Drawing on a Century and a Half of Intelligence and Insights to Serve the Coming Century with the Same (and hopefully for the better!)
Preamble: A vision to get us started
By the Corniche, facing north: The Mediterranean, a shore, a basin, a medium for networked exchange, of traffic, of trafficking; a source of livelihood, an escape route, a route to survival, an expanse for wandering, drifting, drowning; circulation, pollutants dumped, oil spilled, floating, sedimenting, destroying, circulating; a living, driven, disrupted, exhausted, ecosystem, humans, their sagas, their epics included; human interventions, ports, wharfs, dikes, platforms, oil and gas; the Suez Canal, a breach, as old as AUB, more than a century and a half of exchange, of intensifying traffic, of invasive species, of disrupted traffic; rivers, river deltas, and growing, densifying, intensifying human settlements around them.
Looking up and East: Discoloration, a blemish, persistent, emissions, pollutants, an inverted layer, settling, traveling, circulating, raining down, feeding underwater, springs, rivers, irrigation, drinking water, back to the sea.
Further North, and West: Storm churning, fronts moving in, circulation, regional, continental, the Sea under it, feeding it, suffering its brunt, flooding, at times, water levels rising, settlements, ancient, sustained for thousands of years, no longer sustainable...
South and West: Further discoloration, yellowish, pervasive, invasive sand cloud, blowing, blown, traveling, overwhelming, enveloping, disrupting air traffic, disrupting breathing, lingering, feeding moisture for future storms, sedimenting, repeating...
Closer by: A city, emerging from a massive explosion, a catastrophe, exposing human error, human lack of preparedness, human tragedy, human courage in responding to adversity. Hospitals, emergency services, destroyed, flooded, overwhelmed; the radius of damage, 10 Kilometers; radius of care 100kms. Networks already exhausted, complex, redundant, disrupted. Electricity networks, water distribution networks, traffic networks. Logistics/distribution networks: worn, failing, leaking, inefficient. Parallel networks, private networks, redundant, inefficient, random, vulnerable. Financial sector, melting down, economic hardship, unemployment, poverty, governance failing, semblance of controlled organization giving way to self-organization under stress and stochasticity. Collapse, associated avalanches, and the growth of parallel/parasitic support systems. Rapid, poorly regulated growth, sprawl, now further disrupted, into failure, and uncontrolled, unavoidable, cannibalism of whatever systems remain.
Zooming out over wider, national, regional geography: Wars, civil strife, disruptions, waves of refugees, stress and support, disruption of settlements, networks, internal and regional, damage and opportunities for reimagined, collaborative, sustainable growth; global climate change, drought, desertification, demobilization; decades of fossil fuels, coupled to growth of energy intensive settlements, crises in the making, catastrophes postponed. Geopolitical reconfigurations, resistance movements, social-political formations and reformations. Then to top it all off, a pandemic, an emerging disease, wave after wave, of what is likely to repeat, globally, disrupt globally, and expose further failings locally; decisions, closures, lockdowns, economies, schools systems, networked flows, disrupted, further stresses on failing support systems. Also, opportunities to reconsider an equilibrium which is hardly optimal, a waiting mode, when we can no longer afford to wait.
Embedded within this tumultuous field of coupled, networked processes, which are forced to the brink of collapse, collapsing, collapsed, our Academic Institution/Environment is called upon to couple and engage, draw data, enhance intelligence and contribute insights. In fact, the historical evolution of this institution is intimately coupled to those processes, contributing intelligence and insights to the their evolution, having contributed intelligence and insights to their fashioning. It is precisely through this 150 year rootedness, which permeates 150 years, of structure building, settler colonial settlements, nation-state experiments, disruptions on ecosystems, habitats, social-political formations, exploitation of nature and man, by man, that AUB is now poised to contributed further intelligence and insights to unfolding century. Complex reality shall draw on complex historical, regional networks of knowledge production, then enhanced data collection/gathering/harvesting techniques/methods, algorithms, whether data or simulation driven, to contribute intelligence and insights for the coming century. The task facing us is to identify natural, organic, promising opportunities endeavors, existing promising investigators and associated labs, the environments, resources required to nurture and sustain them…etc.