Executive Coordinator

Center for Sustainable Resource Development

College of Natural Resources

4 Giannini Hall

University of California, Berkeley

510-642-1599 (O)

510-643-1934 (F)

Abstract>. In addition to being uncertain and complex, the policy world is incomplete, i.e., at any point in time, most of the work of policymakers and policy analysts is unfinished or to be done. Policy incompleteness, along with uncertainty and complexity, have made fastthinking imperative: just-in-time thinking to match our just-in-time schedules in our just-interrupted task environments. The usual remedy, more deliberation, is frequently no longer possible, and even if it were, it has its own difficulties. If fastthinking is here to stay and we are in the twilight of conventional problem-solving, then policy analysts need new ways to deal with permanently incomplete policy issues. Policy optics allow us to recast familiarly intractable problems of poverty, defense and the environment into a more tractable light. They do not solve policy incompleteness, but they enable us to start tasks that we have a better chance of finishing.

The "end of problem-solving"? "Don’t solve problems," a recent article in Wired> advises: "When you are solving problems, you are investing in weaknesses. . ." But problem-solving is the vocation of every policy analyst, right? Many working analysts, including myself, have spent our careers doing just that. More to the point, our professionalism depends on being effective problem-solvers, or so it has always seemed.

The good news is that many of us who became policy analysts when the profession started in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s have now spent over a quarter century as problem-solvers. The bad news is we have spent those twenty-five years focused on weakness, needs, deficiencies, gaps, obstacles--in short, problems, always more problems. Is it any wonder, then, that burn-out and cynicism loom large as our occupational hazards? Think of all those missed opportunities to invest in strength--abilities instead of needs, innovation instead of problems, pull instead of push, excitement instead of indifference. Some have been fortunate in seizing the opportunities; many have not.

This article is about the shift away from problem-solving and its implications for policy analysis. The shift has much more to it than "Treat each problem as an opportunity for change." What some--though by no means all--are shifting to I call "fastthinking," and one way to exploit the benefits of fastthinking, while reducing its definite hazards, is through the analyst’s use of what I call "policy optics." To illustrate the importance of fastthinking and the role of policy optics, the article focuses on how one optic--that of the urban ecosystem--reconceptualizes not just issues of the environment but also those of poverty and defense.

fastthinking.com>

The term, fastthinking, captures the speed with which decisionmakers are currently making decisions, while fastthinking.com accents the digital technologies that make fastthinking both possible and necessary. It is important to underscore from the outset, however, that fastthinking has its taproot not in changing information technologies but in the complexity of policy issues.

The policymaker’s challenge--and by implication that of the policy analyst--is to underwrite and stabilize the assumptions for decisionmaking in the face of increasing issue complexity. How can policy types take a decision when all else is dynamic? In some instances, decisionmakers resort to policy narratives and scenarios that treat complexity and uncertainty as if there were manageable and manipulatable. In other cases, analysts rely on methods, such triangulation, which increase the analysts’ confidence that no matter from what direction the analysts look at an issue, they converge on points for further pursuit. In more and more instances, the policymaker and analyst resort to rapid, in some cases all but instant, responses on the premise that when things are everywhere churning, there may be no better way to keep decisionmaking going than by making decisions non-stop. When that happens, the "com" in fastthinking.com is for complexity.

But not just "com" for complexity. The end of problem-solving and the rise of fastthinking have their taproot drawing deepest from that other great challenge to contemporary policy analysis--the incompleteness of the world in which we operate.

Policy incompleteness, uncertainty and complexity

Policy incompleteness is the persistence of unfinished business for policymakers, politicians and policy analysts. To put it another way, what punctuates the policy world is persistent interruption, and it is no longer possible to complete all the interrupted tasks before us. Instead, we are left with finding ways to give meaning or find meaning in what remains permanently undone in our task environment. We find meaning in the incomplete when we believe we understand the causes of an interruption and what would have happened had we not been interrupted. We give meaning to the incomplete when we think we have made sense of an interruption and its aftermath, both of which remain causally unclear or not fully understood by us.

Incompleteness, in this way, is not necessarily uncertainty. We may know quite well what is incomplete and why it is so. Complexity and incompleteness need not be the same either. Policy issues are complex, because they are more numerous, varied and interrelated than before. The policy world is, in contrast, incomplete when the myriad interruptions leave it fragmentary and undone, without the depth and substance we have come to expect from complexity. Granted, interruptions can arise out of complexity and leave us with more uncertainty, but it is the unfinished business of the moment that dominates. Over time, tasks do get finished of sorts, and a few things turn out better than we could have ever hoped for. Fires are put out, problems handled, goals addressed, objectives dealt with--work does get done. But--and this is the point--it is the incomplete and unfinished that remain centered on our policy radar screens. For these reasons, incompleteness augurs the end problem-solving, albeit the end is always more fragmentary, abrupt and premature than we would like.

It is this incompleteness and the interruptions that are its proximate cause which have propelled fastthinking to the fore.

Back to fastthinking. . .

Just what is fastthinking? French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has criticized what he terms le fast-thinker>, the media pundits who think in a hurry and are ever ready with the rapid-fire answer and sound-bite. Whatever the merits of Bourdieu’s critique of quick-time experts, he misses the point about why fastthinking is here to stay.

The ability to think fast on your feet has always been at a premium, and not just for policy analysts. In part, fastthinking is about the analyst acting on hunches, shooting from the hip, and thinking on the fly; in another way, it is the analyst’s long-standing recognition that she cannot be definitive and topical at the same time, given the time constraints under which she operates. Analysts know they work in a complex, uncertain and incomplete (read: dynamic) world where no one can conclude, "Well, had someone done more research, things wouldn’t have turned out as bad as they did!" fastthinking is not about conventional trial and error learning, as the conditions for such learning--low environmental uncertainty, stability in goals and objectives, and institutional memory--are missing from much of the policy world today. It clearly is the opposite of the message-in-the-bottle approach to analysis, where you do your research, throw it upon the waters of a government agency or university library, and hope that someone, somewhere, sometime, will retrieve it and treat your message seriously. fastthinking is not even about right decisions. The chances that a policymaker looks you in the eyes and says, "You know, you were right all along!" are slim in a world dominated by incompleteness, let alone issue complexity and uncertainty. Last but certainly not least, fastthinking has long been the case for those policy fastthinkers who operate under the interruption-oriented ying and yang of crisis management and leaving important decisions to the last minute. For them, there are but two stages to decisionmaking: too soon to tell and too late to stop.

