View From the Bridge: Our vulnerabilities

This past December, the Shelter Island Reporter invited me to participate in a community forum on local vulnerabilities. I addressed several issues facing Shelter Island, including wildfires, but I also diverged to discuss what I called “existential vulnerabilities.” I used this term to describe threats that arise not from natural disasters, but from human-made systems and decisions.

Over time, similar ideas have appeared under different names. Some scholars describe them as “societal entropy,” borrowing from thermodynamics to suggest that all systems degrade into irreversible disorder. Others refer to “American inertia,” a phrase used by The New York Times to describe the inability to repair critical infrastructure. I use existential vulnerabilities to mean systemic, structural, or technological weaknesses that, once triggered, could cause irreversible societal collapse, or permanently foreclose a desirable future.

Unlike routine crises — economic downturns, storms, or even wars — these vulnerabilities threaten the foundations of civilization itself, whether globally, nationally, or locally. A simple maritime analogy may help. Operating a ship by radar alone in dense fog is a vulnerability familiar to every mariner. It is dangerous, but it is a natural condition. A trained helmsman knows the protocol: if another vessel’s bearing remains steady while the range closes, you turn to starboard to avoid collision, trusting the other vessel will do the same.

The situation becomes existential when the helmsman is poorly trained or panics. At that point, vulnerability is no longer imposed by nature but created by human failure. The risk shifts from manageable to catastrophic.

A colleague of mine, a philosophy professor, has observed that today’s existential vulnerabilities may pose a greater threat to societal survival than hurricanes or other natural disasters. These vulnerabilities share several defining features. First, irreversibility: once triggered, recovery to a prior state may be impossible. Second, scale: their effects often extend beyond local boundaries to entire systems. Third, systemic entanglement: they are embedded in complex networks such as global supply chains, financial markets, and digital communications.

This concern is hardly new. Founding Father James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 that factions arise inevitably from human nature and unequal distributions of power and property. In today’s digital environment, those can be amplified by algorithm-driven echo chambers that fracture civic trust and undermine collective decision-making. 

And even without the digital environment, societal tribalism fuels factionalized thinking. We need look no further than digital comments regarding pharmacy and restaurant closures, flags displayed on private property, and events from nine years ago but believed to be much more recent. Many of these start out innocently enough but quickly can grow to highly speculative issues when propagated online.

Existential vulnerabilities now appear in many forms. Ethical failures by management consultant McKinsey contributed to widespread opioid addiction through their advice to Purdue Pharma. Investment firms have mismanaged employee pension funds through conflicted and self-serving decisions. Democratic processes are undermined when citizens claim that imperfect voter turnout renders outcomes illegitimate. Each of these behaviors erodes the social fabric.

Closer to home, our neighbors on the North Fork face serious water quality threats. In Orient, PFAS and nitrate contamination combine with saltwater intrusion. In Mattituck, half of tested private wells show contamination. Solutions exist, but consensus does not. As a result, residents bear the consequences of collective inaction.

When I worked as Town Engineer on the 2014 Hazard Mitigation Plan, the focus was on storms, floods, and hurricanes. In later plans, attention expanded to include improvised nuclear devices, radiological dispersal, active shooters, and civil disorder. Natural hazards remain dangerous, but they are not existential in the same way. The most severe threats may now arise from the damage we inflict on ourselves.

Some existential vulnerabilities allow no luxury of prolonged debate. They demand timely, ethical decisions under uncertainty. I do not claim to know how we — globally, nationally, or even here on Shelter Island — will resolve these threats. But I am certain of this: making ethical judgments in situations without clear answers is uniquely human work. Our future depends on remembering that fact and choosing cooperation over fragmentation.

For Shelter Island, existential vulnerability is not about catastrophe. It is about quiet thresholds starting to be routinely crossed through delay, fragmentation, and ethical evasion.