Azimuth News (Part 7)

In 2023 the director of the Fields Institute asked me to lead a program on climate change. For quite some time I’ve been meaning to say what happened to that.

Briefly, I quit when I realized that I couldn’t get myself motivated to do the job, no matter how hard I tried.

It turned out the job was mainly to apply for grants. There were various options for what these grants could be. At the small end, a grant could be for a meeting or series of meetings at the Fields Institute, focused on a specific topic like agent-based models applied to climate change. At the large end, it could be to set up a ‘network’ of research teams in Canada, who would work together and occasionally meet. Regardless of the details, I was supposed to get grants that would help fund the Fields Institute and bring it into the realm of doing something about clime change.

Unfortunately I’m not really good at applying for grants, I don’t like doing it, and throughout my life I’ve generally managed to avoid doing it. I also avoid ‘networking’ except for contacting individuals here and there when I have a specific question. So I don’t have a lot of connections among people working to fight climate change, and I don’t have the patience to build up these connections just to get people to help me apply for grants for the Fields Institute.

The irony of people flying to meetings on climate change is not lost on me, either.

Mind you, the project is probably a worthwhile endeavor. But I’m not the right one to lead it. So after some dithering, I quit.

This is the latest chapter in the more general failure of the Azimuth Project. I started this project here in 2010. I had hoped that the urgency of the climate crisis was so great that if I lit a match the fire would spread: i.e., people would jump on board, figure out what scientists could do, and start doing it. That actually did happen to some extent—just enough to make me think it was working. But there are lots of projects to do something about climate change, and the ones that really get anywhere are much better organized than the Azimuth Project.

The big problem, I now realize, is that my talents don’t include leading an organization. I’m not good at working with large groups of people, giving them a clear goal, raising money to pay them, delegating authority, and so on. I did okay as the thesis advisor of up to six grad students, but that’s about my limit. And I was not able to find someone else to take charge.

What succeeded much more than the Azimuth Project per se was the idea of network theory, which I espoused in this manifesto in 2011. I put a lot of work into network theory, and I was lucky to have several grad students who jumped in and pushed it a lot further. You can see some of the results here:

• Network theory.

though this leaves out a lot of exciting new work.

My original dream for network theory is that it would let us understand the biosphere better and learn to work with it instead of against it. Here’s what I actually said:

I wish there were a branch of mathematics—in my dreams I call it green mathematics—that would interact with biology and ecology just as fruitfully as traditional mathematics interacts with physics. If the 20th century was the century of physics, while the 21st is the century of biology, shouldn’t mathematics change too? As we struggle to understand and improve humanity’s interaction with the biosphere, shouldn’t mathematicians have some role to play?

I’m not sure we are much closer to that, but the mathematics we’ve developed had had some concrete applications, like better tools for epidemiological modeling. I still want to apply them to climate change, but clearly I’m moving too slowly for this to be a practical way of addressing the climate crisis.

A broader project including network theory is ‘applied category theory’. This has been taken up whole-heartedly by my former student Brendan Fong, who is good at organizing people and running an institution. So, if you want to see a project that’s actually succeeding, don’t look here: look at the Topos Institute. This is approximately what the Azimuth Project was trying to be—but run with a competence beyond my wildest dreams.

Besides my own personal lack of organizational skill, the other big problem is that Azimuth Project assumed a vaguely technocratic approach to governance. It’s not that I thought nerds in white lab coats were running the show! But I did think that the climate crisis would eventually be recognized as such—a crisis—and governments would deploy scientists to deal with it. I did not expect that by 2025 the US would be ruled by a corrupt demagogue who would ban the use of the term ‘climate change’ in government documents. Nor did I expect that authoritarian politicians and billionaires would form a world-wide alliance to disrupt democracy and replace it with a system of national oligarchies.

But that’s what is happening now. So I now feel that ‘solving the climate crisis’, already such a herculean task that I put it in wryly sarcastic quotes, can’t be done without doing something even bigger: rethinking and somehow reforming politics and the economy in a way that takes the biosphere and the patterns of human behavior into account.

For a couple of years I’ve been calling this bigger project the ‘New Enlightenment’. It would aim at a reboot of civilization, based on sounder principles, which picks up the job where the so-called Age of Enlightenment left off. (I don’t especially like the word ‘enlightenment’, but I haven’t thought of a better one.)

Of course the scope, viability and very meaning of such a project will be argued ad nauseum as it unfolds. But what else can we do, actually? The ‘same old same old’ just isn’t working.

Anyway, I hope some people younger, wiser and more energetic than me try to steer things in a good direction.