Issue 51: Stuck Boats and Other 21st Century Problems
3.27.21 | It's not easy to make the disasters we're experiencing now
Hello,
This week you’ve probably been following the saga of the Ever Given, a huge container ship that’s wedged itself sideways in the Suez Canal, blocking global shipping traffic. It’s something a relief, actually, to turn our attention to this story after a year of pandemic. The stakes seem pretty low (nobody’s going to die here, right?), the comedy quotient is high (it’s an enormous stuck boat, what more do you want?), and it’s relatable (as they say on Twitter whom’st among us lately hasn’t felt a little stuck?).
More than anything else we’re presented with a crisis that is, for once, easy to understand and explain. A gigantic ship went crosswise, and a bunch of comparatively puny tug boats and earth movers are scrambling without success to set it right, an “absolutely sublime visual gag” as Amanda Mull put it in this riotously fun essay.
But the Great Suez Canal Blockage of 2021 isn’t a simple problem, any more than the Deepwater Horizon spill was a simple matter of a broken pipe in the water, or the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was a simple matter of a missing plane. Or, and let’s get straight to the point here, any more than Covid is a simple flu.
The main thing to take seriously is just how big the Ever Given is. News reports mention that it’s “skyscraper-sized.” That it can carry 20,000 standard shipping containers (two of which lined up end-to-end are about as long as the trailer on a semi). Or that it’s “one of the world’s largest container ships,” which is actually something of an understatement. “One of the world’s largest” implies that there are bigger ships out there. There aren’t, not in a meaningful sense1. The ship currently lodged sideways in the Suez is 400 meters long, or a bit more than 1,300 feet, which is the outermost edge of the envelope for the largest class of container ships ever built. For comparison the Titanic was just shy of 900 feet long, and the current record holder for world’s largest cruise ship (completed in 2018, just in time for the pandemic to obliterate the cruise industry) measures in at just under 1,200 feet. Up until the 2010s, nobody had ever built a container ship anywhere near this big. Since 2017, to keep up with the exploding volume of global trade, we’ve built dozens of these colossal ships, all of which have roughly the same dimensions as the Ever Given.
It took an enormous amount of global ingenuity to design, build, and operate a fleet of ships each of which is big enough to completely choke off the Suez Canal if any one of them ran aground passing through it. And for all the unprecedented effort it took to lodge this ship in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes, getting it unstuck without the stresses of doing so tearing the ship apart (thus making the blockage even worse) will be its own complex technical effort. It’s a novel problem, as the president of the American Salvage Association told Bloomberg: “I have never seen a container vessel this large grounded so hard in a canal that way. … This is a first that I can remember.”
Novel problems are a signature of 21st century disasters, produced by the ever-increasing sophistication, power, and interdependence of the technologies we use to move people, things, energy, and information around the planet. These problems sometimes appear similar to things we’re familiar with, and are presented to us in familiar contexts, but are in fact transformed by their scale and complexity. In 2010, for example, you could watch the Macondo well gushing oil live on cable television in your living room, thanks to a camera beaming images from the better part of a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, and think to yourself I bet I could solve this problem, you just have to plug the hole. Or in the case of the Ever Given, as one six-year-old boy put it in this delightful suite of ideas from kids about how to free the ship: “I would just push the back until it was free and could float away. I’ve seen things like this in my life. Like sticks in the creek.”
This interaction of proximity and remoteness — crises that seem familiar or common-sensical but are in fact exotic and require technical solutions — gives rise to what sociologist Rogers Brubaker has called the experiential and participatory challenges to expertise. It’s easy today to see people claim expertise about something, and it’s often even easy to access the data and other information on which expert knowledge is based. But it’s harder to see the mechanisms through which experts accomplish tasks and make more or less successful predictions based on technical processes and prior knowledge. Think about the wrecks produced by the amateur bakers trying to replicate professionally-made cakes on Nailed It, and you get the idea, except it’s harder to evaluate outcomes when someone claims expertise in something like marine salvage, or climate science, or epidemiology.
So the stuck boat is indicative of 21st century disasters, in which technical innovations meant to solve one set of problems (in this case, say, how to move as many goods as possible between China and Europe as quickly and cheaply as possible) create unprecedented new crises (how to dislodge one of the largest ships ever built from a choke-point in a waterway that handles 12 percent of global maritime trade). This general point is the thesis of Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, which aims to popularize an idea that has been percolating through the academic literature on the anthropocene and stretches back at least to sociology’s attempts since the 1980s to make sense of the Chernobyl disaster and other weird problems of modernity.
The pandemic fits this pattern as well, in terms of its zoonotic origin, the speed with which it was carried around the world, and the nature of the disruptions it has caused. But, listen, the stuck boat was supposed to take our minds off of the stubbornly resurgent viral pandemic, so for now let’s just leave it there.
// Link Roundup
Disease and destiny: For most of human history, Justin Davidson writes, we built memorials to honor great battles, heroes, and accomplishments, and it’s only recently that we’ve started using them to keep us from forgetting losses and shameful mistakes. How can we think through what form a memorial to Covid would take, what it would mean, and how it would be perceived by future generations? This long essay is a great exploration of the topic.
— “How Will We Remember This? A Covid memorial will have to commemorate shame and failure as well as grief and bravery.” Justin Davidson, Curbed.Pandemics are social: In which anthropologist Nicholas Dirks makes the case that we can’t stop pandemics without enlisting the social sciences.
— “We Need Social Science, Not Just Medical Science, to Beat the Pandemic.” Nicholas Dirks, Scientific American.Improving treatments: The mortality rate for Covid is falling, as physicans learn more effective treatments for each stage of the disease. Check out this deep look into the evolving standards of care over the course of the pandemic.
— “How Do You Treat Coronavirus? Here are physicians’ best strategies.” Kelly Servick et al, Science.Drinking our way through: The stress of the pandemic has driven up alcohol consumption for a lot of us, but the consequences are especially stark for young women, among whom doctors are reporting unprecedented levels of liver disease.
— “Sharp, 'Off The Charts' Rise In Alcoholic Liver Disease Among Young Women.” Yuki Noguchi, NPR.The literature of contagion: To pass the pandemic, writer Jill Lepore surveyed plague literature, arriving at this wonderful essay on the new worlds we’re left to create when the tide of sickness passes.
— “How Do Plague Stories End?” Jill Lepore, The New Yorker.
That’s it for this week! Be sure to recommend the newsletter to your friends currently stuck on ships waiting to transit the Suez, subscribe through the button below, and I’ll see you in your inbox next Saturday.
The Ever Given is categorized as an Ultra Large Container Ship (ULCS). A few ships in the category are 3 or 4 meters wider, but none are longer.