The Meaning of a "Wicked Problem"

by Margaret Swedish 

It would be good for us to understand well the meaning of this term. It is not a made-up description of a problem - that it is wicked, therefore negative, or bad, from our perspective. It is a technical term, used in science, research, engineering, and design. It is a term for a problem that is irresolvable, therefore wicked, objectively wicked.

And we are facing thousands of them now. We live among them, and the paralysis many feel over trying to find or imagine a way out of our predicament (another word it would help us to better appreciate) is because there is no path that gets us out of it. We face collapses now we cannot halt, prevent, or fix. We can only figure out how to live through them, adjust our lives to reality, instead of the fiction of our economic, industrial culture, and create in the face of a generational crisis a way to survive with some semblance of our basic humanity still intact.

This world will be so in need of us - if we can hang on to our moral values, our integrity, compassion, equanimity, selflessness, deep respect for the Web of Life, our dedication to what promotes goodness, what helps to ease the inevitable suffering (material loss, grief, want, fear, anxiety, harsh scarcities...).

Am I exaggerating the scale? Think of this new Age of Fire as the Earth becomes more combustible with drought and aridification, record heat, and too much human development within high-risk fire zones. Think the Texas Panhandle, California, Alberta, British Columbia, Australia, Chile, Greece - just a few locations with recent historic level wildfires. Fires that cannot be fought for their power and strength, a raging force of nature that surpasses the capacity of the tools we have to "fight" them.

Am I exaggerating the scale? Summers now that regularly see heat domes and temperatures that reach into the 120s - in Iraq and other Gulf nations, India, Chile, B.C., Arizona, Texas, parts of Europe... Or winters. 74 degrees in February in Wisconsin and the first tornadoes ever recorded in that state.

Am I exaggerating the scale? Atmospheric rivers flowing across the Pacific Ocean and smashing into California now are becoming increasingly powerful as more and more moisture from the warming atmosphere fuels the storms. Rain falling in feet, not inches, hills and mountainsides collapsing, billions of dollars in damage. And then the rise in sea levels from warming oceans and melting ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic that are causing the disintegration of shorelines and threatening more populations because humans built ocean communities in defiance of nature and climate change. Meanwhile, the national hurricane center is considering a new Category 6 for those storms as they get larger, more powerful, and more destructive

Am I exaggerating the scale? How badly have we also poisoned the planet and all living beings, including our own bodies? The National Cancer Institute, a government site, reported this from the year 2020, that 1,806,590 new cases of cancer would be diagnosed that year and 606,520 people would die from the disease. More than 40% of the U.S. population will get cancer in their lifetime. In the U.K., that percentage is over 50%.

I always thought that this would be the stat, the reality, that would change the culture, that would scare the hell out of us, that would make us say, "my God, we need to stop this." What we have done instead is create a sprawling largely for-profit cancer treatment and research industry. Rather than get the carcinogens out of the environment, we make cancer part of the industrial/economic growth culture. Clearly I underestimated the ability of investors and consumers to bear painful illness and death rather than give up their online shopping, their use of plastics (rising rapidly), and global travel.

Some people call this "adaptation." Some of us call it insanity, living outside reality.

Without intending it, we have created a culture of wicked problems now. Global baking and climate change? This crisis cannot be resolved by ending the production and burning of fossil fuels without massive economic collapses, raging poverty and want, wars and violent social conflict, and more. Nor can it be resolved by trying to replace the burning of these fuels with renewables that can never do the job that oil did, and that require mammoth extremes of environmental destruction in order to create the infrastructure for these fuels at the scale of what fossil fuels have enabled.

Take the 100,000 plus untested synthetic chemicals that humans have introduced into our waters, soil, food, and air out of the environment - plastics among them - and the economy collapses. Pick your poison.

I am not making this stuff up. This is all fact-based. This is studied, researched. I have been reading this stuff for decades. I have gone to the presentations, had intense conversations with some brilliant scientists, read the studies, in order to learn, to get this right, because I am annoyed by those who scare people with the unproven end-of-the-world stuff. What is proven and real is plenty terrifying enough.

It is easy to face the reality of our "wicked problem" with despair. But we have to move through that, too. That won't help us learn how to live through this time in a manner that uplifts the best, instead of the worst, of the human spirit.

So, a couple of points to make at the end of this essay. One: don't try to waste time and energy trying to fix what cannot be fixed - like industrial, consumer civilization. It was always headed to this end. It is a hyper-expression of the wicked problem. It is wicked. Let it die. Second: in the face of that collapse, we can learn how to live differently, with different principles, ethics, ways of life, moral and spiritual values that not only serve to ease a lot of the inevitable suffering to come, but also to begin moving away from this destructive culture to a new one, ways of life that regenerate the human connection with the Earth, what gave us life, what can still hold us if we can keep from losing it all, and if we can learn how to live in the wild diversity of the planet without ripping up those connections that hold us all together.

A culture of radical simplicity. A culture of letting go destructive, selfish modes of life. A culture that breaks with the logic of this one, i.e.; the accumulation of stuff, wealth, status. A culture of solidarity, community, becoming repairers of the breaches we have created, allowing the Earth to heal itself and to show us how to do it.

We must head in that direction if we really do want to survive. This is about learning how to live on this planet within the limits of her natural systems, with reverence and respect, without using her for our economic benefit but living within her in a way that is a benefit to all living beings.

You can be sure we will be writing more about this in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned. Share this around. Let's get a community of truth and compassion going right here.

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Wicked problem: In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point." Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. Due to their complexity, wicked problems are often characterized by organized irresponsibility. [Grabbed this off wikipedia. Well-sourced.]

Predicament: an unpleasant situation that is difficult to get out of: