The First Draft of Prehistory
The day after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I walked into my German language class to see my teacher watching us carefully. She was older than most of my professors — an Austrian woman raised in Vienna, who was about 14 at the end of World War II. “Today, we are not going to talk about the German language. We are going to talk about German history.”
That was the right thing for her to say to us, and perhaps for her to reflect on for herself as well. I was an unsophisticated kid, and Chicago was about as far from home as I had ever been. She spoke about her life as a girl growing up in rubble and anarchy. And now as a grandmother, she was growing old in wealth and peace.
She talked about how her world had collapsed in the final days of the war — first slowly, and then all at once. And while healing was happening that day in 1989 in Europe as people sledged the wall into pieces, she could see that other big changes were in motion too. That we were in a new period of history. And not everything would be good just because we had removed one barrier.
I’ve been trying to look forward a little, to see how the water and climate communities will be evolving over the next weeks, months, and years. I’ve had the hardest time in fourteen years writing this essay — feeding my wood stove in my office on the past few cold mornings, trying to think of what to say and how to say it. (Be gentle in your comments.) I think of that wise woman in 1989 very much right now. She is tiny in memory, no doubt from malnutrition as a child.
Consider this my first draft of prehistory.
The easy conclusion is that the dramatic electoral and political outcomes in North America and Europe will have lasting repercussions on both continents and globally. The chapter of human history that closed in the past few days had described decades of relative stability since 1945, at least for the North. The United Nations, global consensus-based voluntary frameworks like the Montreal Protocol or the “Rio Trio,” multilateral institutions like development banks and the IFC and UNICEF, and engagement focused on countries and democratic outcomes have been defining elements for that period. The Atlantic Charter and the coordinated response to the invasion of South Korea were signal moments that showed a need for global partnerships and set forth positive shared values. We saw the emergence of alliances (think NATO and ASEAN) and economic frameworks like Bretton Woods that have maintained a mostly predictable political-social order. Processes like the Cold War or decolonization stressed these multilateral institutions but did not break them. I don’t say that this period represented a clear moral consensus or that the results were uniform or just — or even that we cured poverty or eliminated polio. But the system seemed pretty predictable. A lot of us — at least in the North — felt like we more or less knew what the future might look like. We had a global agenda, or we thought we did. And sometimes we saw progress, like a rising generation of middle-income countries, genuine poverty reduction, and new climate-specific institutions like the Green Climate Fund, climate finance, and the Paris Agreement.
The new chapter that opened this week has a dark beginning. I suspect someone is using a chainsaw to clearcut Bretton Woods, while the Paris Agreement begins to wobble on unstable Euro-American foundations. Bilateral foreign aid is transforming into domestic economic investment — or into tanks and artillery. Established multilateral institutions seem suddenly poised for turnover or even replacement, as middle-income countries begin to assert new priorities and allegiances and lower-income countries follow new money (or the promise of new money). Corporations seem more powerful than governments, billionaires more consequential than legislatures. Identities are corroding borders and boundaries.
The global choir has lost harmony and rhythm, singing separate songs as the older voices grow quieter and softer and more discordant. Is this a time of disorder and fragmentation, or is a new order rising? Perhaps both trends are happening together.
I don’t know how to explain what is happening to my son. The patterns are both turbulent and unclear.
When I was a kid in the late 1970s, one of our local TV stations broadcast a BBC series called Connections, led by a science historian named James Burke. He wore a shiny white suit with lapels that seemed to extend past his shoulders, but he seemed like the most well-educated and intelligent person I had ever seen or heard of.
His show was about what we might now call deep history — how humans have gone through major transitions that have often linked technology, meteorology, culture, science, and politics. Burke was a disco-era Jared Diamond. (I imagined he had a martini after filming each scene — he was cool.) He would follow a thread that began in ancient Assyria or China until the strand reached the late 1970s, showing how mass global manufacturing was altering our sense of individuality and personhood. I have watched the DVDs of the original show many times. They have held up pretty well.
Among many other things I absorbed from Connections was the idea of history as an uneven narrative — change, slow and fast, to paraphrase Daniel Kahneman. And change that is often hard to predict, which can unfold with relentless intensity and energy. Burke didn’t have a message of progress (i.e., “the future is always about getting better,” whatever better might mean). But that history and unexpected events can churn us in profound ways. A biologist might call history “punctuated equilibrium.” A climate scientist might talk about tipping points.
If I have a lesson from work in resilience, it is one that would seem familiar to Burke (who is still alive and in his 90s): sometimes the rules change and the world is new and different, and if you keep using the old rules, you will be hurt and lost and confused. But as my German instructor knew, sometimes the new rules take a while to appear and become visible. Her Vienna didn’t begin to make sense again until the 1950s.
This week, I decided the rules were different, but I don’t know what the new ones are yet. I need to wait and watch, ask a lot of questions, and maybe test some hypotheses. Right now, I am trying to make myself, my family, my organization, and my partners strong — inside and out. I’m preparing for the new rules. In the meantime, I working on my guitar, planning a long hike with my son, casting on stitches for a sweater vest.
In a few days, I leave for COP29 in Baku to join the global climate community. I am sure that many in Azerbaijan will see this week like the morning after Christmas 2004, when a massive earthquake drove a tsunami into south and southeast Asia and east Africa, killing hundreds of thousands with a wall of water that streamed inland in some places for 20 minutes. The video of this wave remains startling, a cold and horrifying force. I don’t believe that we are seeing a tsunami of evil, even if in grief or fear for our climate work we feel that way right now. We are in a time of disruption, and there will be some serious losses for both the water and climate communities. We need to trust that not everything will be bad and every hope will fail, but that new opportunities will also arise. Our needs and work are more important than ever — and that truth will ring out and resonate. Perhaps we need a change in leadership in the global space now, with new institutions for a new century.
Watch for the new rules. Shape them if you can.
John H. Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA