We should think like the Stoics

A practice from Stoic philosophy might help us better manage the environment under rapid climate change

Stoic philosophy is a useful framing for environmental issues (AI generated using Microsoft copilot)

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person’s grief. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.

Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, Letter XCI

Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus—all well-known Stoic philosophers—had a practice of visualising potential hardships or misfortunes to cultivate resilience, emotional preparedness, and mental fortitude. The increased resilience and preparedness conferred by this practice, called Meditatio Malorum, are precisely what we need for biodiversity and ecosystems (not to mention human infrastructure and wellbeing) under a rapidly changing and uncertain climate. Meditatio Malorum offers valuable insights and techniques that can enhance the effectiveness and resilience of environmental management efforts in addressing the challenges posed by climate change.

Climate change is pushing both the climate and ecosystems outside of their historical ranges of variability at a rate we’ve never seen. This means the conditions species have experienced in the past are unlikely to be the same in the future, so any strategies (e.g. attempts to restore to historical ecological states) or infrastructure (e.g. dams) developed for those past conditions will continue to lose effectiveness as conditions become more novel. For instance, the past few years have seen countless ‘extreme events’ bring societies momentarily to their knees, such as extreme floods in China, UK, New Zealand, Australia and indeed much of the world, and unprecedented wildfires across eastern Australia and western North America. What used to be extreme is no longer so extreme (e.g. a historically 1 in 100 year flood event may be a 1 in 10 year event).

Once again, this all sounds a bit bleak. But this is where we should be embracing strategies such as the Stoic practice of Meditatio Malorum—envisioning the worst case scenario—to go into the future equipped to deal with what may come. Currently, we risk flying blind into the future, and as a result, being surprised and unprepared to deal with events that we should well have been. We must shift our focus to being more future focused, anticipatory and adaptable.

Here are some of the reasons the Stoic practice of Meditatio Malorum, or the contemplation of potential misfortunes, could be valuable in environmental management under climate change:

• Preparedness: By envisioning potential negative scenarios, environmental managers can better prepare for and potentially mitigate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. This involves identifying vulnerabilities, developing adaptation strategies, and implementing resilience measures to minimise harm. This is where ecological forecasting comes in. I see this as an invaluable tool in the arsenal, particularly when coupled with adaptive and anticipatory management approaches. Myself and colleagues published a paper about this a few years ago focused on river ecosystems. The effectiveness of models depends on the type of forecast or projection. For instance, mechanistic or process-based models tend to be better at longer-term projections compared to statistical models (for reasons I’ll discuss in a future post), which may be more appropriate at predicting near-term states. The way I like to think about this is that with a well-built model, one can anticipate the decline of a species or ecosystem long before such trends are able to be detected in survey data.

• Resilience building: Meditatio Malorum encourages cultivation of resilience in the face of adversity. In the context of climate change, this means fostering adaptive capacity within ecosystems and communities to withstand and recover from environmental disturbances such as extreme weather events, sea-level rise, and habitat loss. For instance, this may mean promoting habitat heterogeneity across landscapes, allowing more diverse ecological communities to persist. Alternatively, just like investing in a diverse portfolio of stocks and shares buffers investors from shocks, taking action to increase the diversity of species offers an ecological portfolio effect. Both of these mechanisms mean that the sum (e.g. an ecological community) is more stable than its parts (individual habitats or species).

• Risk assessment: Contemplating potential challenges helps in identifying and assessing risks associated with climate change impacts. Environmental managers can prioritise actions and allocate resources more effectively by understanding the magnitude and likelihood of various adverse outcomes. Ecological forecasting can be used here to identify at-risk species or ecosystems, but there are no shortage of risk assessment approaches available.

• Long-term perspective: Stoic practices emphasise taking a long-term view and focusing on what is within one's control. In environmental management, this means considering the long-term consequences of decisions and policies, prioritising sustainability over short-term gains, and taking proactive measures to address the root causes of environmental degradation. This might just be the most challenging to change when we are at the mercy of governments on three- or five-year cycles.

• Adaptive governance: Stoic principles advocate for accepting and adapting to circumstances beyond one's control. In environmental governance, this means fostering adaptive governance structures and processes that can flexibly respond to changing environmental conditions, incorporate new information, and adjust strategies as needed to achieve desired outcomes. This couples nicely with iterative near-term ecological forecasting, which can be built in an iterative cycle of model building, confronting with new evidence, and making decisions while coupling with an adaptive management cycle.

There are many other benefits to this way of framing our thinking this way—these are just some of the most obvious.

If Marcus Aurelius could leverage Stoicism to endure so many hardships in his life, including prolonged military campaigns, political turmoil, health issues, and the burden of governing the vast Roman Empire, then perhaps we should take his lead. We need to be more future focused and aware of the various shocks coming down the pike. If we bury our head in the sand, hoping for the best, future generations will suffer.

I know this may sound a bit left field, but I like connecting things across diverse disciplines and believe this kind of thinking is needed to deal with the uncertainties we face. And, to be fair, many of these approaches are already being used, but we need more of this future-focused thinking given the rate at which the world is changing. I’d love to hear your thoughts here — please comment or share.