Anyway, Mary felt there were more pressing matters than finding the real source for this quote. She wandered the halls as she had the day before. Overcome obstacles by multiplying them: easy to do! The outstanding problems were on this day being discussed, evaluated, rated, even put into a hierarchy of urgency; then compiled into an index somewhat like the Association of Atomic Scientists’ “minutes to midnight” clock, which indeed still stood in the hallway, set at about twenty minutes to midnight, where it had been stuck for decades, making Mary wonder if it had any validity, or rather carried any weight. Stuck clocks; not the best image for a deadly serious danger. For all the most pressing dangers they faced, she felt that the clock was always ticking. But when she mentioned this to Badim, he shook his head; that atomic clock was simply saying the nuclear danger has never gone away, he said. We act like it has, but it hasn’t. So it’s a way of saying we are good at ignoring existential dangers. Really it would be better to do something about that one. Shoot it in the head. You could disarm all those weapons in under five years. Fission materials used as energy fuel, burned down to nothing and the residues buried. It’s stupid.
After that, she wandered the halls feeling that maybe she was in fact no good at trying to rate danger. The Arctic petro-nations still had a not-so-secret affection for climate change, for instance; was this a danger? Recently it had seemed that keeping the Arctic sea ice thick and robust was now Russian policy. So Mary wasn’t so concerned. They had the fleet, and they would keep staining the open Arctic Ocean yellow, to keep sunlight from penetrating deep into the water and cooking them all; same with the icing drones now sent out every long dark winter night, to spray the sea ice with added layers of frozen mist, and seal unwanted polynas and open areas and so on. No; if the Arctic was an outstanding problem, it was at least not intractable. Russia would do its part, she judged.
Down the hall, she was thrust back into the realm of nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Badim wasn’t the only one worried; there was a whole slate of panels devoted to it. Could these problematic materials be turned into nuclear power somehow, burned down to a concentrate that could be safely cached, or slung into outer space? No one could make a compelling case either way on this, Mary judged. It was indeed an outstanding problem.
Then the thirty poorest countries. The bad thirty, the sad thirty, the weak thirty; she heard all these names. These thirty included at least ten so-called failed states, and some of those had been failed for decades, immiserating their people. Wicked problems, in the technical sense of the term, were problems that not only could not be solved, but dragged other situations down into them; they were contagious, in effect. So it seemed that these countries suffering wicked problems needed to have interventions made by their neighbor countries, meaning the whole world; in effect, to be put into regional or international receivership. But sovereignty disregarded for one nation implied it could be disregarded for any nation, if the political winds blew against it; so no nation liked to tamper with sovereignty. And it was usually the prosperous old imperial powers that were insisting most strongly that the various post-colonial disasters be put back into subaltern positions, which insistence never looked good, even if the intentions were benign. The American empire had been mostly economic and undeclared, and so had never been understood or acknowledged to be an empire by Americans themselves, despite their eight hundred military bases around the world, and the fact that their military budget was larger than all the other nations’ on Earth combined. So you could get things like the Washington Consensus, in which the World Bank and the IMF and even the WTO had been used as instruments of American hegemony, forcing small poor countries to join the world as a new kind of colony, American colonies in all but name, or else suffer even worse fates. Even the Chinese with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their local power in Asia, were not as bad as the Americans when it came to imperial self-regard pretending to be charity, as in the structural adjustment procedures at the end of the twentieth century, which had wrecked local subsistence so that entire countries could become cash crop providers for American markets. No: Mary would include American stupidity and hubris, and the assumption of being the world’s sole superpower, as one of their outstanding problems; but there wasn’t a panel or even a poster given over to that idea, no, of course not. Another word of mouth issue. It would take the whole world combined and coordinated to attack that problem, and of course the other countries could never agree among themselves to the extent of being very good at that, especially since most of them were beholden to the US, and more than a few bought lock stock and barrel.
Then the continuing poisoning of the biosphere by pollution, pesticides, plastics, and other wastes and residues of civilization was growing in people’s perceptions as the CO2 problem began to look like it might be receding. The biosphere was robust, sure; but taking in and processing poison was something that any living thing could only do up to a point, after