The equivalency paradox of fastthinking and problem-solving

>Assume the following relationships exist for a decisionmaker:

Three variables are of interest: the obsolescence of knowledge (ranging from zero to high) which the individual uses in making a decision, the certainty of this knowledge (from zero to high), and the urgency of the important decisions to be made by the individual on the basis of the knowledge (ranging from zero to maximum). For our purposes, the relationships are portrayed as in the Figure.

Consider first the relationship between the urgency of decisionmaking and the certainty of the knowledge upon which that decision is made (UU' in the Figure). As drawn, the most urgent decisions are those for which little or no certain knowledge exists; on the other hand, important decisions are in some sense always urgent, no matter how certain the knowledge is on which they are based (i.e., UU' tapers asymptotically to the right). Consider next the relationship between the obsolescence of knowledge and the certainty of that information (OO' in the Figure). As drawn, increased knowledge is rarely obsolete, when overall certainty is low; in these instances, what little knowledge the individual gains is timely and salient. On the other hand, there is a point at which the more certain the knowledge, the more likely the information has become mundane, widely known and of little further use. In short, the more uncertain the information, the more that the decision to be made is an urgent one requiring up-to-date knowledge; while the more certain the knowledge, the more likely that this information has lost its currency. Obviously, actual relationships vary empirically.

Where UU' and OO' cross yields three values relevant to the decisionmaker acting in the face of complexity: U*, O* and C*. The values reflect the only point where the individual's sense of urgency intersects her perception of the obsolescence of the knowledge upon which her decision is made. It is here (at D in the Figure) where the individual is most comfortable in making decisions. In banal terms, the three values illustrate that the decisionmaker: avoids taking the most urgent decisions, recognizes that such decisions have to be taken in the face of uncertainty, and acknowledges that some decisions are based on knowledge that is already well out-of-date. Such is the essence of policy incompleteness.

Less banal, the Figure explains why decisionmakers are always ready to convert policy decisions into bureaucratic ones. The most important decisions are all too often those of high urgency, requiring timely knowledge in the face of an action-forcing uncertainty--that is, they require even more fastthinking than is actually going on! Diagrammatically, this situation reflects the decision space to the left of the intersection of UU' and OO'. The gap to the right> of D is also interesting. The same process that transforms policy into bureaucracy also ensures that the decisions to be taken are: still more urgent than others, less mundane than they could be, and based on knowledge that is more uncertain than other information-based decisions. Bureaucratizing issues becomes the way individuals resist trivializing those issues even further. It is a way of finding and giving meaning to that which is necessarily incomplete around us. Or to put it differently, even administration is a kind of fastthinking, at least compared to its alternative on the right.

Now step back from the Figure and consider what is frequently recommended as the ideal for deliberative problem-solving. In the best of worlds, the most urgent decisions should be taken on the basis of the most certain and least obsolete knowledge available. That is, imagine the same curves as in the Figure, but reversed in their designation: (1) The upward sloping OO' now measures the ideal relationship between certainty of knowledge and the urgency of important decisions (i.e., the two are positively related), while (2) the downward sloping UU' now measures the ideal relationship between certainty of knowledge and the obsolescence of that knowledge (i.e., the two are negatively related). Even if the shapes of the curves were slightly different or the vertical axes flipped, the main conclusion would be the same, however: The intersection of the two curves remains at or close to D, leading to a set of associated values near to, if not actually, U*, O* and C*. Deliberation and fastthinking, that is, may well have virtually the same endpoints.

Nor is it difficult to see how this may be the case. Consensus-building deliberations are no guarantee against mistakes, when such exercises encourage "group-think" and discourage healthy skepticism. Whether just-in-time thinking or thinking-to-take-time, the stuff of our thinking--knowledge that varies in certainty and obsolescence, decisions that vary in urgency--is by and large consensual, not individual, in nature. All of us who have worked for any time in fields as varied as administration and community development know many examples where thoughtful deliberations ultimately led to nothing substantially different by way of a final decision than what would have been the case in the absence of that deliberation. Deliberation or no, defense still ends up with the biggest share of the pie, successful poverty programs continue to be underfunded, and the environment remains prey to all kinds of elites--rich, technical and otherwise.

What to do? First, we must acknowledge the unavoidable trap of deliberation, i.e., the more incomplete the world, the more pressure for deliberation there is. Interruptions make deliberation next to impossible, yet it is because we are always being interrupted that we seek (an interruption-less) deliberation. Deliberation promises to give and find meaning in the same instant because it--better than policy narratives, triangulation or policy optics for that matter--holds out the promise of finishing the business at hand--to complete, in short, the incomplete. Thus, if interruptions and the desire for deliberation are not going to go away (i.e., if fastthinking is here to stay and full-blown deliberation is not really the answer), then the challenge is to encourage second thoughts in decisionmaking in ways that do not expect to discourage fastthinking or reduce interruptions. One way to do just that is to promote new takes on hitherto difficult or intractable problems. The chief feature of complexity is surprise, while the chief feature of incompleteness is interruption, and since the world is full of surprises and interruptions (often one and the same), so too should analysis itself be surprising and serve as an interruption to conventional ways of thinking. The surprising finding "interrupts" by attracting attention to itself; it can even make its own window of action, as fastthinkers decide to take a second look at what they had previously thought to be intractable, unpromising, or too time-consuming. How, then, to take a fresh look at difficult problems, such as the big-ticket items of poverty, defense and the environment, and to do this quickly? The answer here: policy optics that ensure counternarrative, case-by-case analysis.

Policy Optics and the Mailbox Dilemma

The fastthinker is adept at thinking counternarratively. If told a --> b --> c, can she think of a plausible scenario, either where (not-a) --> (not-b) --> c or where a --> b --> (not-c)? The virtue of counternarrative thinking is that, even if the rival hypothesis is not now the case, it still serves as a possible option for the future to the extent that it shown to be plausible. Options specification, in case it needs saying, is one of the key ways analysts find and give meaning in an incomplete policy world.

The fastthinker also understands that there are times when the most surprising analysis is one where the policy problem of interest can be evaluated on its own merits. At least five different criteria exist to evaluate any given policy: (1) in terms of whether its implementation achieved its stated objectives; (2) against some ideal, which the policy's objectives may or may not match; (3) against the implementation record of like policies; (4) in terms of the counterfactual, i.e., what would have happened had not the policy been in effect; and (5) in terms of whether savings could have realized if the policy had been more cost-effectively undertaken. Judging each case on its merits is deciding the mix of criteria and the weights to be assigned to each for the case in question. Moreover, multiple criteria exist to assess policies, but policies also result in evaluating the appropriateness of multiple criteria. When this too happens, the case is being analyzed on its own merits. Briefly put, everything has potential merit in an incomplete world; "deciding the weight of the evidence" is deciding which merits matter for the policy at hand. If you will, case-by-case analysis is one VERY IMPORTANT means of completing the incomplete, while at the same time acknowledging the uncertainty and complexity of the case in question.

The primary advantage of policy optics is that they directly address what I call "the mailbox dilemma" of policy analysis. This year I celebrate 30 years as a more on-again than off-again runner. One thing has continued to strike me over the many miles. Have you noticed just how mismatched most free-standing mailboxes are and the houses they stand in front of? The mailbox is old, rusting, flaked, chipped, falling apart, or nondescript, while the house behind is much more interesting and cared for. Many current policies about poverty, defense and the environment are just such mailboxes. They are shells in which we dutifully send and receive important messages (as well as a great deal of junk mail), but the policies scarcely reflect, let alone match, all the domestic life going on behind them. The policies we policy analysts are analyzing for our clients--be they policymakers or the public--are just as misleading as these mailboxes. They fail to reflect what is underway around them, and what is actually going on is frequently more interesting than our conventional recommendations would lead us and others to believe.

Which, to shift metaphors completely, is the primary virtue of a policy optic. Lenses and prisms not only let us see what we have not seen before, they put it in a different perspective. In this way, policy optics, like policy narratives and triangulation, are overt attempts to give and find meaning for a policy incompleteness that must be addressed anew. By starting with poverty, for example, who has not concluded that many problems are irresolvable? Solve one and a host of others are in the wings to overdetermine failure. In contrast, the urban ecosystem as policy optic casts a perspective on our urban landscape that is far less despairing than we have grown used to. In ecosystem management, restoration projects are central and valued. Even when wetlands are next to the freeway, restoring them and ensuring their connectivity has virtue in and of itself, since wetlands connectivity is part and parcel of the definition of a healthy ecosystem. So too restoring public safety by connecting neighborhood crime watch groups has merit in and of itself, where this improved public safety is an urban ecosystem service in exactly the same way> improved water quality is an ecosystem service we expect from wetlands. To argue that mobilizing neighborhood groups is a palliative that deals with symptoms rather than wider causes misses the basic point that, from an ecosystem perspective, restoration projects such as these are imperative because, without them, we could not have an urban ecosystem, healthy or otherwise. Policy optics do complete an incomplete policy world; rather their new perspectives hold out the possibility of starting something that can actually be finished.

There are other policy optics with which to recast poverty, defense and the environment so that they can be better handled once more, and the larger work of which this article is a part applies several. Here, however, I focus only on one. The urban ecosystem as a policy optic has the advantage of being both lens and prism at the same time, thereby adding considerable purchase to the analysis. Why focus on issues of poverty, defense and the environment? Because analysts know there is always room for radically rethinking these issues, notwithstanding the much good that has been written about them in the past. Finally, considerable attention is given below to drawing out the implications of the policy optic for the environment (particularly the urban environment), as these implications are central to undertaking the task of reconceiving poverty and defense.

The Urban Ecosystem as Policy Optic for Rethinking the Environment

A recent article on restoration ecology in Science> plotted the relation between the spatial scale of natural and human-made disasters (km2) and their estimated recovery time (in years). Its figure (reproduced on the next page) shows urbanization to be a worse disaster than oil spills, floods, modern agriculture or the blast of an atomic bomb, but not as bad as a massive meteor strike. This ranking, I submit, is not a helpful way to think of the urban environment. Nor for that matter is it meaningful or useful for restoration ecology.

As a policy optic, the urban environment as an ecosystem points the fastthinker to much that runs counter to conventional wisdom. Consider recent observations culled from the operation of an urban environmental project I helped design and manage:

Some of these points are well-known, others make sense when you think about them, some can be quibbled with (more plant biodiversity yes, native species no), and the list could be easily extended. But they all add up to an occasion for fastthinkers to take a second look at what is the urban environment. In our colleges of natural resources and the environment, we teach and encourage students to restore creeks, plant more trees, develop more community gardens, promote public transit, and reduce the litter around them. Yet when acting on these exhortations, teaching meets reality big-time.

Once the fastthinker starts with these seemingly counterintuitive findings and accepts just how incomplete our understanding is of these issues, she quickly realizes that, when it comes to cities, we have been dealing with the wrong ecology, the wrong ecosystem, the wrong management.

The Wrong Ecology>. Part of the problem is that much of current ecology and environmentalism stops where the city begins. Outside the city, we recommend self-sustaining ecosystems, whose functions and processes worked together before human settlement to correct for natural disturbances as they arose. These historical ecosystems are the template against which we seek to restore the human-altered landscape of forests, crops and prairies.

Once we move inside the city limits, the notion of a self-correcting ecosystem melts away. Self-sustaining ecosystems are not possible in most, perhaps all, urban areas. There is no "there" there to mimic the presettlement past. In point of fact, urban ecosystems are those where people make the difference--not "a" difference, nor necessarily a bad difference, but the> difference. You cannot have an urban ecosystem without people, and fastthinkers working on this topic need an ecology and environmentalism that reflect this basic point of departure.

What would such an ecology look like? It starts with ecology’s keystone of diversity (a.k.a. complexity) without which, ecologists tell us, you cannot have a healthy ecosystem. Diversity here is not restricted to the number of species in any given ecosystem; complexity, remember, also includes degree of differentiation and interdependence of species, not just their number. Ecologists tell us that diversity in species composition--that is, the number of different types of species combined with just which types these are--may well matter even more to the operation of ecosystem functions and services (e.g., plant productivity) than the sheer number of species, other things being equal. At the same time, the resilience of an ecosystem can be enhanced when species that are similar to one another in their effects on ecosystem processes differ in their response to the environment, i.e., any decrease in the abundance of one species would be compensated by increases and responses in the other functionally similar species.

It is precisely this kind of diversity--in composition and response--that provides such an important part of the resilience we expect from the urban environment. Indeed, this diversity combined with the fragmentary (incompleteness) and openendness (uncertainty) of urban living are so much part and parcel of the city and town life that one might well want to call the combination by its other name--cosmopolitanism. Which is not so surprising, as cosmopolitanism is where city people make not just a difference, but the> difference. Those odds and ends (that add up to a dynamics more than the sum of its parts) of conversations, restaurant meals, walks, parks, gatherings, and the sidewalk alive with people around--in a phrase, street life--all work to make the urban ecosystem pre-eminently cosmopolitan. While the urban ecosystem at its best can never be self-sustaining in the presettlement sense, it can be "self"-sustaining nonetheless.

The Wrong Ecosystem. >I am in a car with an engineer and ecologist, who are talking about the indicator study we are on our way to propose to officials in Sacramento. At one point, the conversation goes something like this:

Thus, the crux of the matter: What makes an ecosystem complete? What are the components without which we would not have an urban ecosystem, let alone a healthy one with integrity? Or to frame it more specifically in this article’s terminology, what kind of urban ecosystem do fastthinkers see when they look through it as an lens that brings components closer and a prism that parses components differently?

What they see can be described counternarratively. For purposes here, counternarrative thinking can best be thought of in the formal terms of the semiotic square. The principle underlying the semiotic square is that a term is defined by what it is not, specifically its contraries and contradictories. Any term, x>, is defined both by what runs against it, as in anti-x>, as well as by what x> or anti-x> are not, as in the positions "neither x> nor anti-x>" or "both x> and anti-x>." More formally, the x>/anti-x> contraposition denotes a specific relationship, while the contraposition, neither x >nor anti-x>/both x> and anti-x>, denote a general one.

fastthinkers are adept in using such algorithms, and the semiotic square is particularly useful in addressing just what is this urban ecosystem on which we should be focusing and what are the implications of this ecosystem for our understanding of the environment generally. Almost any contemporary environmental text would do for an application of the semiotic square, but start with one of the more thoughtful pieces, "The Trouble With Wilderness," by William Cronon, one our best environmental historians. In practice, a fastthinker would undertake the following very quickly, jumping from conclusion to conclusion in a matter of minutes. An article, like this one dedicated to making the connections, takes longer.

Cronon sets out to critique the foundations of contemporary American environmentalism. His is a broad canvas--only part of the picture deals with the urban--and his analysis teems with opposites:

Start where Cronon begins his analysis: take civilization and its cognates and shuttle them through the poles of the semiotic square: civilized> (human); savage> (anti-civilized, inhuman as when Cronon writes, "Seen as the frontier, [wilderness] is a savage world at the dawn of civilization"); both civilized and savage>; and neither civilized nor savage>. In Cronon’s analysis, the term "neither civilized nor savage" was the original denotation of "wilderness," i.e., deserted, desolate, raw, untouched by human hand, be that hand savage or civilized: "a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling," where "the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was ‘bewilderment’--or terror." Briefly, the dyad of "civilized" and "savage" specifically denotes which human beings one is talking about, while the dyad of "both civilized and savage" and "neither civilized nor savage" denotes more generally whether one is talking about human beings or not.

Having started with civilization, Cronon moves to how wilderness itself became a priority in the American setting. Here is where Cronon introduces the urban. Take wilderness and shuttle that term through its polar opposites: wilderness>(one kind of human relationship); urban-industrial> (the opposite kind of human relationship as when Cronon writes, "[Wilderness] is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can escape from our too-muchness"); both wilderness and urban-industrial>; and neither wilderness nor urban-industrial>. In Cronon’s analysis, the dyad, "wilderness" and "urban-industrial," denotes specifically which human creation one is talking about (remember, Cronon believes wilderness is decidedly a human creation as much as cities are), while the dyad, "both wilderness and urban-industrial" and "neither wilderness or urban-industrial," denotes more generally whether one is talking about human creations or not. Pace> the earlier "neither savage nor civilized," the "neither wilderness nor urban-industrial" is itself a place of terror, only this time it is the vast unknowability and endlessness of outer space that we look upon as the landscape outside human creation.

Having dealt with wilderness, Cronon moves to contemporary American environmentalism particularly. Once again, start with his key term, in this case "environmentalism" (for him, an all-inclusive term not at all restricted to urban issues), and cycle it though the square: environmentalism>; anti-environmentalism>; both> environmentalism> and> anti-environmentalism>; and neither environmentalism nor anti-environmentalism>. Here the myriad environmental groups, e.g., EPA, EDF and the like, are set in opposition to and opposed by the myriad anti-environmental advocates drawn from business, industry and private property groups, among others. Each opponent says it is the best steward for the resource, wherever it is, or knows what is the best stewardship policy to follow. Thus, the dyad, "environmentalism" and "anti-environmentalism," denotes specifically which steward of what resource one is taking about, while the dyad of "both environmentalism and anti-environmentalism" and "neither environmentalism nor anti-environmentalism" denotes more generally whether is talking about resource stewardship at all.

Look now where this analysis has led with respect to understanding environmentalism generally and its underlying assumptions. (fastthinkers would have gotten here long ago!) In the first round of our semiotic shuttle, we ended up with humans, then we shuttled our way to what humans create, and now we are at something much more specific, namely, one human value--stewardship--among the many other things humans have created for themselves. Yet, as we have gotten more and more humanly specific, the endpoint has become more and more inhumanly imperialistic in the focus on stewardship of a resource that could be anywhere. The vast, unknowable regions of outer space, once and still the source of existential dread for many, is now within reach of the panoptic gaze of the self-appointed who, simply by stopping a rocket or satellite from leaving earth, is "stewarding" outer space for the rest of us. Nothing unknowable and nonhuman need leave us in fear and trembling, because there is nothing that we cannot manage, or at least manage better, from this microscopic spit of sand in this limitless universe--because there is nothing that we are not responsible for stewarding, nothing, anywhere, no matter how far away. The universe has become Our Ecosystem to steward. The more specific we have become in the analysis, the more generally overweening has become our ambition. Now that> is terrifying.

But that is not the end of the analysis. The urban needs to be fleshed out much more explicitly than Cronon has done. The first paragraph of his article talks about "urban" in opposition to wilderness. Let us then start with that term and shuttle it through the poles: urban>, rural> (anti-urban, as in countryside or agriculture), both rural and urban>, neither rural nor urban>. Except for the odd reference to "country folk" and the like, Cronon is strangely silent on the contraposition of rural agriculture and urban cities, spending much more time on the opposition of urban and wilderness. Wilderness still remains, at least in the term "neither rural nor urban," but in a way that Cronon does not seem fully to appreciate. For, while "urban" and "rural" are human creations in the way that Cronon argues "wilderness" is, in reality wilderness is not that kind of creation, or at least not like that of rural agriculture or urban cities. Wilderness is neither rural nor urban: Humans build and maintain the definitional fence separating cities and agriculture from the wilderness, but that does not mean that which falls on one side of the fence--town and country--is the same kind of creation as that which falls on the other side of the fence--the wild. They are different. We do not manage wilderness in the same way we manage streets and crops. So too for the wilderness that is the rest of the--not Our--universe.

Which leads us to where the fastthinker has long gotten to, namely, the answer to what kind of urban ecosystem are we seeing when looking through the optic of the urban ecosystem. The urban ecosystem--and by implication, urban environmental policy--must perforce be managed within a regional context, not simply because of wider system effects at work, but because it is only at the regional level that you can manage agriculture and protect wilderness as well, on the principle that policies for urban, rural and wilderness define themselves each by being what the others are not. Otherwise the urban ecosystem remains permanently incomplete. Cosmopolitan and urbane the ecosystem may be, but never outside a wider management context that counts equally. And, in case it needs repeating, there is nothing quite as corrective an enema for imperialist delusions of grandeur than having to work on urban environmental issues within a regional context.

Which leads us to management.

The Wrong Management. >The urban ecosystem is a wonderful lens that quickly magnifies the nature and role of learning in managing ecosystems. Much has been made of the role of adaptive management in addressing ecosystem diversity. Adaptive management is learning how to manage ecosystem functions, processes and services through an incremental and iterative process of experimentation, re-experimentation, continuous hypothesis-testing, feedback, and gradual trial and error. But there is a problem with this kind of management, which becomes patently clear when the unit and level of analysis is the urban ecosystem. You cannot experiment with humans like that, and urban ecosystems are nothing without people. Again, urban ecosystems are where people make the> difference, and, if fastthinking has any message, it is that people increasingly do not give you a second, third, fourth chance to "get it right".

Instead, a different kind of management is required, one that allows learning to take place without the first error becoming the last catastrophic trial. Such learning is possible, at least for institutions that have been called "high reliability organizations" (HROs). Fortunately, HROs are found throughout urban areas, in activities such as air traffic control systems, hospital intensive care units, and utility companies. Unfortunately, adaptive management and learning in HROs may be contradictory. Indeed, if we were to follow the dictates of adaptive management, we would run the risk of destroying the kind of learning we need to manage urban ecosystems better.

High reliability in institutions comes from high technical competence in the face of extremely complex activities, requires sustained high levels of performance, oversight and flexibility, is constantly focused on the search for improvements, maintains great pressures, incentives and expectations for safety while at the same time meeting peakload production requirements, and creates a virtual culture of reliability predicated on maintaining activities in a very safe fashion without testing the limits of trial and error. For our purposes, nine interrelated features can be culled from the literature as distinguishing high reliability institutions and their management of activities, and each is worth identifying, however briefly:

By this point, it should be clear why adaptive ecosystem management could actually undermine the kind of high reliability needed for managing those urban ecosystems that are so inescapably tied to the real human beings who live and work in their midst.

While safety may well be a concern of the scientists and managers involved in adaptive management, in no way have these operators been recruited, trained, indoctrinated, and continually monitored to ensure that safety and reliability are their number one priority. While the scientists involved in adaptive management may have some management skills, in no way have they been professionally trained to be technically competent, high performing managers committed both to high production and high safety at the same time. While the scientists in adaptive management may at times see their management as intrinsically tied to politics and a turbulent task environment, they have almost all been trained to separate science from politics, the technical from the social, and the organizational from the technological. While the scientists involved in adaptive management well understand the integrity of their research design, in practice they frequently trade-off design considerations in the face of declining budgets and research support. While the scientists and managers may well be professionally committed to adaptive management, they frequently do not live and work in the areas were it is practiced. And while scientists and managers in adaptive management understand the risks associated with trial and error, they all have been trained to see the primary virtue of adaptive management to be the ability to reject or not reject the null hypothesis, that is, to risk and actually accept failure as the chief way to learn about the system of interest. In this fashion, adaptive management is kind of damage control in the face of world just known incompletely, whereas high reliability management seeks to ensure no damage in the first place, because the world is too dangerous to be left just incompletely known.

Accordingly, if fastthinking is here to stay, better the fastthinkers be wedded to a HRO that enforces decisionmaking based on constant monitoring of the best information available than to an adaptive management framework which is, if anything, willing to accept failure in meeting peakload requirements safely. High reliability institutions put a premium on decisive actions taken very quickly with little chance of review, but at least such fastthinking takes place in an organization where these decisions have to produce results reliably and safely.

In short, urban ecosystems require high reliability--not adaptive--management precisely because of the public safety items like those bulleted at the outset of this section. Vacant lots should be safe for community gardens; trees should be safely secured; creeks should be safe for recreating; litter clean-ups should be safe for people undertaking them; reliable mass transit should be safely available to everyone, including the poor, young and elderly; the streets, and not just libraries, should be safe for kids--and all of this, and more, should be defended.

Which leads us to defense.

The Urban Ecosystem as Policy Optic for Rethinking Defense

Nothing would seem further away from the urban ecosystem than US defense policy. Yet it is but one step from recommending our troops be sent to Latin America to aid environmental projects, as one former high state department official recently did for protecting rainforests in Central and South America, to recommending that equivalent forces and resources be used in our cities where the environmental priorities for many are already public safety ones. Defense and the environment merge in an urban ecosystem perspective, when the service we seek from that ecosystem is a level of public safety for the times and cities in which we live.

To see how, consider the Department of Defense, which has undertaken a massive base closure exercise in the greater San Francisco Bay area where my home is. The stated aim is to convert the bases for civilian uses, but that is the wrong way to think of what is going on. The urban ecosystem service of public safety does not distinguish between civilian and military. Just as the Boeings of the world are adapting to the post-Cold War by merging the civil and military sides of production (where technologies and methods of civil aircraft production are applied to its military aircraft production and vice versa), so too can current national policy be seen as the explicit merging of the defense operations (the bases) with the operations of a civilian sector (commercial, industrial, manufacturing) that it has long been part of anyway.

What does this mean, practically? fastthinking as case-by-case analysis becomes possible for four reasons when defense is magnified through the lens of the urban environment. First, the Department of Defense has been spending increasing resources on military operations other than war, such as peace-keeping, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance missions--activities which have included, among others, urban trash detail in Cap Haitien and policing the streets of Mogadishu. Second, defense analysts have identified one key US national security challenge to be the deterioration of the global environment--and urbanization is arguably this planet’s most important global change. Third, DoD is under considerable pressure to move to smaller, rapidly deployable units equipped with advanced weaponry and telecommunication systems able to respond quickly by moving "into the storm’s eye" and out again, i.e., to tailor rapid response to the demands of each case.

Fourth and relatedly, The Economist>, in "The Future of Warfare," addresses three recent technological advances in military affairs:

This is dangerous hype, when the illusion created is that these developments auger an error-free, digital linking of every weapon system in battlespace for real-time synchronization, response and recovery in combat. What these advances in rapid gathering, processing and acting on intelligence do auger, however, is that the military is in a better position to treat each case of strike on its merits. Indeed, one of the grand strategies currently competing for the attention of the US military is, according to Posen and Ross, "selective engagement," where the "responsible practice of selective engagement will...require considerable case-by-case analysis". Such selective engagement is precisely the approach to be promoted in an urban environmentalism that recognizes the answers to making vacant lots safe for gardening, trees safe for sidewalks, creeks safe for daylighting, litter safe for removal, and public transport reliable for all its users will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, if there are to be answers at all.

What does this all mean? One example will have to suffice. A good instance of selective engagement through rapidly deployable units would be what has been called "place-specific crime prevention." As the term indicates, changes in the physical environment, namely, increased access control (e.g., locked doors and gates), screening (e.g., metal detectors), and use of surveillance devices (e.g., video cameras), are tailored to meet the special features of a given neighborhood, community or residential complex to prevent or otherwise reduce crime in their facility/vicinity. Imagine the DoD contracting out its services (or using its budget to hire independent contractors) to work with willing neighborhoods to design and implement place-specific crime prevention programs, selectively, rapidly, instance-by-instance. Participating neighborhoods would invite in DoD contractors to customize a place-specific initiative that would work hand-in-hand with the neighborhood’s crime watches and home alerts on activities such as introduction of alarm systems, motion detectors, resident vehicle registration, street flow alterations, rapid security repairs, enhanced night-lighting, and other mechanisms to achieve what has been called "defensible spaces". Who needs to send in the troops, when the Army could initiate an "adopt-a-neighborhood" program?

Other examples are available, but the point is the same: Think counternarratively as the way of thinking case-by-case. Can we imagine all kinds of urban place-specific programs (and not just for crime prevention) whose very precondition for success would be the involvement of the staff and resources of the Department of Defense? Just as there are no straight lines or right angles in nature, so too does the diversity, uncertainty and incompleteness (a.k.a. the dynamics) of the urban ecosystem allows no once-and-for-all generalities within, let alone across, ecosystems. Indeed, a defining trait of cosmopolitanism is this ability to tolerate interventions that must be judged on their own merits--a trait, by the way, never more required than when having to operate within the regional context recommended earlier.

The Urban Ecosystem as Policy Optic for Rethinking Poverty

No single policy optic can hope to recast poverty in a totally fresh light. The urban ecosystem, nonetheless, parses poverty in ways that command a new look at some important issues, including that of race.

One uninteresting feature of urban ecosystems is that they have victims. The loss of biodiversity and species extinction are highly significant issues in contemporary ecology, but they have greater salience in ecosystems outside the city limits, such as rainforests and arid and semi-arid rangelands. Ecosystems are complex, incomplete and uncertain, and urban ecosystems are very> dynamic in this way, because humans are such a fundamental part of them. In these ecosystems, the language of victims and victimizers necessarily becomes tangled, where, as Herbert Simon reminded us long ago, the question, "'Who really> makes the decision?'...is meaningless--a complex decision is like a great river, drawing from many of its tributaries the innumerable component premises of which it is constituted. Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision. . ." Processes are dynamic, and no process entangles the notion of victimization more than poverty and its muddied genesis on the American scene.

At its most basic level, poverty is complex, uncertain and unfinished precisely because causality is unclearly interrelated in important respects, i.e., significant elements of the process are unseen, little recognized, and even less understood. Remember the Newsweek> and Time> cover pictures of O.J. Simpson after his arrest? What should have been on the cover was the picture of the anonymous one out of every two urban black males, between the ages of 18 and 35, who is not in some way enmeshed in the criminal justice system. Here would be someone who against very high odds is making it. The fact that he is not on such a magazine cover, let alone would anyone scarcely ever think of putting him there, speaks volumes about race relations in this country. That this matters at all is largely a function of the premium the urban ecosystem puts on a cosmopolitanism so at odds with such unquestioned, widespread racism.

In case one thinks the preceding is extreme, consider the example of the political philosopher, Jon Elster. Elster finds that blacks are underrepresented among organ donors, noting: "The low rate of donation is due mainly to the reluctance of relatives to give their permission to recover an organ that could be used for transplantation. The reluctance has several causes, one of them being a belief that the organs are mainly going to white patients".

So this is how bad it's gotten. Denying their organs to whites is one of the few acts of legal resistance blacks had left. . . I reread Elster’s paragraph and then took in the footnote. It referred to an article that found black and Latino refusal rates were more than twice the refusal rate of the white population in the survey area. I went to the article to find out why, but no luck--just numbers. I tracked down one of the footnoted authors and gave him a call. Was it true, I asked, about blacks refusing? Oh God, he said, let me send you the findings. A couple of days later the packet arrived, thick with photocopies. What the research finds is this:

There is a world of difference, I submit, between black donors refusing to donate their organs unless they go to other blacks and their refusing because the organs would most likely go to whites. Love of one's race is not necessarily hatred of the Other. Some refuse for the reason Elster gives, but more seem not to. What this example shows is just how misleading even the best can be when it comes to race. We are simply too quick to believe the worst in people we do not know--which is precisely the occupational hazard of fastthinking when it comes to issues of poverty generally.

It is fairly easy to find evidence counter to the media narrative. According to a respected researcher in the area, James Wright:

If homelessness is more complex than the media narrative, what then explains the narrative's popularity? The short answer is: The media narrative stabilizes the assumptions for decisionmaking in the face of admitted complexity. Homelessness is genuinely complex, uncertain and incompletely understood, and one way to articulate and make sense of the dynamics at work is to tell scenarios that enable us to take decisions notwithstanding. Indeed, pressure to generate a narrative about homelessness is a direct function of how it is experienced. The more complex, uncertain and incomplete things seem everywhere--"They say it's black mothers who are the homeless, but all I see are street crazies"--the greater the demand for uniform approaches for dealing with the matter.

Since popular understanding of homelessness is by and large scripted by a pre-existing media narrative, the issue of what to do about homelessness is pre-empted by a prior question for the fastthinker: What would it take to revise or displace the media narrative altogether? More especially, how can we bring urban ecosystem dynamics into the narrative and still make it stabilizing? If that is not possible, how then to subvert it?

Appealing to facts will not help. The more dynamic the issue is shown to be, the more pressure to keep something like the media narrative as the basis for decisionmaking. As for more research, it seems only to certify the problem's intractability and the perception that "hard problems without any real answers" are the order of the day. Yet the media narrative is no better, as it inverts the problem: You feel the issue has to be more difficult than the narrative makes it, but it is easy to understand why people want the simpler scenario.

The question of how to revise the media narrative in more useful ways means the fastthinker must bring a diversity, uncertainty and incompleteness that are ultimately stabilizing into the narrative, and the quickest way to do that is to think counternarratively. If plot is "what becomes of story when its internal relations grow complicated," as Frank Kermode tells us, then the homelessness narrative needs more plot. In the same way, if the "I" and "you" in a poem are a kind of impersonalization, then personalizing homelessness means undermining the stock-I of the media narrative. The most obvious complication is developing a counternarrative where homelessness is a precondition for happiness. That is, can we imagine a homelessness that does not focus on "its victims" first? By telling and showing the story of one particular family, the adult members of which at times counternarratively "wanted" to be homeless, the photojournalist Herman LeRoy Emmet and his strong book, Fruit Tramps>, make being homeless much more immediate and understandable. The book’s upsetting first pictures give way to a more nuanced understanding of this family, where subsequent photographs portray a life that is complex, open-ended and unfinished and because it is dynamic in this way, it has the unexpected, in sharp contrast to a media narrative whose most notable feature is being devoid of surprises altogether.

Counternarratives are essential in subverting the media narrative. Instead of focusing, as does the media's scenario, on events leading up to homelessness--returning Vietnam vets, deinstitutionalization, New Class cutbacks--homelessness can be counterrepresented by, say, a video of a day-in-the-life of any> homeless person. The nameless individual is chosen not because s/he is representative of the broader homeless population. After all, how can any individual "represent" a dynamic issue, circumscribed as this one is on all sides by so many other issues? Rather, s/he is chosen because the activities of any homeless person are an alternate version of the activities of any other person living homeless. While each case of homelessness is nongeneralizable, any case of homelessness embodies the arbitrary contingency of the dynamics that defines homelessness, case-by-case.

Focusing on the highly personalized contingency and arbitrariness of homelessness has profound implications for analyzing and making policy recommendations. Foremost, the fastthinking must be ex ante, not ex post. Consider that argument in favor of applying neoclassical microeconomics to issues such as homelessness made most forcefully by Nobel economist, Gary Becker: "The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach as I see it." The analysis being privileged is ex post facto: At best, it is only after taking a decision that one can find out if output has been maximized, the market was in equilibrium, and preferences were stable. The problem is that this approach allows the "mechanical, arithmetical and hydraulic aspects [of economic analysis] to appear dominant and alone interesting, instead of inviting attention to the whole landscape of ideas implicit in ex ante: the freedom of conjecture, the presence of a void requiring to be filled, the sources and manifold rivalries and conflicts of suggestion concerning the filling, the whole matter of uncertain expectation," in the words of that very different economist, G.L.S. Shackle.

For Shackle, uncertainty, incompletion and the manifold diversity underlying experience are unavoidable. Since the future is dynamic, probability and prediction offer little to decisionmakers in deciding what to do about homelessness or other issues of poverty, defense and the environment. They instead must rely on imagination and inspiration in formulating competing hypotheses for decisionmaking.

The media's homelessness narrative is a pluperfect specimen of the ex post approach to analysis, where we act as if we knew beforehand all there was to know about homelessness, even though at every point evidence can be brought counter to the dominant media narrative. What is required instead is an ex ante approach to analysis for making decisions about a homelessness--and for a poverty--we know to be tangled and not easily summarized. For the fastthinker, the ex ante approach means that, if you want to know more about homelessness, then tie analysis to implementation. Instead of treating "research" as a necessary preliminary for program development (akin to the message-in-the-bottle toss), the ex ante approach means making this analysis part and parcel of actual program implementation. First start programs to help the homeless, eventhough one may not really know who they are and their real problems, or focus on programs that already exist to help the many different homeless--eventhough they obviously deal only with part of the picture--and only thereafter ensure the program is redesigned in light of ongoing monitoring and evaluation. Start, in other words, with incompleteness as a virtue, as the very precondition for program success. fastthinkers certainly do not have the answers to homelessness--in fact, homelessness is the answer for some people, even the best answer. That said, the most effective way to determine if we are in a position to do something about homelessness--as well as any issue of poverty--is to see how well relevant programs can be redesigned in light of what they are learning about homelessness. (And remember the learning should be high reliability in nature, not conventional trial and error, since we are dealing with people who matter here.)

Conclusion in Two Parts

What this all adds up to for the fastthinking policy analyst can be put briefly>: For fastthinkers, the urban ecosystem begins in the middle of the street. Moreover, the street-level ecology of interest is the one that traces the ecosystem service in greatest jeopardy, public safety, where the overlap in poverty, defense and the environment is the most visible. Starting in the middle of the road, you move across the lanes, to the curbs, then curbside, across the sidewalks, over the fence or wall, onto the yards, into the residences, through the rooms, and out into the back and beyond. In so moving you trace a transect that varies case by case, but may include elements of the following when public safety is at its greatest risk: traffic that is too fast and in the wrong kind of car; lanes that are poorly maintained or used by buses whose fares are too high, stops too few, and hours of operation even more restrictive; parked cars that are abandoned, used for drug drops, or in various states of disrepair; a curbside strip of old litter, few streetlights and even fewer good street trees; sidewalks that are buckling and street corners taken over by worse; fences or walls that have seen better days; yards that are even more littered and uncared for; residences whose rooms are scarred by indoor contamination, energy inefficiencies, family problems and the scabs of American consumerism; and gardens too toxic to grow anything to eat and creeks, parks or other public spaces where safety is the key issue. Again, each transect will vary, and we should be doubly chary of generalizing a string of negatives into a single narrative about public safety-as-poverty-defense-and-the-environment-together. What is missing, of course, are the concatenated positives to be found along transects that come from neighborhood collaboration and action to improve public safety, e.g., putting speed bumps across the road, hauling away abandoned cars, educating people about the harm of pouring lubricants down city drains, lobbying the city for more streetlights and street trees, coming out on the weekend for litter clean-ups along the street and yards, making residences more secure against break-ins, testing for indoor contamination, keeping families together who have a sense of community and see themselves as no more victims than the rest of us, and making public spaces safer for everyone.

Any transect, however, is only half of street-level ecology. We have to move further out and upwards as well. For the street and its ecology of public safety live in at least three places at once--on site, in the city, and within the region--which seal the street’s cosmopolitanism. When residents are actually on the street, they are keenly aware of the physical condition and the safety of that street and its adjacent environs. In the city, how that street and its surroundings are managed in terms of safety is affected by a host of factors, including city budgets and personnel, nearby neighborhoods, and the demographic changes citywide. The-street-within-the-region also looms large, where regional patterns and trends in transportation, employment and business, the changing quality of life, shifting rural/urban interfaces, and environmental resource use often have tightly-coupled impacts on the street and its adjacent surroundings. Other more loosely coupled connections to the state, nation, and the international are also palpable, but only add to the textured density of the street life in question.

Tracing the lineaments of street-level ecology through to the region is to identify where and how contemporary poverty, defense and the environment can be treated as a whole. None of this, I believe, would be evident or at least as evident, were it not for the policy optic of the urban ecosystem. Just as in ecosystem management, the ecology of the urban ecosystem privileges restoration projects that conserve, restore and privilege public safety (the ecosystem service) and cosmopolitanism (ecosystem diversity, uncertainty and incompleteness) for the urban environment. Wherever projects for the restoration and preservation of public safety and the urban lifestyle begin, they end up around and part of street life. Libraries staying open longer may keep kids safer, but public safety of the street must be directly addressed, the lack of which is driving them indoors. In contrast and to take but one of many examples, restoring public safety and a sense of shared urban living by supporting and connecting different neighborhood crime watch and home alert groups across town has considerably more merit from an ecosystem perspective, as urban ecosystem health is defined precisely in terms of such connectivity. That said, we also know from an urban ecosystem perspective that restoration projects will have to be judged on their own merits in ensuring the ecosystem continues to have the requisite diversity for the highly reliable flow of ecosystem services.

Some will find the policy implications unsettling. From the perspective of the policy optic, all restoration projects are small (there is too much going on for even big-ticket items to be otherwise), national defense is an oxymoron (the urban ecosystem begins in the neighborhood, where poverty, defense and the environment merge as public safety), poverty is not about victims but rather the precondition for public safety carried on by other means, and the environment is not at all what most of us thought it was. fastthinkers, on the other hand, may well find these results promising. There are no big, systemic remedies for poverty, defense and the environment. You can begin on any city street and take any transect. The urban ecosystem and its ecology are far too dynamic to generalize from or beyond. We start with street life or we don’t start at all. That’s where the action is, and it is all over the place.

A final word about policy optics.> Very little of the above has relied on the work of those professionals and scholars who have worked long and hard on issues of poverty, defense and environment. Yet, current writing about these topics is dominated by these experts, and with what seems to be good reason. Just look at what happens when you choose to write without reference to experts.

My library copy of Andrew Ross’ Strange Weather >has the following sentence underlined by a previous reader: "Ecologists have drawn attention to the environmental contexts that fall outside of the mechanistic purview of the scientific world-view." Off in the margin is scrawled: "Ecology is> a science, you moron." Ross makes quite a virtue of his ignorance. "This book," he writes, "is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them." Well, yes, his book is certainly that.

William Chaloupka, another culture critic, wrote Knowing Nukes>, a book about nuclear weapons, without reference whatsoever to the literature produced by nuclear weapons analysts and theorists. His cultivated ignorance leads him to endorse the argument that so-called "smart" weapons have made soldiers obsolete in modern warfare:

The argument, however, is wrong. Indeed, it is exactly opposite of what has occurred. Take the Gulf War. Many people believe that "continuing the trend toward a high-tech military using primarily 'smart' weapons will allow the United States to fight and win with minimal U.S. casualties," according to defense analysts, Gene Rochlin and Chris Demchak. What the Gulf War actually demonstrates, in their view, is the "necessity for establishing and maintaining an immense social organization in order to provide the degree of support necessary for effective use of the newer weapons". They go on to argue:

In other words, not only is Chaloupka wrong, but if we believed him, we would likely increase> the chances of lives lost in the next "smart" war.

Do such examples mean then that we cannot say anything useful about poverty, defense and the environment, unless we resort to what the experts say first? Policy optics, I believe, offer a third way between expertise and silence, by enabling us--and not just fastthinkers--to say something significant that even the experts have by and large missed to date. Policy optics, be they lenses or prisms, are issues that recast the familiarly intractable into the unfamiliarly more tractable. Obviously, not all issues are good policy optics; moreover, what sets the good policy optic apart from the expert’s advice is crucial: The former brings new> information to bear on old problems; the latter all too often brings only more> information.

The latter distinction is an old one. In an earlier era, George Scialabba reminds us, public intellectuals were important because they had better information than their opponents. Today, almost everyone in this country seems better informed than before. The more we have learned, the fewer public intellectuals we have needed and, thus, the fewer to be found. Accordingly, if public intellectuals are to matter today--and I include fastthinking policy analysts in their number--they require new information. One important source of that information is specialization, and policy optics, like that of the urban ecosystem, are effective examples of specialized perspectives that work to make the old new.

Specialization>? Aren’t we talking the demise of the public intellectual because of specialization? Specialization is the problem, not the solution, right? If any doubt this, just look at all those one-handed experts! Brian McCrea puts it this way: "A paradox of professionalization is that as a field narrows, it generates nearly an infinity of issues and controversies". But when infinity meets infinity, there's bound to be overlap. It would be better to say of today's fastthinking policy analysts what Tom Driberg once recommended for fastthinking journalists: "A columnist," Driberg wrote, "must be interested in a large variety of special subjects. The real secret is not to appeal to the majority but to appeal to as large a number of minorities as possible>. This will in effect get you a majority readership." "It...is not specialization itself that occasions problems," the literary critic, Gerald Graff, attests, "so much as the failure to bring specializations into relation with one another in any planned way." One such "planned" way, and the one I strongly commend to the reader, is the policy optic that enables a second look where it is needed.

That said, second thoughts should never be confused with second chances. Whether it is rapid-fire fastthinking or deliberative problem-solving, they amount to the same thing on the dimension that matters--the former puts a premium on thinking as a way of taking action, the latter places its premium on thinking before taking action. Either way, thinking is what counts, and that is no small matter, even when (especially because?) this thinking counts for so little today.