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:

Time to Face the Reality of Our Predicament

by Margaret Swedish

Okay, this time I'm serious. I must start writing again. I have so much brewing inside, so much from my past, from my personal history, that shines some light on this moment in our western culture's history, so much I have let go from old belief systems that I have shed, that needed shedding, so I could see more clealy, and now from spiritual practices and insights emerging in this time of vast and often terrifying upheaval. So, too, of these recent years back in my hometown, what I am learning from returning to my roots after 25 years in the DC area, and my life with street folks and Chileans in Montreal in years before that, and before that, in the streets of Milwaukee and of Boulder CO during my university days, protesting the Vietnam War and marching for civil rights.

And I just keep learning...

Now, in the face of accelerating political and social crises, the dangers of world war, the cultural chaos that is leading to the collapse of our governing institutions, and all the ecological unravelings happening all at once, including my own unraveling as I age and struggle with lethal disease, this is the time for a real shout-out to the world. People, wake up!

As a nation, we are underestimating in the extreme how bad this is going to get. And, because of that, we are not preparing as we need to to take on the challenges. We do not yet have the psychological capacity, nor the spiritual stamina, to live through what's coming with our humanity intact. That will only come when we are truly prepared to surrender the very ways of life that are bringing about this great upheaval, when our values change from consumption, accumulation, and affluence to community and simplicity in all things, to living in deep relation with Nature in which we are fully embedded, when care for the Web of Life matters more than economic or financial "success," when that care becomes the reason we get out of bed in the morning, the core meaning of what it means now to work in the world, the core meaning of what it is to be a human being.

What a time on this planet and in this dysfunctional culture to start writing again! But if we reach deep into that core to rediscover our humanity in the face of a culture that has been busy destroying it, perhaps we can find the path to how to live through this devastating transition with compassion, generosity, gentleness, integrity, and a deeper experience of the spirit and of community than we have ever known.

So, you can see where I left off in this last essay a couple of years ago. And you can see how the election of the wannabe dictator and the pandemic and then my own illness quieted my voice for a good long time. But a renewed surge of energy and inspiration is telling me it's time to get back to this, that the various lenses of my life's work and evolving faith have something to offer to this moment - about what went wrong and what we need to do to right this ailing species of ours. As a colleague said in a recent Zoom call, "We got it all wrong!" Indeed we did. We need to finally free our minds and hearts from the clutter of the values of this economic growth culture and start to see clearly what we need to do to live on this precious planet that is being rapidly diminished by the 6th Great Extinction, massive loss of biodiversity, our over-consuming at a massive scale the resources that this planet actually has to support us, climate change, the toxification of our environment, and a whole lot more.

Light at the end of the tunnel

It's a grand scale for a writer, but I'm going to dig in. Whatever the limits of my physical life now, I can sit at a laptop and write my heart out for months or years or whatever I have left to make my offering.

Hope you'll go on this journey with me. And I hope you might invite others to join you by letting them know about this blog and getting the link out into your communities and networks. We could actually have a conversation here. We could multiply the lenses through which more people are doing clear seeing. We could share best and deepest spiritual wisdom and practices. We could contribute to the urgent work of creating the Beloved Community wherever we are.

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I intend to post twice weekly. You can receive the link via email by subscribing in the box on the upper right column. Ain't gonna charge for this. It will always be free.

Two years later...a plunge into the present moment

So, where are we now? Nearer collapse. That's the first point. We were there 2 years ago when I pretty much stopped writing. The death of my oldest sister in 2019 morphed into the pandemic that began at the end of that year, and here we are almost 2 years later. I couldn't write during the pandemic. A lot of writers had that reaction.

Staring into a darkness, a big ending right out there in front of us, growing closer and closer, inexorably - that's what it felt like at times. It was the "45" years, the years of the Orange Man. We were headed for political collapse, watching incompetent power-mongers, racists and misogynists, making a mess of things, unraveling the political system and Constitutional order for the helluva it, for revenge against the progress of BIPOC people and women who threatened their power (which was built in part upon racism and misogyny) after all the years of struggle for rights expansion. Corruption, substanceless braggadocio stomping around the White House (or the golf course), a frail, extremely narcissistic, volatile ego, attracting others of the same ilk - it was sad and dangerous. And we are reaping the whirlwind now and will for years to come.

