By Ian Concannon
This spring, I traveled to southwest Florida where my namesake hurricane had made its explosive landfall the previous October. In June, I navigated life along with millions of others under the heavy haze of forest fire smoke blown over New England from Canada. Most recently, violent floods washed through several towns in southern Vermont, where I’ve lived for several months cumulatively since graduating from college in 2018. I am now training as a climate planner in graduate school, where my work seeks to develop resilience at a public transit agency. Yet even treading repeatedly within the direct footprint of climate change, I cannot shake a nagging sense of incompleteness—that I have somehow come no closer to comprehending the full forces at play.
Extreme weather may serve as evidence of climate change, but it is only a snapshot of a larger process. Climate change is as much an undermining of the way we make sense of the world as it is a self-contained object as such—more epoch than event. Climate change is a sunburn, an acid ocean, an expanse of algae, a burn scar, a mutated pathogen. It is the afterlife of acts committed generations ago and it never seems to arrive. Its essence can never be grasped directly. Strange weather is only the shadow cast by this phantom.
Attempting to squeeze a treatment of climate change into the bounds of ordinary discussion only obscures its true nature. Instead, I suggest we dim the lights and dream…
Pan has always been an old god, even when the ancient Greeks learned of him from the Arcadian mountain tribes. Secluded from view, he preferred to roam the woodland hills, tending livestock and hunting game. Unlike his more refined relatives Artemis or Hermes, Pan presented a distinctly bestial figure, pursuing his favored nymphs and sowing panic in foes. Offensive and alluring, powerful and marginalized, he brought together associations of fertility, replenishment, music, vengeance, chaos, violation, and mortality. Pan continues to embody these painful contradictions of the natural world.
Much as Pan could multiply into a swarm, his image has taken many forms in different settings since antiquity. A quick survey includes the Wiccan horned god as well as the faun from Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, leering at the borderlands of the underworld. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, a deer god with a human face silently patrols the forest depths, taking and restoring life in equal measure with each stride. Pan’s offspring remain a penetrating reminder of a tangled rift lurking beyond the scope of civilized life.
One feature separating Pan from the rest of the Greek Pantheon is his mortality, documented first under the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius following the birth of Christ. More recent authors associate Pan’s death with the triumph of modernity:
Then keep the tomb of Helice,
Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold,
And what remains to us of thee?
Though many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Ah, what remains to us of thee?
My contribution here is to suggest that the terror and humility we know as a result of the turmoil of climate change reveal the continued presence of larger-than-life demigods. When we spot wayward migrations, upend our routines, abandon our homes, or savor an unseasonably warm winter evening: this is Pan’s work. To know this is to restore the generative agency of natural forces that were thought to be extinguished long ago. This time, though, Pan is back in ghost form—an existence denied by most, unimpressed by our attempts to appease. The question becomes: what would it mean to organize ourselves in space holding closely to this understanding?
One answer comes to us from ecological systems theory. As introduced by ecologists C.S. Holling and Lance Gunderson, Panarchy is a concept that invokes both an antidote to hierarchy and a nod to Pan’s power, in which the cycles of a system are tied together across spatial and temporal scales to describe the system’s response to stimuli. This approach honors the changes that naturally occur across such assemblages while suggesting interventions that uphold beneficial forms of resilience.
It may be worth grounding this theory in the case of a lake. Over the course of a year, this lake’s surface area, depth, temperature, nutrient composition and biomass content will all vary. However, these relatively rapid cycles, such as freeze dates in the winter, higher flow rates in the spring, or phytoplankton blooms in the summer, occur in such a way as to maintain the water body’s capacity for certain essential functions. This lake also depends on larger resource flows, such as tributary inflow volumes and the spread of species from other sources. These are in turn governed by even larger economic and climatic processes, like mass fertilizer application, anthropogenic demand for water, and planetary temperature trends. While periods of expansion, stability, collapse, and renewal are to be expected, Panarchy theory suggests that a resilient system will trend back towards its “domain of attraction” until conditions dictate otherwise; a lake will remain a lake, rather than an anoxic puddle or golf course.[2]
Given these constant exchanges, resilience is not equivalent to stability. Instead, resilience implies that local adaptive cycles are able to integrate information from the slower cycles surrounding them. When conditions change abruptly, ecosystem functions will initially degrade before adapting in such a way that the external changes become internalized. A lake may dry up entirely if enough feedback pushes it in that direction, but it may still retain its status as a productive system, albeit in a new state. What matters is that larger grounding conditions do not shift so fast as to undermine the ability of smaller, more local systems to maintain their adaptive capacity.
With Ghost Pan running loose, this is exactly what we see. Supercharged with two hundred years of fossil fuel energy and the global connectivity of capitalism, changes that might otherwise have taken thousands or millions of years can now proliferate in a matter of decades, if not faster. Circulating at such speed and altitude, these shifts fail to impart a coherent message on the systems they contain. Our lake, industry, or city of cannot meet these new demands by surrounding their existing structure in new fortifications. Their internal logic must move from preservation to pliability.
In my efforts to embed climate resilience across a large urban transportation system, this clash of priorities is readily apparent. After decades of divestment, public transit remains an economic lifeline for tens of millions in North America and is understood as increasingly crucial to weaning cities of their dependence on fossil fuels. Simultaneously, its operations tend to be welded in place by predetermined land use and governance regimes. More specific challenges to the climate resilience of transit include:
- Limited oversight of land, often along narrow Rights-of-Way. In the Northeastern United States, these Rights-of-Way are commonly laid in former streambeds or reclaimed wetlands.
- Dependence on volatile supply chains for specialized equipment.
- Few formal coordination avenues to plan with surrounding landowners and policymakers, like municipalities or residents.
- Specialized labor practices that delay responses to emergent needs, such as maintaining drainage infrastructure vs. clearing roads or repairing transit vehicles.
- Unionized labor may be paired with short-term private contracts in which institutional knowledge is lost from year to year.
- Project management processes that prioritize condition or political expedience over climate vulnerability.
- Nested networks of aging communications, electrical, and mechanical infrastructure in which small disruptions set off cascading effects across the rest of the system.
- Lagging federal and state requirements that promote but do not require climate resilience standards.
Transit authorities have few examples to guide how to successfully climate-proof tens of billions of dollars of assets. Adaptation strategies mostly involve selective elevation, installing flood walls, substituting rapid transit for buses, and reducing service during high-risk weather events. Even pursued to their fullest extent, these resilience measures correspond to a vision of the future in which people continue to use transit infrastructure much as they do now, albeit with critical elements elevated or clad in corrosion-resistant materials.
A “panarchic” approach to this issue recognizes the inseparability of transportation from its larger setting. Even as transit moves to meet the inevitability of direct climate change exposures such as extreme heat or stormwater flooding, the surrounding city will also be transforming. Economic changes may induce new demand away from traditional commuting destinations, while new residential patterns may bolster or undercut the existing labor force. Newly widespread forms of data will likely make climate modeling more accurate, even as the weather itself becomes more erratic. Longstanding political assumptions baked into the American planning context may begin to unravel, opening or foreclosing instruments by which local government rises to meet the challenges of environmental change.
Far from spaces of disembodied circulation, transit exerts a visceral influence on its physical surroundings. The pressures of climate change reconfigure the ways in which these spaces are demarcated, contested, and made ready for new uses. As planners, we occupy a unique position that both bears witness to the continued influence of historical actors and formulates new models by which future generations may carry out their own lives. Pan’s presence signals a warning to that tradition of planners who understand themselves as technicians erecting monumental cities in defiance of the surrounding environment. Let’s hope we are able to listen.
[1] Oscar Wilde, “Pan,” in Poems by Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Ross. Retrieved at Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1057/1057-h/1057-h.htm.
[2] Holling, Crawford Stanley, and Lance H. Gunderson. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002.
About the Author: Ian Concannon is an aspiring climate planner and master’s student at Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, with a B.A. in History from Williams College. His recent projects have involved performing outreach in support of disaster preparedness, evaluating road network resilience for an environmental engineering firm, and assessing public transit performance when exposed to coastal storms. He is especially interested in finding ways to coordinate across local policymaking bodies in support of resilient systems change. When he’s not tinkering with maps, Ian can be found on trail runs or backpacking loops throughout New England.
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Featured image courtesy of Ian Concannon