Living on the Real World

About a month ago, I read a columnist who said she[1] found it easy to write columns that were interesting, and easy to write columns that were true – but difficult to write columns that were both interesting and true.

Made a lot of sense. But then I thought to myself…given the current state of the world, there’s plenty of material out there that is both interesting and true, but so much of reality these days is a downer. Not much is upbeat. Instead of adding to the immense pile of pessimism, why not focus on what is interesting, and true – and good news[2]. We could all use more.

So, I got out one of the several notepads I have lying around (remember, I’m old-school). and wrote at the top: LOTRW topics: true, interesting, good news.

Bad idea.

It sat there, blank, for weeks. Mocking me daily. And, as a result, LOTRW has been AWOL.

But we get better at anything we undertake with practice. In the process of looking for positives, I’m getting better at seeing them. There’s now a trickle of ideas. My plan is to try out a few in successive posts.

Here’s one to start.

It comes to me secondhand; this from the American Institute of Physics, dated September 11 (okay, so it’s not just a lack of topics; it’s also procrastination).

The headline?

House Science Committee Advances Weather Research Bill

Of course, the news isn’t all good. After all, this is 2025. Here’s the subtitle:

The reauthorization act received unanimous, bipartisan support, but a similar bill passed the House and stalled in the Senate last year.

So, the negatives right out of the gate: only a reauthorization (that is, permission to spend); not an appropriation (as in, actual cash). Only the Committee; not the entire House. Only the House. Not the House and the Senate. And a similar bill failed to pass last year.

But look at the article’s opening text: A bipartisan bill for weather research advanced  out of the House Science Committee on Wednesday by unanimous vote. The Weather Act Reauthorization  reaffirms and updates NOAA research, forecasting, and emergency preparedness programs authorized in the 2017 Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act. 

The bill recommends between $160 million and $170 million each year through 2030 for NOAA’s research office to carry out specified weather research programs, roughly steady with the program amounts for fiscal year 2024. 

True? Check. The House Committee accomplished this actual step.

Interesting? Check. These days, unanimous bipartisan political support for anything (coming from even a small handful of people) goes against the massive flood of news in the other direction. (A bit of the flavor of “man bites dog.”)

Good news? Check. Support not just for forecasting but also for related research and for emergency preparedness – acknowledgment that the mission, the goal, goes beyond the forecast per se and extends to public safety, and extends to innovation and advance in support of that cause.

Is it big news? By itself, maybe not. This news comes only from the narrow area of weather services. But in other sectors we’re beginning to see similar, isolated instances of government walking back some of the draconian and devastating decisions of recent months. The beginning of a movement?

Expect more.

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[1]Pretty sure it was “she,” although I failed to capture the column at the time and my skills with AI-enabled Google search were unable to retrieve her (?) article from the blizzard of material out there.

[2] As in, gospel, which comes from an old English translation of the Greek word euangelion found in the New Testament but also in secular contexts.

Vaughan Turekian and Peter Gluckman call for Rewiring science diplomacy in an August 21, 2025 Science editorial. They offer a valuable perspective on emerging challenges facing such work, the changes underway, and the new coping strategy needed.

They note that science diplomacy was originally seen as a means to build international trust and multilateralism. Over time this aspiration gave way to a more pragmatic goal: making faster scientific progress or achieving goals that would be otherwise unattainable by a single nation acting alone. They then point out:

Of late, there has been a shift to a transactional model, which takes on a more business-like approach with a focus on dealmaking, and near-term returns for the players within broader national strategy. Science’s value now is seen as not just a tool of cooperation but also as a currency of negotiation. Agreements are contingent, driven by near-term benefit, and increasingly aimed at advancing national interests.

Instead of settling for either-or; they argue for synthesis:

Today, effective science diplomacy requires a new framework—a trimodal model for science diplomacy that is aspirational, pragmatic, and transactional—leveraging the distinct logics and strengths of each approach. Aspirational diplomacy builds empathy and long-term trust. Pragmatic diplomacy reinforces institutions and solves shared problems. Transactional diplomacy delivers immediate, nationally aligned outcomes.

The editorial concludes on this hopeful note:

The growth of transactional science diplomacy need not mean the end of trust-based collaboration or the fragmentation of scientific cooperation. If managed carefully, it can coexist with and even reinforce other forms of diplomacy.

Well said! Turekian and Gluckman leave open (thereby keeping the editorial brief and focused), just what this “careful management” might look like and how it might be achieved in practice. Balancing these competing interests will obviously be different case by case.

How, then, might we pursue the actual implementation? Speaking to us from across 400 years of history, Francis Bacon had some thoughts to keep in mind. He stated,

“Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all — that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life, and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it.”

Readers familiar with Living on the Real World know I’m besotted with these words of Bacon’s, revisiting them often. (A listing of ten entrances to this LOTRW rabbit hole can be found here.)

Say we accept Bacon’s advice – to advance science for the benefit of life. and out of a spirit of selfless love (the best modern-day translation of Bacon’s Elizabethan word “charity.”). That’s the aspiration[1]. Then perhaps at each step in science diplomacy scientists and national leaders might ask: in this particular instance, how can a transactional science diplomacy lead to the benefit of life? How could a pragmatic approach contribute?

When it comes to pragmatism and transactional approaches, additional, more recent voices come to mind. Douglas McGregor, the author of the 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, saw interpersonal competence in the business world as the ability to solve a (given) problem in such a way that you can solve the next one. Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People offered a similar notion in Habit Number 4: think win-win[2]. Both authors recognize that as a practical matter that diplomacy should be viewed as a process to be sustained, not as a one-off event. Pragmatists as well as idealists can see obvious advantages to not pursuing transactions with an eye solely to short-term gain, particularly if one-sided.

Social scientists know this. It’s certainly not a news flash to either Vaughan Turekian or Peter Gluckman. Heck. We all know this. Husbands and wives know this; Parents know this, when it comes to raising their kids. It’s the key to any relationship that’s worth having, any relationship that endures.

In the long run, the aspiration – the greater service – is what matters most. I’m not suggesting that in a transactional world it’s necessary or advantageous to flog others with this reality. That wouldn’t be diplomatic! But it is useful for each of us to bear in mind[3].

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[1]BTW, we scientists, being only human, struggle with this part, lapsing into some of Bacon’s lesser motivations. Being only human, so did Bacon himself.

[2]This notion also has received repeated attention in LOTRW.

[3]There’s more in LOTRW on science diplomacy as well. Here are some links.

In June I wrote a series of short LOTRW posts on the future of emergency management. ICYMI, here’s a link to the fourth of these, which in turn links to the three earlier posts.

In part the series was motivated by recent events in this space: natural disasters; federal level cutbacks in major agency players such as NOAA and FEMA; and inspiring local-level approaches already underway that might compensate a bit for the declining level of protection for Americans in the face of such cutbacks. Significant transitions are underway.

In part, though, I was also cramming for my finals – doing a little urgent homework before participating in a plenary panel discussion at the 50^th Annual Hazards Research and Applications Workshop, held in Broomfield, Colorado July 13-16. The topic for the session was Assessing Current Conditions – Challenges to Emergency Management. The session moderator was Michael Newman, former Department of Treasury and currently with the Institute for Business and Home Safety. The other three panelists were Susan Cutter, a professor of geography at the University of South Carolina, and a holder of multiple fistfuls of national and international recognition such as elected membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters; Jessica Jensen, a former professor in emergency management and disaster science at the University of South Dakota, and currently a policy researcher at the Research and Development Corporation  (RAND); and Adam Smith, formerly NOAA, where for 15 years, he was the lead scientist for NOAA’s U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Program. As an Asheville resident, Adam also brought a firsthand perspective on the disastrous Asheville flooding resulting from Hurricane Helene.

A bit of background. The workshop has long been one of my favorite annual meetings. Each year it brings together several hundred hazards professionals spanning the gamut from research in the earth sciences and social sciences underlying the study of hazards; to practitioners working at international, national, state and local levels in hazard mitigation, emergency management, etc.; and to local-level political, corporate and tribal leaders personally and professionally impacted by recent events. Participation is by invitation only but the tradition has been to have something like a third of the participants be first-timers/early career, and students. It’s an amazing 3-1/2 days, followed by a day and a half of breakout sessions for researchers and practitioners separately. I first attended a workshop in the 1980’s and had been coming pretty much every year since until covid hit.

This year I participated with some caution given the federal funding picture. I expected the attendance to be diminished and the atmosphere to be subdued. The opposite proved to be the case. I was surprised but shouldn’t have been. Attendance was down somewhat, but bolstered by an unusually large contingent of early-career participants. The enthusiasm level in the sessions and in the hallways was high. To some extent this was organic. The hazards community is populated by people who see reduction of disaster risk as a calling versus a lucrative career (to be abandoned if the lucre dries up). They’re not in it for the money. But the other factor was a superhuman level of courage and effort by the host staff from the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, and its director, Lori Peek. They stood up the meeting in the face of myriad concerns, none of which materialized. It was a privilege to be there.

It was also a privilege to be on the panel. I learned so much from the other speakers and from the Q&A. I don’t know whether to characterize it as passion made substantive by insights or insights brought to life by passion but it was great.

The best news is you don’t have to take my word for it! We learned after the fact that the plenary sessions had been recorded. You can view ours here. You can judge the merits for yourself; come up with your own list of takeaways.

But don’t stop there! For example, the plenary session that followed ours was entitled Imagining Future Possibilities – Moving from Vision to Reality. It provided five perspectives for the future – not from folks who had been around a while, but from early-career professionals who will be the ones building that future for the next half-century. And emphasizing the way things look and what needs to be done from the viewpoint of a range of under-represented groups.

As the session began, I was in the audience thinking this should be interesting! After the first speaker, I was thinking – hey, that was really insightful! After the first two speakers, I was even more impressed. And it kept getting better and better from there.

By the end I realized:

All challenges and uncertainties aside, the future is in good hands.

And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. – King Solomon^[1], Ecclesiastes 4:4 (NIV)

This Old Testament verse reminds us that our tendency to compare ourselves with others goes back a long way, and, even very early on, was found to be unprofitable. For most of us, it leads to jealousy. For the few who find themselves on top, it leads to obsessive worry and fear about losing that special standing.   

So, of course, being human, we have busily occupied ourselves with such comparisons 24/7 for millennia.

Fast forward to 1964. I’d just graduated from college and was headed for graduate school. My father, a Ph.D. mathematician (Princeton), was already an established scientist (then 46, he would be elected a AAAS Fellow one year later). We had a conversation about comparative success and failure in science (the subject of the previous two LOTRW posts). Dad said something like this:

When I was young, it was possible to realize that you were, say, the best mathematician in Greensboro, North Carolina [where he grew up and where his family still lived], and that meant something. But post World-War-II, scientists now compare themselves against the best in the world – and that means almost everybody feels like a failure.

This in 1964 – six decades ago. I know the time precisely because my dad subscribed to the AAAS journal Science; we were discussing a recent article on the topic. Through the magic of today’s archival, search and retrieval systems, I succeeded just now in tracking down the original. It took only a minute or two.

The full title? Comparative Failure in Science: A recent study shows that this is not incompatible with stable careers for basic research scientists, (Science, Volume 143, pp 1012-1014). The author was Barney G. Glaser, a Ph.D. sociologist who would later become well-known as one of the founders of social scientists know as grounded theory.

Here is an extended excerpt, to give you the flavor. They show the paper’s age (for example, the paper makes several assertions that might not be accepted at face value today. As well, the article universally refers to scientists as male, despite the fact that the only scientist cited in the opening is a woman. Sigh):

A perennial problem for some scientists is their feeling of comparative failure as scientists. This problem becomes clearer if we consider two major sources of this feeling that are inherent in the very nature of scientific work. (i) In science, strong emphasis is placed on the achievement of recognition (1); (ii) the typical basic scientist works in a community filled with “great men” who have made important and decisive discoveries in their respective fields; they are the acknowledged guiding lights. These esteemed scientists, who have attained honors beyond the reach of most of their colleagues, tend to become models for those who have been trained by them or who haveworked under them. As Eiduson has put it in her recent psychological study of basic research scientists (2, p. 167):”Scientists are idols-oriented.” To take these honored men as models is important for training as well as for a life in research. During training, one learns to think creatively. Emulation of these models results in the internalization of values, beliefs, and norms of the highest standard. This emulation of the great continues and guides the scientist in his research work, however individual in style his work may be. But it is precisely here that a feeling of comparative failure may arise. In emulating a great man the scientist tends to compare himself with the model. He estimates how closely he has equaled his model in ability to adhere to high standards of research, to think of relevant problems, to create “elegant” research designs, to devise new methods, to write clearly, to analyze data. In addition, because of the strong emphasis on attaining recognition for research contributions, the scientist perhaps will compare his own degree of success with his model’s to gauge how he himself is doing. In using the great man’s achievements and the recognition accorded him as criteria, the scientist may be motivated to strive continually and unremittingly toward greater heights (3). On the other hand, he may see himself, over time, as a comparative failure for not having attained a comparable amount of recognition (4).”The model, then, is the ego ideal figure, who represents the ultimate position, and in fact, defines what a scientist should do, how he should think, how he should act. By comparison, everything else is inevitably of lesser worth. We have seen the way the scientists in this group rebuke themselves as they become old, distracted, sit on committees or government advisory boards, or become administrators-and thus move away from the ideal. From this picture it is obvious that the scientist is hard on himself. He has a built-in, clearly marked scalar system, along which attitudes and kinds of performances are measured. When he moves away and deviates from the pattern, he becomes a maverick, or a person who has tossed aside the flaming torch.”

Glaser then outlines his thoughts about some more attainable vision:

Average Success.

With this problem in mind, I recently made a study of the organizational careers of basic research scientists, one purpose of which was to ascertain the consequences, for the scientist’s career, of receiving or not receiving an average amount of recognition (5). At the time of the study, these scientists were employed in a government medical research organization devoted to basic research. This was a high-prestige organization from the standpoint of scientists and was run much as though it were a series of university departments. The study is relevant to this discussion in showing something of the career history of basic research scientists, who are today in increasing proportions leaving the university setting to become affiliated with high-prestige organizations devoted to basic research. In these contexts organizational scientific careers are still primarily dependent on professional (not organizational) recognition (6). By “average amount of professional recognition” I mean supervisor’s favorable evaluation of the quality of the scientist’s current research, and, through publication and through acknowledgment in the publications of others, for his contribution to the cumulative knowledge in his field. This definition gives the three major sources of recognition within reach of the typical scientist: references from superordinate colleagues, publication, and publication acknowledgments in the work of others. This “average” degree of professional recognition is attained by most of the country’s scientists at any one time and by practically all scientists at one time or another. This degree of recognition is in marked contrast to the highly regarded, and restricted, high-prestige honors (in the form of awards, prizes, grants, lectureships, professorships, and so on) that are part of the professional recognition accorded those scientists who make great and decisive discoveries-the “great men.

The author goes on to cite the writings of a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of considerable repute at that time, Lawrence S. Kubie, who also has a Wikipedia entry of his own. Kubie’s celebrity patients included Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Moss Hart, Kurt Weill, Vivien Leigh and Sid Caesar. Here’s a bit of Glaser on Kubie:

Comparisons with great men are, however, taken not as comparative but as absolute failure by Kubie in his famous article “Some unsolved problems of the scientific career” (7). Kubie warns future scientists of the perils ahead when devoting themselves to that “carnivorous god, the scientific career.” His criteria in warning of potential failure, are absolute (not comparative) judgments, based on the careers of the more notable great men of science. For example, he talks of the “ultimate gamble which the scientist takes when he stakes his all on professional achievement and recognition, sacrificing to his scientific career recreation, family, and sometimes even instinctual needs, as well as the practical security of money.” Implying again that the scientist whose success falls short of the great man’s is an absolute failure, he characterizes the young scientist as having “a self deceiving fantasy: -that a life of science well may be tough for everyone else, but that it will not be for him,” and as having “ambitious dreams; unspoken hopes of making great scientific discoveries; dreams of solving the great riddles of the universe.”

Glaser closes in this vein:

Perhaps my discussion draws the kind of “implication” from “statistics” that Kubie is looking for in future re-search when he says in his article on the scientific career: “It is the . . .duty of scientists and educators to gather such vital statistics on the life struggles of a few generations of scientists and would-be scientists and to make sure that every graduate student of the sciences will be exposed repeatedly to the implications such data may have for his own future.”

A bit of a downer? You think? I’m thinking Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings should have recorded their hit song as, Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be scientists.

This is often the point in LOTRW posts where I encourage people to “read the original article in its entirety.” I. am. not. going. to. do. that. here. However, I will admit that I couldn’t take my eyes away. Equal parts of a trip down memory lane and horrified fascination.

But I will share this. In assembling this post I got to thinking that my ideas on this topic had been pretty much in cold storage for the last sixty years and wondering what current literature if any might update social-scientists’ views. Turns out there’s a ton of stuff. I’m already over my usual word-limit for a post. Instead of a dive here, I’m suggest you google either or both of these two phrases: The first, recent posts on scientists’ feelings of failure, will take you to links suggesting this remains a serious problem for people in STEM fields. The second, recent posts on feelings of comparative failure in science, takes you links carrying a new thought – that when scientists open up about failures and failing in science, it humanizes us in the eyes of non-scientists. We can certainly use more of that.

So, I will encourage you to sample some of those links more fully. Enjoy the reads!

Next time: back to emergency management.

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[1] According to rabbinic tradition.

Better than you think.

Here’s why.

The previous LOTRW post makes the case for Elijah the Tishbite as the greatest meteorologist of all time. 3000 years ago – before satellites and radar, before mathematics and computers, before AI – he made a pinpoint interannual weather forecast, applied empirical understanding of atmospheric electricity to change history, and also made accurate short-term precipitation forecasts that verified. He did all this working in a hostile government regime where success versus failure literally meant life or death for the forecaster.

But chances are good, whether you are a veteran weather forecaster whose work spans decades or an early-career meteorologist just starting out, you’ve already enjoyed more success than Elijah. The reason? The whole of Elijah’s resume contains only two productive working days: the day he made his interannual forecast; and the day he applied his knowledge of atmospheric electricity and made his subsequent short-term forecast. His career consisted almost entirely of hundreds of days doing little more than waiting, relying on God’s providence to make it through.

What about after his Mount Carmel mountaintop experience? Did he burnish his resume further? Did he receive adulation and wave after wave of recognition? The AMS Jule Charney Medal? The Syukuro Manabe Climate Research Award? The AMS Award for an Exceptional Specific Prediction? The AGU Athelstan Spilhaus Award? Did he rule over Israel?

No. He did not.

Instead, this same man who had shown such bravery for years turned tail and fled. I Kings 19 tells the story:

Ahab told Jezebel [his queen] everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. ² So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.”

³ Elijah was afraidand ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, ⁴ while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” ⁵ Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep.

(An angel provides him with a bit of food; thus strengthened, Elijah)

traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. ⁹ There he went into a cave and spent the night.

There

the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

¹⁰ He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

¹¹ The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. ¹² After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. ¹³ When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

God asks him once more:

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Again, Elijah replies “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

Elijah was experiencing burnout.

Seeing this, God is empathetic. He makes no more demands. He simply encourages Elijah to straighten out his affairs and then appoint his successor, saying

…and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet. 

As a final word, God tells Elijah as tenderly as He can that Elijah had never been alone. BTW, God says

Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.

Seven thousand other faithful! Any actual isolation was only in Elijah’s own head. Notice that God didn’t tell Elijah any of the stories of the other seven thousand. Who knows? Some or all may have been equally powerful in God’s calculus.

To recap: in his meteorological career, Elijah has only those two good working days, suffers burnout, and names his successor.

Each and every reader of this post can honestly tell themselves,

Hey, I’ve had more good working days than that! And I have also had those far-more-numerous in-between days, but you didn’t catch me just sitting around, doing nothing. I was always making progress.

Exactly. Remember that in our discussion of GOATS, whether in meteorology or athletics or with respect to any other human endeavor, comparison of accomplishment across gaps of history and place and circumstance may be interesting, but they should never invite any serious attempt to rank-order. Our personal contributions to making the world a better place don’t lend themselves to such analysis. That goes not just for historic figures but also contemporaries. Your circumstances, even compared with those closest to you with respect to DNA or your office mates, are always sufficiently different that comparisons are usually vain.

Have a great day – like the GOAT you are. And remember – you’re no more alone today than Elijah was back then.

(This post is a bit longer, and a bit different from the usual… my apologies in advance.)

When I was growing up, “goat” was a somewhat derogatory term. Part of this stemmed from the qualities of goats themselves. They’re considered more utilitarian than charismatic. The positives? They can live on practically anything. They are a source of food (milk, yogurts, cheeses, etc.) and can provide meat and skins at the end. The negatives? They are a bit contrary.

But in my time there was also a negative Biblical connotation. You’d say someone was the goat of this or that sorry incident as a shorthand for scapegoat, the Jewish sacrificial animal that, though innocent, ceremonially took on all the sins of the people and then was banished into the wilderness. (There wasn’t such a thing as scapesheep, or scapecow, or scapechicken.)

But today’s world of sport has turned things around, given us the very positive acronym GOAT (Greatest-Of-All-Time). That of course occasions debates. Do you apply the label to Pele, or Lionel Messi? To Michael Jordan, or LeBron James? Babe Ruth, or Aaron Judge? Jack Nicklaus, or Tiger Woods? Billie Jean King or Serena Williams?

You get the idea.

In our circle, that might prompt the question – who was the greatest meteorologist of all time? There’s no shortage of candidates. With apologies to potential names I’ve omitted for lack of space, here are a few names; some familiar, some less so. In no particular order, Vilhelm Bjerknes, Jule Charney, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Ed Lorenz, Joanne Simpson, Warren Washington, Eunice Foote, Harry Volkman, … or (substitute your personal favorite here).

Or you could go back a bit further in history to C.H.D. Buys Ballot or John Dalton or Gabriel Fahrenheit or Anders Celsius or (perhaps stretching a bit) to Robert Boyle.

But allow me to make the case for Elijah the Tishbite – a Biblical prophet who lived during the reign of King Ahab (9^th century BC).

Elijah was known as a miracle worker – and what could be more miraculous than making accurate weather forecasts some three thousand years ago, in an era lacking instrumentation, radars and satellites, and mathematics? But that is what he did. His very first forecast was a seasonal to interannual outlook – a forecast problem so difficult it challenges the best capabilities of meteorology today. Here’s the text:

Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.” – I Kings 17:1 (NIV)

No dew or rain for a few years? In a world where the folk wisdom is don’t like the weather? – just wait five minutes. It’ll change. Yet Elijah’s forecast would verify.

Talk about bold. Even in ordinary circumstances of that time, such a forecast would require profound courage. In those days, false prophesy was considered a crime, a misrepresentation of God – and therefore calling for death by stoning. (A few years ago, when my wife Chris and I toured Israel, every time I would see a pile of rocks – the landscape was dotted with them – I’d wonder, the gravesite of an early weather forecaster?)

And these were no ordinary circumstances. Ahab was a particularly odious, vicious, idolatrous king. Immediately after making this forecast Elijah was forced to flee for his life. We’re told (continuing in 1^st Kings 17-18) that Elijah then spent a period of time in humiliation. He hid by a brook in the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, where he was fed by ravens (not just any birds, but unclean birds, mind you) that brought him bread and meat in the mornings and evenings.

Of course (there was a drought!), the brook dried up. Elijah decamped to Zarephath (a heathen city), where he moved in with a widow and her son. They all would get by on a small amount of flour and oil that God replenished (miraculously) day by day.

More than two years passed. God instructs Elijah to present himself to Ahab (no small ask, since Ahab has been killing God’s prophets all the while and has been especially keen on dispatching Elijah as well).

Elijah does as instructed and asks Ahab to meet him at Mount Carmel, with all the people of Israel, and with a special invite to the political/religious leadership of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel’s rule: Ahab’s 400 prophets of Baal and Jezebel’s 450 prophets of Asherah.

(Continuing in 1^st Kings 18),

So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel. ²¹ Elijah went before the people and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

But the people said nothing.

²² Then Elijah said to them, “I am the only one of the Lord’s prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. ²³ Get two bulls for us. Let Baal’s prophets choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. ²⁴ Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The god who answers by fire—he is God.”

Then all the people said, “What you say is good.”

Then Elijah reveals his understanding of atmospheric electricity (bear with me). He invited the prophets of Baal to go first, in the morning. (Continuing from Chapter 18)

Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, “Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first, since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god, but do not light the fire.” ²⁶ So they took the bull given them and prepared it.

Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. “Baal, answer us!” they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made.

²⁷ At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” ²⁸ So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed. ²⁹ Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.

Now it’s Elijah’s turn:

³⁰ Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come here to me.” They came to him, and he repaired the altar of the Lord, which had been torn down. ³¹ Elijah took twelve stones, one for each of the tribes descended from Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord had come, saying, “Your name shall be Israel.” ³² With the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord, and he dug a trench around it large enough to hold two seahsof seed. ³³ He arranged the wood, cut the bull into pieces and laid it on the wood. Then he said to them, “Fill four large jars with water and pour it on the offering and on the wood.”

³⁴ “Do it again,” he said, and they did it again.

“Do it a third time,” he ordered, and they did it the third time. ³⁵ The water ran down around the altar and even filled the trench.

You make the call. Was this all pure showboating? Did Elijah do this wholly to make God’s intervention more dramatic? Or did he also know what my meteorologist friends know, especially my colleagues from Colorado days – that the greatest lightning risk on high ground comes in the afternoons, and is enhanced by good electrical conductivity of that high ground, as enabled by soil moisture?

Back to the narrative.

³⁶ At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. ³⁷ Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”

³⁸ Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.

³⁹ When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”

Elijah seizes the moment:

⁴⁰ Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.

He thus begins the trajectory of Ahab’s downfall (but that’s another story for another day).

We’ve seen the successful seasonal outlook. We’ve witnessed a possible application of atmospheric electricity for societal benefit. Elijah now demonstrates his chops as a short-term forecaster:

⁴¹ And Elijah said to Ahab, “Go, eat and drink, for there is the sound of a heavy rain.” ⁴² So Ahab went off to eat and drink, but Elijah climbed to the top of Carmel, bent down to the ground and put his face between his knees.

⁴³ “Go and look toward the sea,” he told his servant. And he went up and looked.

“There is nothing there,” he said.

Seven times Elijah said, “Go back.”

⁴⁴ The seventh time the servant reported, “A cloud as small as a man’s hand is rising from the sea.”

So Elijah said, “Go and tell Ahab, ‘Hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you.’”

⁴⁵ Meanwhile, the sky grew black with clouds, the wind rose, a heavy rain started falling and Ahab rode off to Jezreel. ⁴⁶ The power of the Lord came on Elijah and, tucking his cloak into his belt, he ran ahead of Ahab all the way to Jezreel.

There you have it: accurate seasonal forecasting, empirical understanding of atmospheric electrcity, pinpoint short-term forecasting, including quantitative precipitation forecasting (QPF), attention to risk comm and applications, and great personal courage in the face of galeforce political headwinds. My candidate for meteorological GOAT.

An aside on GOAT debates; the reason they’re both addictive and unsatisfying is that most GOAT candidates were nearly ideally suited for their particular time in history, but as history has moved forward, the skills demanded of athletes has changed. That has to be true for meteorologists as well. My bias? Generally favoring the more-current athletes. Seems to me athletics are growing more competitive with time, records are falling. So I’m thinking chances are good that the meteorologist GOAT is someone early-career or even still in school today — someone whose name most of us don’t know yet.

Anyhow, just thinking that today’s meteorologists (who might be forgiven for feeling a little bit of that Biblical-scapegoat tag on their backs) might find reason for both inspiration and encouragement in Elijah’s 3000-year-old example. He walked the walk.

…life is not as idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,

         And heated hot with burning fears,

         And dipt in baths of hissing tears,

And batter’d with the shocks of doom – Tennyson (from In Memoriam, 118)

Flash flooding of the Guadalupe River during the pre-dawn hours of Independence Day produced tragedy along its length, most notably in Kerrville, Texas. More than 100 people have died, including vacationers and far too many young children at summer camps. More remain missing; the death toll continues to mount.

The grief is beyond any expressing.

We live on a planet that does its business through such extreme events. Floods can and do raise creek levels twenty feet in a few minutes. Events hit hardest at the local scale and are no respecters of location or time of day, or the lives and fortunes of those young or old who happen to be in the path of destruction. This heartbreak will not be the last.

Americans remain challenged and vulnerable, especially when warning lead times are short, when the threats develop at night, when the danger develops in underserved rural areas, and when those in harm’s way are not at home, but on travel or vacation (where risks and the appropriate actions needed are unfamiliar).

That is why we have an emergency management community, a closely-knit, coordinated network of federal-, state-, and local agencies, corporations and small businesses, NGOs, and others – to provide 340 million Americans a measure of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (those July 4^th values) in the face of Earth’s real and present dangers. It is the motivation and vision for federal programs and resources at the national level that designed to be vigilant everywhere, 24/7 (even and especially during evenings and holidays), and to push out weather warnings and communicate risk (along with options for action) to that last mile, to those who are in harm’s way, to those who must act.

For all our efforts in emergency response to date, there is still work to do. There is still room for improvement. There always will be.

The early stages of the Guadalupe aftermath have seen a bit of finger-pointing. In retrospect, all involved can see how they might have done a bit more. One point of agreement, whether admitted or not; hazard risks do not lessen if we summarily do away with or diminish the operational capacity of the federal agencies – or when we do away with the supporting research and development that are the means to “doing better the next time.”

Nevertheless, that is the path that for the moment we have chosen.

So, in the face of the recent federal withdrawal (see also here), while waiting for the rebuilding of that infrastructure (which must eventually come), what are the opportunities for initiative, for agency? Clearly the federal operations and related R&D have to be rebuilt (even if along different lines). That will fully occupy a good part of today’s emergency management community – especially those who will remain in DHS, who will be charged with continuing maintenance and delivery of residual FEMA functions. But what else can be done in the meantime? What might the remainder do?

Here are three (of many) emerging narratives, that illustrate, but by no means exhaust the possibilities. They are offered here to stimulate ideas, to inspire imitation, experiment, action.

As FEMA shrinks, a grassroots disaster response is taking shape. This New York Times article starts out:

They were just drills, but each felt urgent and real. A group of volunteers searched a wooded area for someone who had been injured and stranded, ready to provide aid. Then they practiced a river rescue, attaching a rope near the bank to help pull the victim to shore.

This was Rescue HQ, a gathering in rural Tennessee last month where the founding members of several newly formed disaster response groups ran through emergency scenarios and discussed how to better coordinate in the chaotic aftermath of a storm or a flood.

Groups like this are growing in number — a new model of disaster response taking shape outside of government channels. Many volunteers are deeply religious and have military backgrounds.

They’re an unequal match for what the government can do, especially when it comes to long-term rebuilding efforts after natural disasters. But with the Trump administration pulling back staffing and funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency — and even pledging to eliminate it — communities may soon rely far more on volunteer help.

The article looked at two or three such efforts, surfacing reasons for hope as well as grounds for caution (all while driving-home the need for federal leadership).

After Lahaina burned, an experiment in housing the most vulnerable. Following the Paradise California wildfire of 2018, which destroyed 10,000 homes, rebuilding has been slow. Only 2500 structures had been rebuilt as of November of 2024. It’s possible to do better, as the Washington Post reported from Lahaina:

Almost two years after wildfires ripped through Lahaina, this is where global supply chains, disaster relief and a novel solution to America’s housing crisis come together. On track for full occupancy this summer, the 57-acre development is part of Hawaii’s attempt to house some of its most vulnerable residents, using hundreds of prefab homes in a way that has never been tried elsewhere. It’s also a test of how quickly the government and private companies can work together to prop up housing when there are few options — and whether other places will do the same.

