Mian Crist

speaker

152 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jul

Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Close Readings · Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

and not even what Kelly Levy et al.

call a stupid wicked problem, but an intractable predicament, a tragic failure, an interminable catastrophe.

Every fix faces insurmountable challenges, beginning with inertia and vested opposition, quickly compounded by resource limits, energy costs, political dysfunction, and competing priorities, while the long-term nature of key problems requires commitments from future actors impossible to compel.

Even worse, if Tainter's theory of diminishing returns on complexity is right, then the increasing complexity required to address our situation will only accelerate rapid, large-scale simplification.

So basically, this is the irresolvable civilizational impasse that we find ourselves at.

And we may get back to this in a moment, but I think it's important to say that Tainter is a well-respected figure in his field, and also this is a theory, right?

Scranton is really leaning into the way that this theory works to think about civilization.

And I think it's a very useful kind of heuristic.

Also, it's important to note that throughout the book, these sentences begin with, if Tainter's theory is correct, or if Tainter is right about this.

And sometimes it feels like a very big if.

And also, maybe he is correct.

Maybe we should think through this, right?

This is the kind of pessimistic thinking through of a worst case scenario in a way.

I do.

I think that because it is the way that he defines impasse, if we are in a society that could manage a transition through the pressures that climate change and other kinds of catastrophic things that are sort of coming up are going to put onto us.

So I think this is why thinking about COVID is useful, right?

We saw in COVID that

a collapse of a very complex network of interconnected systems that turned out to be much more fragile and delicate than anyone had thought.

These systems upon which we all rely, also for food, energy, fertilizer, all of these kinds of things,

This big shock to the system that came from COVID was not something that the system could very easily handle.

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