Credit: NPR.org

All happening in a world falling apart from ecological unraveling and cultural failures all around the world, a time when what we need is the best of humans, not the worst.

It was hard to sit here and write any damn thing. And then I received a cancer diagnosis. It all fit together in ways hard to describe. My body, my spirit, following the path of diminishment and decline in a diminishing, declining world.

I never thought it meant I would never write again. It meant I would be a very different person when I began again.

The pause was not total. I blogged monthly for a while at the Center for New Creation website, but that ended as I moved on from it after 15 years. I have poems started or nearly finished as they roll themselves out of whatever that space is where they originate. They need attention, but they are there, waiting for me. My discipline when it comes to editing a poem is just terrible. They are born, I file them away as drafts, and there they linger as I return to the prose. They may never see the light of day, but the practice of writing poems has made me a better writer.

Meanwhile, in this atmosphere of a world falling apart (and nothing we can do to stop it), the acceptance of that entails a lot of letting go, and that letting go is quite freeing, if also painful. The desire to "fix" the world is still there in this aging social justice advocate, but this one can't be fixed. It can only collapse, and the real question before us now is how we will live through it and what kind of world will emerge from that. 

Credit: Margaret Swedish - Athabasca River, Alberta

If nothing else, this precipice moment tells the writer that there is no use holding back anymore. Nothing to lose, right? Write it all, fully, honestly - what you see, what you know after decades on this planet, what the precipice looks like as we all draw nearer. None of us can "save" the world anymore, so we may as well tell the truth about it from the various vantage points of our lives. And we need to tell that truth as vulnerable, scared, gentle humans so that the words can be of service to others, rather than judgment that just pushes people away, or the resentment and rage that become violence and hate. There is a bad time coming and we need to learn how to live through it and keep a modicum of decency, generosity, and compassion as values we treasure.

We look back on our lives, those of us who have been around a while, and perhaps ask what it is we can gather up to mine for wisdom. There is a lot of material for me. I grew up with extreme racism here in Milwaukee, and later the Vietnam War and the great cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s. At CU in Boulder, I was involved in campus ministry, which in those days involved solidarity with farmworkers struggling to form a union, and visiting young men, boys really (average age 15-24), in a federal prison for first offenders near Denver, including several conscientious objectors avoiding the draft out of conscience, and peace marches and teargas, and later living among street people at a soup kitchen in Montreal, and after that, 25 years in Washington DC, most of that in a national office animating and resourcing a faith-based solidarity movement with liberation struggles in Central America. Back in my hometown of Milwaukee, I am engaged with an urban farm, which raises community as well as food, a practical hands-on path of community survival and enrichment, and have turned to a sangha and Buddhist practice as an anchor for my spiritual journey (though I am still very fond of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, despite what religion has done to them).  

The building here I first lived when I moved to Montreal

That sounds like an interesting life and it has been, and it is chock full of things I never thought I would do, but did, and some of it was painful and traumatic, and some of it was rich beyond measure. In other words, I have some material to work with, yes? I'm 72 now (hard to believe, it's not what I thought 72 would be when I was a kid, when all those aging aunts and uncles came by for a visit) and, as I mentioned, I have a very unusual cancer that is being checked with a monthly injection that keeps it where it is for hopefully a good long while. I have no doubt that the increase in this cancer in the population, and so many others, is because my body is contaminated with beaucoup carcinogens no matter how healthy I have tried to live. 

We all have microplastics in us now, and PFAS "forever" chemicals (a family of toxic chemicals pervasive now everywhere and in everything), and more than half of people alive in this country will get cancer, and that is a pandemic quite unique to us. You'd think that would change things, but instead of deciding to get the toxins out of the environment, it just started a cancer industry where more billions are being made by investors in the private health market. Clever, capitalism, don't you think?

Well, the reckoning is here and more people know that than are willing to admit it or say it out loud. We just cannot imagine a life without the capitalist industrial growth economy. We can't, even though we've had it for so brief a time in human history. One thing capitalism has understood perfectly is precisely how addictive our brains are, the evolution of intelligence, wisdom, and ethics being far behind that of the technology where it can offer stuff online and have it delivered to our porches.

