How Risk Really Works: A Play
[setting: a board room table. There may be cigars.]
Man 1: ok folks, the good news is we've struck more black gold and the select company here are all invited to invest.
Man 2: gosh dang that sounds great – but what's the risk here? We're a bit snowed under being bled dry for a teensy paint accident about half a million years ago – those environmental protection agency folks sure know how to hold a grudge. Worse than my wife, haw haw.
Man 1: well, it's pretty risky – in fact you know what, I think we'll cause everything to go horribly wrong and we'll have a giant spill that we'll be unable to cap that will spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean, wreaking havoc with ecosystems and human health for the foreseeable future. How does that sound folks?
Man 2: oh. Well that don't sound too good. But shucks, sure we'll invest – it would be rude not to!Man 3: why not – count us in!
*****
In Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, the hubristic Captain MacWhirr steers his ship and all aboard towards disaster because he refuses to deviate from his course in the face of an encroaching storm. His name gives it away: he is mechanically determined to transcend the watery element and drive full steam ahead through the maelstrom. Conrad punishes this disconnected hubris with the typhoon of the title, as the ocean that the captain can only see as a vacant and passive background reveals its active agency.
Every good captain that I have ever trusted my soul to aboard a boat, large or small, knows that the sailors are not in control of the voyage. The ocean is in control of the voyage, and we will make our course and destination when our aims align with the whims of the water. The sea is not malevolent, just as it is not beneficent: it is sublimely impersonal. The beauty and the danger come from the fact that it really doesn't give a shit about our vessel. We can prepare; we can carry sea anchors and storm sails and liferafts and EPIRBS and radios and rosaries, but we are not the only parties controlling the outcome of every voyage, and the qualities I most admire in good sailors are flexibility and humility – not to be found in egotists like MacWhirr. Being response-able means having the ability to respond, both materially and in terms of humility and creativity.
In other words, the best sailors I know respect the sea, in all its moods. There is a hyper-masculine, clichéd character who is all too common, who goes to sea seeking to master the ocean, to dominate the vagaries of the wind and tide and control the uncontrollable. He doesn't usually have a sailboat. He has a two-storey white shiny monstrosity called "SeaRenity" or "Well Hung". This is the attitude that gets you into trouble when a squall stirs the water into unexpected revolt. There's no partnership with the wind or the water, just ego versus elements. There is no ability to respond, because there is very little respect.
This is the attitude I see in Key, Bridges et al's refusal to countenance the possibility of a spill from deep water drilling. I see a hubristic arrogance that expects to be able to rewrite the risk statistics simply by concealing them. They seem to imagine that the 1 in 30 deep sea wells which spill were prefixed by the conversation above, planning their disasters. Noone plans to have a spill, and to pretend that all that is required to prevent one is assurances with clenched teeth that nothing could possibly go wrong is the attitude that will fail to be prepared if one were to occur. It's MacWhirr again: bloody minded arrogance, unimaginative, inflexible, and inside, very frightened.
It is this obsession with control that scares me – that takes humans as the lead character, money as the key motive, and all else is background and resource, permitted to exist purely in terms of what it can give us in capital gain. I don't think it's possible to make the ocean play this game. It doesn't know the rules. I wouldn't sail with these captains – I think they're out of their depth.
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