Moderating risks in the risk society
With every risk, there’s a chance to eliminate or moderate potential damage or ride it out. Which do we choose?
We all take risks every day. They’re mostly small ones — stepping into a crosswalk before the pedestrian light turns green, for example — and usually cause no or little harm.
Some risks are inevitable: earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes come to mind. We know they are going to happen each year though not where or when except in a general sense based on historical trends.
Then there are risks we consciously take en masse, subjecting ourselves and others to potentially dire consequences. As products of our choices, these risks are preventable, but only over many years, just as they were produced gradually over many years.
And there’s one other type of preventable risk: the risk of doing nothing to better our chances of avoiding harm in the future. It’s a risk born of apathy, or thinking efforts to change the course of disastrous events will be futile or too costly, or someone else’s rows to hoe.
President Kennedy had an answer to those who would do nothing: “There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
Put another way by a successful risk-taker, Oprah Winfrey: “One of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.”
Lessons from the last house standing
Each year we see news reports from city blocks or subdivisions entirely wiped off the map by severe weather or wildfires. Sometimes the account of the tragedy takes an unexpected, optimistic turn: that one house left standing amid the devastation.
In a low-lying coastal community, that last house may be the one built on stilts to resist storm surges — the house the neighbors laughed at while it was being built. In a forested or semi-desert area, the wildfire may destroy many homes, but there’s that one outlier — the one with the xeriscaped front yard, the stucco exterior, the concrete-tile roof, and the defensible space around it. It may not have been the prettiest house on the block, but it is now.
Sociology is among the many disciplines in which I am a bystander, but I admire those who use it to develop explanations of human group behaviors and trends. British Lord Anthony Giddens and German sociologist Ulrich Beck developed risk-reduction theories in the 1980s to reduce the downside of large-scale industrial development while maintaining its upside. Beck coined the catchphrase “Risk Society” to describe how we adapt to new risks we have created and existing risks we have increased through modernization, and how forward-thinking strategies can, over time, reduce those risks. Beck gave examples of devices that created both boons and detriments: the plow, the locomotive and the microchip.
The Risk Society is a forward-looking concept. It asks, “What can we do now that starts the process of making future generations’ lives better?”
The remedies won’t be easy, but we don’t have to look far to see some of the easier answers, the ones that don’t rely on the invention of a global cooling fan, or beneficent interventions by more advanced cultures. The house on stilts and the fire-resistant home stand out, not only for having survived disasters but as examples of existing methods of adapting to the increasingly harsh environment.
Adaptation. Survival of the fittest. These are familiar processes that do not require millennia of genetic mutation or a rub on Aladdin’s lamp to work.
The risks we take
Who would have thought five years ago that the Pacific Northwest would be become better known for its disastrous wildfires and searing heat than its rainfall?
The Northwest isn’t alone. According to a January 14, 2021, report from the World Meteorological Association, three of the six warmest years on record worldwide were 2020, 2019, and 2016. The average temperature has increased by 2.16°F (1.5°C) above the 1850 to 1900 level. Two degrees doesn’t sound like much — on a thermometer we’d consider it a mild fever — but on a world scale, it is a tremendous amount of energy.
A June 19, 2019, NASA paper, “Selected Findings of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming,” reports that at the current two degrees of temperature rise, “about 14% of Earth’s population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years.” At an 3°F increase in temperature, 37% of the population (more than double) will face recurring severe heat waves. The areas most affected will include Central and Eastern North America, Central and Southern Europe, and the Mediterranean region. The deadly heatwaves that occurred in India and Pakistan in 2015 could become annual events.
Changes of this magnitude will affect the decisions we make, individually and internationally. Housing decisions, such as whether or where to rebuild after a disaster or the type of structure to choose, can decrease a family’s risk of losing their home a second time. Insurers and municipalities can create incentives to rebuild responsibly. On a larger scale, zoning laws and development plans can adapt to “harden” areas of dense housing against disasters and provide green zones as firebreaks.
One option should be rejected: doing the same thing as before; the “comfortable inaction” President Kennedy disdained. There’s also that phrase incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The risks we make
Some risks are natural, though perhaps unnaturally enhanced by human activities and choices. We make other risks for ourselves, usually as unexpected consequences of improvement in our methods of production or changing technology.
Take cybercrime, for example. We seem to be in an infinite loop, a race to get ahead of the cyber bandits as they race to get ahead of us or those of us who don’t keep up with cybersecurity measures.
Before railroads, there were no train robberies. Before the Internet, there were no cyber bandits. Before commercial air travel, there were no plane hijacks. This is a pattern as old and as immutable as human nature: some people innovate, others prey. We can’t exit from the loop, but we can predict that every advance will create opportunities for its misuse. By making that prediction and acting on it, we may get a few steps ahead of the predators.
Some risks arise without the aid of villains. We recently experienced two major disruptions of the supply chain: the COVID-19 shutdown of mass food production facilities and the accidental blocking of the Suez Canal by a huge freighter that became wedged into the channel — a prime example of Murphy’s Law in action: If anything can go wrong, it will. The prolonged power outage in Texas this year may be another such instance.
In each case, what was Plan B? The question oversimplifies complex systems, but the three events share one common feature: a bottleneck. When we rely almost exclusively on one conduit to process goods or get them from one point to another, we run the risk of a blockage shutting down the system.
We wouldn’t be as secure from attack if the Air Force operated from only one, centralized airbase. There might be some economies of scale if we did so, but it would be an enormous target for our enemies and far less efficient at reaching far-flung destinations.
These events caused real losses to businesses and pain to people. A February 19, 2021, article in the Austin American-Statesman compared the damage from the power outage to that done by 2017′s Hurricane Harvey, the costliest storm in Texas history at $19 billion in insured losses. (Note: many home and business insurance policies do not cover losses due to electricity outages.) The death toll from the outage is estimated at 210.
Developing a more dispersed distribution and supply system is one way to keep businesses running, food getting to markets, and electricity warming homes.
Takeaways
Several themes emerge from the above observations:
- Advances in systems of operation or technologies often have unexpected outcomes.
- Forward-thinking strategies are needed to adapt to a changing environment — whether literal or figurative — doing nothing is not a good option.
- Anticipating risks and having a Plan B to deal with them is the stitch in time that saves nine.
With every risk, there’s an opportunity, a chance to eliminate or moderate potential damage or to idly try to ride it out. Which do we choose?
Louie Castoria (lcastoria@kdvlaw.com) is a partner in the San Francisco office of Kaufman Dolowich & Voluck LLP, a national law firm, a mediator at CastoriaDisputeResolution.com and CourtCall Online Dispute Resolution, and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Golden Gate University.
This article does not provide legal advice. The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily the firm’s or its clients’.
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