The Moral Case for Adaptation (for Adaptation and Resilience Professionals)

Last week, I was asked to speak at a conference in a session about what we can learn from failure in the context of adaptation and resilience. The room was packed — many young professionals, but also some folks that are more mid-career, with the experience and gray hairs to prove it.

Failure is a deeply sensitive topic. Most of us are uncomfortable sharing major mistakes and misjudgments, even when we have learned something really important and positive from the process. Admitting an error to a peer or manager or someone we look up to is even harder. Sometimes even confessing an error to our inner self is challenging. A few of my mistakes took some years for me to fully acknowledge as regrets that had affected people and projects who were important to me.

With age, I think I have become much braver and more open about my failures — and my increasing desire to make sure that I am not falling short of what I need to be and do. I don’t want to avoid asking what might have been a critical question. An important motto has been to apologize early and often, and then redirect effort.

Here, I want to focus on moral failures in adaptation — and by extension the moral case for how we pursue adaptation and resilience. I would like to explore a moral crisis that many of us as adaptation and resilience practitioners, researchers, and decision makers face on a regular basis: how do we bridge the gap between the scope and intensity of the climate impacts that we know are coming with the very limited tools, policies, and institutions that are at hand?

About two years ago, I addressed a group of North American water managers on this topic: You know that dry season flows are disappearing completely or nearly so as snowpack and glaciers go away. Why do you insist on limiting your guidance to decision makers to small incremental impacts — 5 percent less snowpack rather than 95 percent less snowpack?

Many of us feel trapped in limited roles and institutions, but not asking questions about how we seriously address major drivers is our responsibility. Imagine a physician deciding to not order a blood test because it might be awkward or uncomfortable, but when that test could also provide an essential piece of diagnostic information? We should be more than our tools, and often our intuition about what is to come in a particular place or system draws on deeper wells of wisdom, intuition, and insight than a spreadsheet or an analytical model might reveal. Like a physician, our higher role is to ask the difficult questions. And if not us, then who?

After my talk to the North American water managers, a group of mid- and senior-career members of the audience rushed forward. I could see the lines of regret on their faces, as much as mine is similarly etched. Failure, especially moral failure, leaves marks. Some of them approached me in confession. I feel could feel grief and loss.

The session last week evoked a strong response too. I tried especially to speak to young professionals. In my experience, recent graduates are often called on by their managers to explore the implications of adding an adaptation and resilience element to their programs. More senior managers may not fully realize that adaptation and resilience regularly call into question longstanding assumptions and core, even “signature” programs and operations. Asking more junior staff to lead such efforts is almost guaranteeing that they will invoke ire and anger and that the results may lead to censure. That’s not a fair request for a young professional, and if they are honest and have integrity, they may be punished for their moral strength. I’ve known a lot of good people — especially young women — who have been fired for being brave in this space. They were placed in an impossible situation. Indeed, after the session had ended, a young woman came up in tears, full of shame and memory of just such an experience. I know too well how she felt and feels and I was glad we could hug. She was brave — brave in her work, which was a moral victory even if a failure in her manager’s eyes. I admire her.

Be brave. Your work is larger and more important than your job.

John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA