This Is Not A Blip

IN MARCH, THE COLORADO RIVER RESEARCH GROUP published a report urging water watchers to stop using the word “drought” to describe environmental changes in the southwestern United States. “Drought,” the group wrote, implies that “the condition is temporary—a deviation from a norm that is expected to eventually return.” But what is happening in the Colorado River Basin is not temporary. There will be no return. The old norm is dead. A better word to describe emerging conditions, the researchers suggested, would be “aridification”: the period of transition to a permanent condition of increasing water scarcity.

A few weeks later, David Lipton, the second-in-command at the International Monetary Fund, gave a speech in Sofia on the future of multilateralism. The occasion was the annual gathering of Eurofi, the pretend think tank set up by Europe’s main banks as a lever to keep Brussels market-friendly and free of anything that might faintly resemble profit infringement. Lipton, a cartoon technocrat with a brush of hair so tough and a gaze so unblinking he sometimes appears to have been taxidermied while still alive, began by lamenting that “until recently, the theme of multilateralism probably would have prompted me to focus on governance reforrems at the IMF.” But, he added, “times have changed. We live in an era of doubts and questions about the global order. We are in a trust recession.” The consequences of this slump in global trust, Lipton continued, are everywhere obvious: the rise of right-wing populism and protectionism; anger about income inequality; the growing popularity of “single-issue movements, online groups and communities that form on social media.” But Lipton also had good news: regulations introduced after the financial crisis led, ironically, to a renaissance in public trust in banks. Trust, in others words, “can be rebuilt.” For Lipton, the moral was clear: “We can restore trust in institutions and larger purposes if we set out to regain the sense that something concrete can be achieved by working together.”

Read the story by Aaron Timms from The Baffler - “This Is Not A Blip.”