Hurricanes, Fires, and Scholarly Societies Now
My parents raised me to worry about hurricanes and hurricane season. I grew up on the coasts of Florida, as did my parents themselves. Floridians, but not of the Florida Man variety, hurricane season was for them about making plans and preparations. This involved learning about, and mitigating risks, making plans, getting supplies, having shutters, marking storm locations on maps printed in daily papers, watching the weather news and much more. These kinds of preparation were not abstract, as my family weathered numerous actual storms of greater or lesser impact. While our home was never severely impacted, we had access to plenty of examples of how devastating tropical storms could be, both pictured on the local news and in family oral tradition.
As if the job of leading a scholarly society is not challenging enough now on other fronts, society leaders have—like my parents when I was growing up—to think about such things as hurricane seasons, fire seasons, and the practical implications of anthropogenic climate change. Leaders of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), for instance, know this because many of them experienced their own 2018 annual conference in San Jose, California. Here is how then first-time attendee Ian Pollock described it afterwards in December 2018
Darkening the sky, hanging in the rafters of the convention center, and stinging the throats and eyes of everyone who came, the smoke of the major fires ravaging California was an inescapable presence. The AAA president, in his opening remarks, acknowledged the forensic anthropologists from Cal State Chico who were at that moment assisting in the recovery and identification of bodies from towns destroyed by the fire. Zoe Todd was among many who commented on the smoke, calling it a kind of message: the land itself telling us about the violence of the settler colonial structures on which California is built.
I was reminded of Kim Fortun’s recent interview on The Familiar Strange podcast, in which she talked about living in toxic times. She argued that anthropologists can respond as a disaster unfolds, and not just in the aftermath. I also thought of a recent workshop at Deakin University in Melbourne, called “Writing Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene.” As the organizers wrote in their call for participants:
[Block quote in block quote] ‘Slow disaster describes the long process of environmental and infrastructural degradation produced by inadequate risk assessments, industrial regulations, and the political narratives that shape design decisions of human-environment relations. The longer temporal perspective provided by slow disaster can help index political, infrastructural, and social dynamics in relation to the new terrains and atmosphere emerging in the Anthropocene. Writing slow disaster draws attention to, and works through, the entanglements of climate crises, structural violence, and the legacies of industrialism.’
San Jose, after all, is basically an adjunct to Silicon Valley, home of techno-utopians and their confidence that every problem can be solved with a technological solution, and a concentration of wealth like the world has never seen before. The fires that sent up the smoke choking San Jose were distant still, but creeping ever closer. No blue-sky thinking could dispel the haze.
Beyond the structural lessons of such episodes, there are also just the practical realities. Sometimes the show, or the annual meeting, just must go on, but it goes on in such a way that falls far short of its organizer’s hopes for reasons not within their immediate control. One can have, for instance, a bad meeting where everyone is talking about bad air or a meeting that loses money and thereby impedes other work.
Or, sometimes scholarly meetings have to be cancelled. COVID led to this dynamic on a vast scale and I was involved as an organizer for the 2020 American Folklore Society (AFS) meeting that eventually was realized in Tulsa in 2022. Hotel contracts and meeting plans loom as the most mission critical, financially significant, and ultimately risky undertakings that scholarly societies pursue. They are where the largest amount of staff and volunteer labor, and member activity and expenditure, resides for most of the societies in the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Natural disasters, pandemic diseases, and, strikes and labor actions (three real world matters that are linked at a deeper level) are all threats that scholarly society leaders wind up needing to understand and manage to the best of their ability, but they cannot directly prevent or control them. The best that they can do is to seek to mitigate risk and impact.
It has been a long time since I first started tracking these issues. Meeting locations, meeting contracts (which are complex and involve varied actors), the implications of locations and contracts for both society members and local people, including local scholarly and cultural organizations, as well as local workers are, and have long been, matters of great concern within and beyond scholarly societies. But today, they are weighted with many additional concerns. The AAA has witnessed some of those additional concerns and their impacts as AAA members have passionately debated the pros and cons of holding its meeting this year in Tampa, Florida (and the pros and cons of attending). I bracket out those for now and just focus on the newest facts known to me on the morning of October 8.
I hope that Hurricane Milton, presently a major storm spinning over the superheated Gulf of Mexico and headed towards a coastline centered on Tampa Bay petters out quickly and causes no damage or harm to anyone or anything, but Florida (and Georgia and North Carolina and Tennessee) has not yet recovered from the devastation of recent Hurricane Helene. The work of Helene recovery makes Milton even more dangerous as the Tampa area is piled high with debris ready to be blown or washed away, aggravating further any damage that Milton might otherwise cause if/when it makes landfall. This matters for the AAA leaders because the 2024 annual meeting of the AAA, which was already under great stress for sociopolitical reasons, is only 43 days away and set for Tampa. I want Milton to produce no injuries, no destruction of infrastructure, no negative impacts of any kind. As an expected attendee at the upcoming meeting, I want only good things for my fellow AAA members and the people of my home state. As a member of the Council for Museum of Anthropology (CMA) board and thus a minor AAA elected leader, I am worried not only about the “regular” human risks, but also about the risks to the AAA as a society. A whole generation of vexing and difficult annual meetings (not just San Jose in 2018) have already impacted AAA membership and AAA finances. Like so many institutions, scholarly societies have been being ground down by a range of contemporary processes and dynamics. Massive fires are a climate change part of this that we can discuss from experience, but there are scholarly societies right now, on the day that I write this, who are cancelling their annual meetings specifically due to Hurricane Milton (Google it for evidence and for Helene cancelations as well). I hope to be in Tampa for a great AAA meeting, but it is only prudent, as with my parent’s yearly preparations and close attention to the weather, to be cognizant that Hurricane Milton could impact the AAA meeting set for November 20-24, 2024. And the Tampa meeting has already faced challenges increasingly typical of the current gestalt.
In the series of posts that this one joins, I am trying to think out loud about the newer challenges that leaders of scholarly societies generally, and of my scholarly societies particularly, are facing, and that they have no choice but to face. Severe weather and natural disasters are not new, of course. And scholarly societies have weathered such things before and will do so in the future. But the political, economic, social, and organizational environments are worsening, and anthropogenic climate change is making the weather more variable and, in the case of massive fires and powerful storms, more dangerous. It would be a significant thing if this were the only change to which scholarly society leaders needed to help their organization adapt, but it is just one on a long and growing list.
I wish for only good things for the people of Florida and I appreciate all that the elected and professional leaders of the AAA and AFS are doing to keep these societies mission-focused and effective in vexing time. That work is not easy.
Shreds and Patches 