That's the world that's ending, collapsing now, having made us sick, having poisoned our world, having made us quite incapable of stopping that which is bringing us so much harm.

Honduras: children displaced by palm oil plantation

I've seen too much of what it has cost us, this economic growth culture - in the streets of Montreal, in the federal prison in Colorado where we celebrated the 15th birthday of a Mexican boy who crossed the border carrying weed (and could not speak a word of English), in the bombed villages and encampments of displaced populations during El Salvador's civil war, in the simple houses of workers in the sweatshops of Mexico and Honduras, in neighborhoods back home here in Milwaukee with conditions as bad as some of the poorest countries I visited, or in the Diné and Cree communities along the Athabasca River in Alberta where the tar sands industry has bulldozed their forests, contaminated their waters, and ruined a whole culture's way of life. I learned that the U.S. teaches people in other countries how to torture and how to destroy villages to save them. I learned that all this affluence and consumerism the culture so enjoys requires this brutality in order for us to have them. No way around that bit of moral truth either.

And since I started focusing on the ecological crises we are falling into now without hope of avoiding them any longer, I also learned that we will fell entire forests, dig up, mine, and destroy millions of square miles of precious lands and water all over the world for the same reason - to have the benefits and the comforts and conveniences that industrialism has brought us.

There, you see? I start writing and it comes like waves washing over the present moment, drowning us in our history of colonialism, empire, and rapacious industrialism. This is what I was afraid of, that if I started I couldn't stop. I would have to look at it all again. All of it. Hold nothing back. Trust me, that is a frightful space in which to live. Fortunately, while I don't have a lot of company in that space, especially here in my hometown, I do have company. There are others I know bravely walking into that space to ask - what do we have to offer now from our passion and skills, our compassion and sorrowful solidarity, that can be of service in such a world?

Credit: Cheri Johnson

I have my garden plot in our urban farm with 90 or so others, gardeners as diverse as what we grow, and before the pandemic I took my trusty laptop and PowerPoint to all sorts of communities to talk about the conditions of life on the planet and what needs to end - as well as what needs to be begun - and I have my words. And now I want to offer them again. We'll see what emerges. I hope you will be with me on this journey. It needs company. In order to build the Beloved Community amid the chaos, fear, and violence of our time, we need to start actually living it.

Finally, words are not meant to be cast off into a vacuum. Every writer wants a conversation, feedback, solidarity. As I move along this path now, thoughtful responses are welcome. With the world as it is right now, sharing wisdom is more necessary than ever.

~ Margaret Swedish

swedishmargaret2@gmail.com

Coming back to a writing life... Morder, "The Overstory," and why this feels urgent

My intentions to get back to my regular writing practice were derailed again over the last winter and through spring, this time by a wrenching personal experience - the dying and death of my oldest sister, one of the most profound relationships in my life. Thing about a loss like this is that there is upheaval on so many layers of one's life, and about all one can do is allow that to be what it is. What it is, is different for each of us. For me, it pretty much shut down my capacity for creative writing. I had to accept that. I had to let it be. Fighting it, pulling up a draft and staring at it helplessly, wasn't doing me any good.

It integrates. Takes time, but eventually it integrates. The context for the grief gets larger with time, the psychological room for it. The space gets bigger. This does not take anything away from the intensity, or those moments when it strikes again like a powerful ocean wave that washes over and for a moment takes everything with it. The grief can still be overwhelming, but it also begins to take on its own story, to reveal, to be comforting, to become a spiritual resource in which to rest, to find wisdom, to bond with the rest of the grieving world.

Writing and the need to imagine a different world - urgently

Well, so much for my once a month promise to this blog. Missed November - a dreary, dreary month 'round these parts. Too reflective of my mood, especially as a writer. I don't know how to write of and to these times. The pace of tumultuous change is picking up speed. I take in a day's worth of shocking news and events, and then, just as I try to absorb them, reflect on them, process my own thoughts and feelings, open to whatever emerges - more shocking news and events come storming in.

Storming - too often quite literally these days. Unprecedented weather events are almost daily fare now, disrupting lives, bringing personal tragedies to thousands of families, and billions of dollars worth of destruction - and that's just in this country. But, have you noticed the culture changing its priorities at all because of these things? Do those not affected "feel" these events as part of their lives?