Friday, February 25, 2022

Just-in-Case Chaos

Long Beach containers: the giant Legos that move the world
Image: Port Technology

During one of my brief bouts of non-academic employment, I worked in a business that was deeply involved in supply-chain issues. We packaged 100,000 meals every day, with food and packaging materials flowing into our warehouse and back out in an incredibly complex dance. 

Thankfully, I was not in charge of all that -- in fact, no one person could be. Even then -- in the mid-1990s -- logistics were complicated and pricing was so competitive that we measured the cost of everything to the tenth of a U.S. cent. Even though my role in all of this was rather peripheral, my employer knew the value of my understanding it better, and so I was one of many employees sent to take a course for supply-chain professionals called Just-In-Time. It was one of six parts of a certification program I did not complete, but it was the overview -- offering a global perspective that I continue to value as a geographer.

Of course, most normal people do not pay much attention to supply chains and do not even hear the two words being used together. But 2020 and 2021 (and 2022) are not normal times, so many people have become reluctant students of the vagaries of the world space-economy (as we geographers like to call it). 

For many, the incredible stuckedness of the Evergiven in the Suez Canal in March 2021 -- and the even more incredible stuckedness of hundreds of other vessels -- was the introduction to supply chains. For others, it had been the disruption of microchip and automobile manufacturing because of the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. In both cases, we became aware that efficiency and expediency come at the cost of resilience and redundancy.

In short, Just-in-Time minimizes costs and maximizes speed by not storing inventory. In extreme cases -- and most cases now are extreme -- parts enter an assembly line directly from a delivery truck, which got them from a train or a ship. I explained some of the technologies that make this possible in my 2011 post The Biggest Ships Ever

This is all very efficient and convenient, up until the moment it is not. Late in 2021, massive disruptions led to wild speculation and finger-pointing on the part of people who had not given the system much thought previously. I found two brief radio pieces quite instructive. 

In November, NPR reporter A Martinez spoke with Danny Wan, executive director of the Port of Oakland, about the persistent backlog at California ports. In December, NPR's Steve Inskeep talked with John Porcari, port envoy of the White House's Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force about the federal role in facilitating global traffic.

It is easy to conclude that when something goes wrong, some individual is to blame. But the world has become complicated in ways that are sometimes revealed only in crisis. We have an obligation to become better informed so that we can meaningfully participate in decisions that might make us even more vulnerable in the future, in exchange for small gains in efficiency.

Lagniappe 

Gas prices are another example of something that is far more complex than it seems and whose response to market factors triggers irrational responses, even among those who claim to love the free market

Blogger Crazy Eddie draws on the wisdom of Trevor Noah to explain why gas prices are high in a recovering economy. I share it here because both fuel prices and supply-chain problems have a prectable (and predicted) post-pandemic trajectory.

Bugging Out

In a recent episode of Fresh Air, co-host Dave Davies interviewed journalist Oliver Milman, whose reporting for The Guardian led him to write the new book The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World

Bees are just one of many kinds of essential insects.
Image: WikiMedia

The subtitle is a good summary of the 40-minute interview, which is nevertheless worth our attention. Milman piqued my interest when he described what a world without insects would be like; he credits the recently deceased ecologist E.O. Wilson -- whom I mention many times on this blog -- with some rather grim ways of describing just how empty our world would be without insects. He then describes some of our dependencies in detail, along with some interesting ways in which the sharp decline of insects is being documented. He offers some small glimmers of hope, because modest changes in human habits have been shown to benefit insects greatly. They require our attention, though.

From the beginning, this discussion reminded me of the work of an earlier biologist about whom I have written even more on this blog: Rachel Carson. After all, her landmark 1962 book Silent Spring derives its title from a grim, quiet scenario in which birds are no longer present. Her focus was birds, but she described their endangerment in the context of human attacks on insects. 

Silent Spring did lead to some softening of those attacks, but as Milman makes clear, human activity continues to threaten these essential creatures in many ways, both deliberate and accidental.

The insecta class has persisted for 400,000,000 years, through several mass-extinction events. We have an opportunity -- and responsibility -- to ensure that a brief century of human "progress" does not prove to be their undoing. 

Lagniappe 

I was heartened to learn -- just a day or so after hearing the story above -- that an unusually large bee had been found in Indonesia, four decades after its presumed extinction. The rediscovery of the enormous Megachile pluto resulted from a very deliberate search that followed a rather accidental discovery of its nests. 

This part of the story exemplifies the attention to detail that has always fascinated me about entomologists. I used to go hiking and camping a lot with a friend who had studied entomology before becoming a geographer. (We did all of this travel in his VW Bugs, but that is another story.) Countless times, I would be walking along in almost complete oblivion to my surroundings when he would stop, gasp, and gesticulate wildly toward a smudge on a branch or fencepost or a bug that looked like all the other bugs to me. Invariably, it was a highly unusual bit of insect nest or food, or a bee disguised as a wasp disguised as a bee.



I hesitate to post this, because it is a hopeful anecdote that does negate the more systematic findings about the precipitous decline of insecta as a class. But we will take encouragement where we can find it, as we continue to work for the protection of all the remaining critters and the ecosystems of which they are a part.

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