At the Ka Laʻi Ola development, 450 structures will house roughly 1,500 people. The earliest waves of residents moved into their new homes one year after the fires — much faster than they likely could have in the rest of town as the recovery grinds on. More traditional construction is often hard to ramp up in remote or devastated areas. But here, the faster pace is possible because the development revolves around factory-built housing and a full-steam-ahead approach by local and state officials…

(A similar public-private collaboration is underway in rebuilding Altadena.)

Financing local emergency management. All this raises the question, given the FEMA cuts, where can the money for rebuilding infrastructure be found? Susan Crawford (not the newly-elected judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but Susan Crawford the Harvard law professor emeritus), writing on Substack, suggests looking to individual states. She offers this (the post is worth a careful read in its entirety):

What’s a local government looking for abundant, inexpensive capital supposed to do? Well, federal government assistance aimed at climate adaptation may be a thing of the past, but the municipal bond market (which includes state bonds, despite the name) remains highly attractive to investors—thanks to an apparent Congressional inclination to keep the exemption of bond interest from federal taxation in place. Record-breaking numbers of muni bonds are being issued these days. And Gaughan wants everyone to consider what state-level public finance agencies can do for local governments when it comes to adapting to the ferocious physical effects of climate change.

“Bond banks have the back of local governments as they face ongoing climate challenges,” Gaughan says. “At the end of the day, we want our cities, towns, and villages to be successful,” he adds. “So that’s why we’re so vested in trying to figure this thing out.” He’s implying that relying on individual towns to figure out adaptation, each on their own, won’t work.

How could state bond banks—there are only about 14 of them—step in to assist municipalities? To start, they can act like a powerful financial uncle, by pooling borrowing needs, taking advantage of the state’s stronger credit guarantee, and attracting a diverse portfolio of projects, then passing along to municipalities the money they’re able to borrow at lower interest rates than many cities, particularly smaller ones, could access on their own.

Three ideas. Addressing only small, diverse slivers of emergency response and recovery. But accomplished by small numbers of people, leaving many others free to copy these approaches or to formulate and try out other ideas. Much of the opportunity is likely to be local. Though resource-constrained, local governments see hazards risks as existential. America comprises over 3000 counties. The Guadalupe-Kent County experience is (or should be) causing thousands of county officials to lose sleep at night. Absent FEMA, they need help revisiting their emergency management plans, starting with traditional what-to-do-with-warnings strategies, but extending further, into minimizing the numbers of their populations living, working, and sleeping in floodplains, on earthquake fault zones, etc., in unsafe construction. They need help instilling hazard-awareness in their populations, beginning with K-12 public education on hazards. They’ll want to hire professional expertise, but they will also be interested in new tools that might make their task less expensive and more robust. In particular they’ll be on the lookout for ideas on how to harness artificial intelligence to augment and backstop every phase of the emergency management task.

The bad news is that none of the options will be easy, and success is by no means guaranteed.

Tennyson offers a valuable perspective. The poet reminds us that a meaningful life is not a matter of effortlessly scooping gold nuggets or rough diamonds from some creek. Life, especially a life worth living, demands sweaty, sustained effort, too often accomplished amid anxiety and sadness, and – punctuated by the very disasters that in this instance we’re trying to prevent.

The good news is that the possibilities are unlimited.

Emergency management – that is, emergency management as “a community, an idea” – has been hit by disaster. This present-day reality is the starting point from which emergency management must move into the future. In the short term, say the next decade, even as emergency managers attempt to “recover” from slashed budgets, personnel cuts, reduced mission-scope, and more, they will be called upon to manage disasters of even greater complexity and broader reach. That is because emergencies and disasters are on the rise, fueled by decades of population growth, especially in dangerous places and in fragile built settlements. In addition, disasters are mutating in response to unprecedented and unforeseen vulnerabilities emerging from social change and scientific and technological advance[1]. But while emergency managers are “doing their day job,” they must at the same time achieve a greater long-term goal: an actual reduction in the number, the economic and human cost, and the geographic reach of the disasters in the future’s pipeline[2]. Already, disasters are fraying the fabric of society; civilization cannot survive (let alone prosper) indefinitely in the face of the relentless growth of disasters of every stripe.

The double task – coping with the disasters of today while reducing the disaster risks of tomorrow – requires action at state and local, national, and international levels. There’s overlap, but a somewhat different emphasis is required at each scale. To illustrate:

At the state and local level. Individual disasters (most, not all – more about that later) are confined geographically. Floods, drought, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., hit hardest at local and statewide populations. In the past, these events would prompt help from a surrounding, less-impacted nation. But today those larger populations are themselves are less able and correspondingly less willing to help. Their aid rarely matches the urgent requirements of the minority trying to recover – to get their shattered lives back on track. The announced U.S. intent to eliminate FEMA is one sign of the emerging passivity in the face of need.

Here in the United States the President balances the interests and priorities of more than 300 million people living in 3000 counties. County officials and their residents care most about just one, their own, with an average population of 100,000[3]. The personal stakes are existential for residents in any immediate disaster area; attention should therefore be greatest there. Disaster reduction – avoiding settlement and commercial development in floodplains or seismic zones; establishing and enforcing robust building codes; building resilience into roadways, electrical grids, water and sewage systems, etc. – is a local matter. In this framing, it becomes a responsibility and task for the entire local (and state) community, not just the tiny subpopulation employeded by the fire department, local police, and county-level EOC’s. Emergency management is participatory; it is not a spectator sport. It is everyone’s business. The public needs to demand accountability from its political and corporate leaders; and needs to shoulder responsibility for individual and family safety. But as matters now stand, any specific public confronts this reality only episodically. Many people have little firsthand experience with hazards, and little opportunity to internalize what hazard mitigation looks like and requires in terms of daily actions and conditions on the ground.

Most of the population who will be making disaster risk and emergency management decisions in future decades are children today. Insertion of emergency management concepts and responsibilities in K-12 public education would therefore be a partial remedy. Such a curriculum emphasis would also confer several side benefits. Young people are extremely interested in natural hazards; the topic can develop interest in and passion for science and technology more broadly. And it’s not simply a portal to STEM education; it threads through civics as well and encourages critical thinking more generally. In the United States public education is under local and state control; hazard risks and emergency management issues also vary locally, so there’s a good match between in scales of the challenge and coping responsibilities and challenges.

Another need at state and local scales is the need to develop scenarios for emergencies and plans for emergency response at these scales with the local specifics in mind. This reality brings us to

The national level. Coping with disasters of today while at the same time reducing the disasters of tomorrow exposes the efforts of national leaders to wash their hands of the problem for what it is – wishful thinking. At a minimum, in the short term, the national government needs to backstop the ability of private-sector insurance and reinsurance to spread the financial risk, to provide other forms of assistance in community rebuilding and retrofitting. The importance of this should not be underestimated. Unity is what makes a nation. Nowhere is the notion of “we are all in this together” either displayed or abdicated in fuller view than in times of emergency.  

Already straitened, state and local budgets are continuing to tighten even as they come up against a future of increasing disasters and emergencies. These opposing trends make innovation necessary.  It will be impossible to reduce the disasters of tomorrow with the tools of yesterday. We must fight the disasters of tomorrow with tomorrow’s tools.

This need for innovation also requires national-level action. A key challenge for disaster- and emergency management lies in identifying particular risks, understanding which are the most likely, and of those which are the most consequential. This requires a predictive understanding of weather-, climate-, geological-, and even biological (think pandemic) processes. But that’s only the beginning. It extends to an understanding of how these different risks will work through the economic and social life of individual communities to disrupt their functionality and safety.  Many branches of science and engineering must be brought to bear. In addition, a major priority should be the harnessing of artificial intelligence to the emergency management problem. AI holds great potential for developing the needed K-12 public educational materials, and for identifying detailed disaster scenarios tailored to the risks and capabilities of specific local communities.

Because of the enhanced effectiveness and savings that can be realized at scale, the natural science and social science databases needed for this task should be the responsibility of the federal government agencies and partners at the national level, along with the insurance and reinsurance to spread the financial portion of disaster risk. In addition, national help to localities is fundamental to building the domestic unity and trust that are the hallmark of a great nation. To do less is to risk being reduced to third-world status or splintering of the country or both. To be blunt, we were already doing this right, before we decided to cut federal budgets for NOAA, USGS, EPA, NASA, NSF, NIH, and DoE.

The international level. Keep in mind the historic truth. Recovery from natural disasters has relied almost entirely on the existence of larger, unaffected areas, and help from those areas. To some degree, nations in the past have provided help at some level to other nations recovering from natural disasters. But such relief is intermittent, patchy, limited, and undependable. U.S. efforts have been compromised by the recent elimination of USAID, as well as failure to support UN agencies such as WHO and other infrastructure for meeting such needs. Such practices need to be institutionalized, made more robust.

The risk, however, only begins there. For some disasters – climate change, or pandemics, or asteroid strike, or world war, or the insidious spread of microplastics, or a rampant spread in totalitarian governments – there are not, nor will there be, unaffected areas to draw upon. Recent experience with covid, meltdowns in the global financial sector, and the current pervasive climate of war and turmoil on every continent has demonstrated that we’re handling these global emergencies poorly, and recovering slowly, if at all. They’re intensifying. Countries need to find more means and incentives and instrumentalities to foster collaboration, build trust, and discover unity – and do so with some urgency.

The good news? We all want our lives to matter. Now’s our chance! This agenda alone (and it’s only one of dozens of global challenges) gives each of us a chance to make a difference. You may have heard it said:

The magic we want is in the work we’re avoiding.

Let’s get to it!

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[1] This is argued in more detail over the history of earlier LOTRW posts –  for example, here and here.

[2] Also as argued in earlier posts, and in the book Living on the Real World

[3] There’s quite a range here; Los Angeles County has a population of ten million; Loving County, TX, and Kalawao County, HI, each have populations just less than 100.

The future of emergency management starts with the present. And today, emergency management in the United States is in growing disarray. At the federal level, the most recent blow (of a series) was last Wednesday’s announced decision to phase out FEMA after the 2025 hurricane season. You could see this coming. In prior months and weeks, the agency had already been put on notice and under stress. Mass, indiscriminate firings at FEMA eliminated hundreds of jobs in mid-February. In May the acting head of FEMA was removed after mentioning to Congress that in his opinion abolishing the agency wouldn’t be in the best interests of the American people. Meanwhile, backlogs of emergency aid requests have been piling up.

And that’s just FEMA. The majority of U.S. disasters are due to weather, water, and climate hazards, but the National Weather Service and NOAA have also seen similar abrupt personnel and budget cuts, threatening to degrade warning accuracy during the current hurricane season. Other federal agencies, including USGS (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, riverine flooding), EPA (toxic spills, air-quality alerts), DoE (nuclear accidents), and NIH (pandemics), NASA (novel hazard monitoring capabilities) also play roles in monitoring natural hazards and emergency response and recovery at the federal level. They too face cuts in their missions and partial dissolution.

These breakdowns at the federal level have a domino effect. They place an increased emergency response and recovery burden on the states, who are inadequately equipped to handle the load. The funding and personnel needed are not available at the state levels. The ripple effect extends to emergency management at the local level. This is not just a matter of money and people. The need for federal coordination stems from three realities: hazards originate from sources distributed globally, even other countries, not just the immediate vicinity of the resulting disaster; the climactic phases of individual natural emergencies and disasters are themselves no respecters of state boundaries; and the loss of life, property, and the business disruption can be so great for any disaster location that response and recovery efforts have to be orchestrated over much larger areas and across levels of government.

Such emergencies will not end with the 2025 hurricane season. Natural disasters and emergencies are on the rise.

Three closing points:

“A rose by any other name is still a rose.” – Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet). Even Shakespeare’s lovestruck, teenage Juliet would be wise enough to know that eradicating the label emergency from natural hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes will not eliminate the future need for coordinated emergency management of those and similar events at federal, state, and local levels. America appears to be choosing to abandon a fully resourced, chartered, publicly-visible all-hazards emergency management system in order to focus what remains of DHS on immigration as essentially the sole national emergency[1]. As natural disasters come up, and they will, remaining DHS employees will continue to respond – but only within that infamously limp frame of “other duties as assigned.”

“Physician, heal yourself.” – Jesus, Luke 4:23 (NIV). FEMA, in company with all other human endeavors, could stand improvement. Every FEMA employee, from boots on the ground to leadership, would acknowledge this. But the path to improvement would not seem to lie in crippling the agency, then demanding that those finding their former responsibilities subsumed within a larger agency do more with less.  

Recall that disaster is disruption of an entire community (which can be a community of practice as well as a geographical community), persisting after the hazard has come and gone (in this case, federal budget cuts are still ongoing – the disaster in question remains underway), and exceeding the ability of the community to recover on its own. In most instances, community recovery is largely accomplished with help from the larger unaffected population.

Under ideal conditions, the ravaged FEMA would not be required to improve itself unaided. And yet the simultaneous damage to closely related agencies at federal state and local levels reduces their ability to help.

“You can’t go home again.” – Thomas Wolfe. The challenge is great. For those left behind at FEMA (assimilated into DHS), just as for communities such as Asheville and Altadena still struggling to rebuild, there will be no return to the prior state – to the way things were. Similarly, there’s no moving on – that is, some new beginning with an entirely clean slate. The only choice is to move forward – building a better future founded on the experience and suffering and harsh lessons of the past.

Something very special has to happen. Though rare and difficult, the feat is not impossible. In fact, FEMA itself has seen this movie before. James Lee Witt, the incoming FEMA administrator in 1993, found a FEMA that had been established decades earlier primarily to contend with the Cold War threat of a nuclear attack. Happily (almost miraculously), decades had passed without a single such event. However, the agency remained heavily focused on that single risk. In the meantime, the pressing reality was the multiple natural disasters that were recurring every single year. Under Witt, FEMA reordered its priorities to focus on what had been a glaring blind spot, becoming a much more vibrant, effective force for national resilience in the process.

U.S. government history offers other success stories. One such, on a large scale, was the the recovery and remaking of the US military following the Vietnam War. Some of the key changes? The military transitioned to an all-volunteer force as a means of building a more dedicated, skilled personnel. It focused on more realistic training under battlefield conditions and broadened that focus to cover a full spectrum ranging from counter-insurgency to large-scale global threats. It placed greater emphasis on doctrinal training for officers, and especially on learning from past mistakes. It worked to regain the trust of the American people.

Difficult? Sure. Taking decades? Indeed? Continuous effort versus one-off initiatives? Absolutely. But it has been done and can be done again.  

More on that next time.

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[1] An update: this week there are (conflicting) hints that the government may be carving out slowdowns in the deportation of farm-, hotel-, and restaurant workers (see also here). This an acknowledgment of the vital role such workers have been playing across the economy in harvesting American crops, etc. Illegal immigration is a problem. But immigration more broadly is also an opportunity.

“If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one is around to hear it?”

The previous LOTRW post noted that nations institute public weather services not just to provide forecasts, but to save lives and property. That national need is met only when weather services work in partnership with emergency managers. Their futures are necessarily intertwined.

Just what is that future? The outlook reveals problems as well as opportunities. This and the next few posts to follow consider both.

Start with emergencies per se. If emergencies themselves were for some reason to decline, the need for emergency management would decrease. But emergencies are likely to increase in number and impact.

A brief aside: this is a matter of reality more than mere nomenclature. Two variations on today’s quote help us see that[1]. The first:

“If no tree falls in the forest, but someone says one did fall, there is indeed a sound.”

In the year 2025, “a state of national emergency” is being used as the legal basis for draconian forms of government action with respect to immigration (framed as invasion) and with respect to tariffs (framed as economic warfare). Here the debate is whether such a state of emergency actually exists.

Meanwhile, natural disasters are driving a separate national conversation in the opposite direction:

“If a tree falls in a forest, but someone says, ‘that didn’t happen,’ then there is no sound.”

Something of this order is going on with respect to presidential disaster declarations dealing with hazards such as flood, drought, storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires and the like. In 2024, President Biden issued 90 such declarations, almost two a week. But in 2025 inaction has been the order of the day. The federal government is slow-walking or denying requests for assistance, arguing that natural disasters are a state-level problem.  (Media coverage of this shift has been extensive; samples can be found in both local– and national news outlets.)

In addition to after-the-fact action, there’s also debate about hazard warnings.

“A tree in the forest is about to fall near you.”

Budget cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service, to the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies would appear to compromise pre-existing improvements in the advance notice and accuracy of warnings. Again, the problem exists at both national and local levels.

George Berkeley’s original reflections on falling trees (footnote) have triggered more than a century of relatively calm discussion by scientists and philosophers. By contrast, the two latter debates about national emergencies are being fast-tracked in the courts. In the first case, political stakes are high. In the second, big bills are coming due, raising questions of who pays – the federal or state governments.

Natural disasters and their accompanying emergencies are the focus here. These are on the rise, both in terms of frequency and in terms of cost. Extremes of wind, flood and drought are nature’s way of doing business; they’re not going to lessen. The damage they do is increasing – the result of population growth and greater property exposure, as well as the mounting costs of business disruption. Social decisions – poor land use (allowing populations and economic activity to move into hazardous areas), inadequate building codes, and fragile critical infrastructure – all combine to magnify the risk.

A quick refresher on disasters-versus-emergencies. A disaster is a disruption of an entire community, persisting after the hazard has come and gone, and exceeding the ability of the community to recover on its own. Emergency management usually refers to the actions during the acute phase when the hazard (the hurricane, tornado, wildfire, etc.) is active: (warnings, evacuations, rescue, and other actions to reduce immediate loss). Here and in the next few posts the term will be expanded slightly to include activities sometimes labeled hazard mitigation, as well as other activities associated with risk management more broadly.

Bottom line: disasters and emergencies are both ascendant. The only choice is between effective versus inadequate emergency management, whether by that name, or some other.

Next time: The emergency management community in the United States (the researchers and the practitioners, extending to first responders) is itself experiencing a disaster – a precipitous, haphazard, and seemingly arbitrary withdrawal of multiple forms of support at the federal level. For emergency managers, this community disruption will persist long after the hazard has come and gone, and will exceed the community’s ability to recover on its own. In fact, recovery is an oxymoron. Things will not go back to the way they were. We need to move forward. That set of realities applies to the emergency-management community just as it does to any geographical community such as Asheville or Altadena, or Boulder or New Orleans.

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[1]BTW, was surprised just now to discover that the above quote has its own Wikipedia entry. But (shame on me) of course it does! And it’s not simply that there’s a Wikipedia entry for everything. The article lays out the philosophical question about the role of observers, the emergence of the problem in quantum mechanics, and more. Folks give some credit to George Berkeley for originating the discussion (but not so much for the exact quote).