprehensive solutions.

Personally, I am glad to be seeing the splitters wander over to talk with the lumpers. And in turn the splitters are helping the lumpers get better at solving problems too.

John H Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA