The Uninsurable Future: Reading Risk, Insurance, and Ecological Design

What does “risk” really mean—who defines it, and who benefits from the way it’s narrated into institutions?

In this episode of Reading the World | قراءة العالم, Ali Alhajji speaks with Joshua Harrison, Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure (UC Santa Cruz), about the relationship between risk, insurance, and ecological design—and why the idea of an uninsurable future reveals more than a market problem. It reveals a crisis of imagination, governance, and accountability.

Starting with the insurance industry’s growing inability to price climate volatility, the conversation reframes insurance as critical infrastructure: a system that quietly shapes where people can live, what futures remain investable, and whose losses are deemed acceptable. From there, the discussion turns toward prevention rather than reaction, and asks what it would mean to redesign our institutions around stewardship.

We then move into ecological and cultural “reading scenes”: how design changes what becomes visible, how fire can be understood as a tool of land care rather than only catastrophe, and how Indigenous knowledge complicates dominant frameworks of expertise. The episode closes with Two-Eyed Seeing as a way of thinking across knowledge systems—while staying attentive to power, translation, and responsibility.

In this conversation:

• How institutions narrate risk—and what those narratives erase
• Insurance as a front line of climate governance
• Why prevention is the missing logic in modern risk systems
• Stewardship, “good fire,” and ecological design as forms of reading
• Two-Eyed Seeing and the ethics of knowledge-sharing across systems

Reading the World | قراءة العالم is a bilingual podcast (English/Arabic) that takes one question at a time—carefully, clearly, and without shortcuts.

Keywords: risk, insurance, ecological design, institutional narratives, climate change, Indigenous knowledge, governance, prevention, stewardship, ecological crisis

Reading the World | قراءة العالم
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Each episode takes one question at a time—carefully, clearly, and without oversimplification.

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Transcript

Reading the World | قراءة العالم

Edited Transcript: Joshua Harrison on Risk, Insurance, Ecology, and Institutional Imagination

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity, concision, and readability. Repetitions, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been removed or corrected while preserving the substance and sequence of the conversation.

Opening

Ali: Josh, I want to start with a simple opening. In one sentence, if possible: when you hear the word risk, what do you think most institutions are actually doing when they use it?

Joshua Harrison: That is a deceptively simple question. I think most institutions are predicting the present. They look at uncertainty and make a guess about it, but their frame of reference is almost always the immediate present. That is one of the major problems we face.

Ali: Welcome to Reading the World | قراءة العالم. Each episode takes one question at a time, carefully, clearly, and without shortcuts.

Today’s question is: How is risk narrated into institutions and decision-making? And what becomes visible—or invisible—when we treat ecological design as a way of reading the world?

This episode sits at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and interpretation: not only what the world is doing, but how our systems describe it, and how those descriptions shape what becomes possible.

My guest today is Joshua Harrison, director of the Center for the Study of Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz. For decades, Josh has worked at the intersection of art, ecology, and systems strategy, building projects that treat environmental crisis not only as a scientific problem, but also as a crisis of perception and imagination.

Josh, welcome.

Joshua Harrison: Ali, thank you very much for inviting me. I am glad to be here.

Ali: To set expectations, this is not a technical insurance briefing, and it is not a project showcase. I want to read risk the way the humanities read a text: by asking who defines it, through what language, with what incentives, and for whom.

I also want to connect that to ecological design: how design can expose what our institutional narratives hide.

You recently published an essay titled “Avoiding an Uninsurable Future.” In it, you frame insurance not as a side issue, but as a front line where climate breakdown becomes legible as institutional failure. Let me begin there. When you say uninsurable, what does that mean beyond the obvious—beyond premiums going up or coverage disappearing?

What Does “Uninsurable” Mean?

Joshua Harrison: At the largest scale, an uninsurable future is a world that has changed so much that the physical manifestations of planetary change exceed the capacity of our institutions to repair them within any reasonable timeframe.

At that point, premiums no longer matter. They are insufficient to address the damage. The goal, of course, is to act differently and do what we can to prevent such a future. That is not only in the interest of insurance companies; it is in the interest of all of us.

The question, as you put it well, is conceptual. The evidence is obvious to anyone who seriously studies the planet: increasing storms, rising waters, desertification, raging wildfires, and infrastructure in massive danger. The major reinsurance companies understand this. They study it. They plan for it. Their annual reports show that they understand the seriousness of climate risk.

Yet the insurance industry as a whole spends only a small fraction of its available cash flow on prevention, even though many estimates—including estimates from within the industry—suggest that far more investment is required to build planetary resilience.

That means a coalition of forces has to act together, led in part by the one major corporate sector whose business is supposed to involve thinking about the future. Insurance companies are charged with thinking analytically over fifty- to seventy-five-year horizons and reducing risk. Their business model depends on anticipating loss and preventing unnecessary payouts.

One way insurance companies avoid paying claims is by rejecting them. But another, more constructive way is by reducing risk before damage occurs. That is where the name of my center matters. Force majeure is the French legal term often used in contracts to describe “acts of God”—events considered beyond human control. Insurance companies and other businesses use the term to say: this particular event falls outside what we can reasonably insure.

At the center, we study the risks we have created for ourselves and then call “acts of God.” Many of these risks are becoming more frequent because of extractive resource use, carbon emissions, poor urban design, water mismanagement, and broader environmental damage. We have engineered ourselves into these problems, and now we must find ways to back out of them.

My question to insurance companies and related governmental actors is simple: you are supposed to think proleptically. You know this is a problem. Your own data tells you it is a problem. Your business model requires long-term thinking. So why does your behavior look as if you only need to think five years ahead—or even less?

Where does that disconnect come from? What structural blindness keeps institutions from acting on what their own data already shows?

Insurance as Critical Infrastructure

Ali: If insurance quietly shapes where people can live and what futures remain investable, what happens when that infrastructure begins to fail?

Joshua Harrison: This is not only a private profit calculation. Insurance began, in its modern form, as a kind of shared-risk conversation. Lloyd’s of London, for example, emerged from a coffee shop where shippers pooled risk. Cargo ships faced storms, pirates, and many forms of uncertainty. By sharing risk, one loss could be absorbed collectively rather than destroying one trader.

In that sense, insurance began as mutual aid. For a long time, mutual insurance was one of the most common forms of insurance in the United States, and mutual associations still exist in many places. That mutuality carried a sense of governance: shared risk meant shared responsibility.

There is an old phrase: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That should be the motto of a good insurance company.

Historically, insurance companies have often intervened preventively. Seatbelts are a useful example. Volvo introduced the three-point seatbelt and did not restrict its use through patent enforcement. Yet many car manufacturers resisted adding seatbelts because of the cost per vehicle. Insurance companies recognized that seatbelts would significantly reduce traffic deaths and therefore reduce payouts. Once insurers made coverage difficult for vehicles without seatbelts, the auto industry changed. Regulation followed. Today, a car without seatbelts is almost unthinkable.

That is risk reduction as design. Insurance companies helped create a safer physical reality rather than simply deciding who deserved payment after an accident. That preventive imagination is largely missing from the climate conversation.

Ali: In your essay, you describe insurance as something closer to critical infrastructure than a normal market product. What does insurance underlie culturally and materially that people do not notice until it starts failing?

Joshua Harrison: Insurance gives people a sense that they can continue doing what they are doing in the place where they are doing it. It is an essential infrastructure for much of social life.

We insure homes so that, if they burn, we can rebuild. Companies insure against accidents, liability, and many other forms of disruption. Insurance creates a certain security: if I live here and something happens, I can continue to live here.

That works in a relatively stable world. It stops working when the world itself becomes unstable.

If you live on the oceanfront, in a fire-risk area, or in a flood-prone area, the meaning of insurance changes. In a known flood zone, it may not make sense to build a permanent home at all. It may make more sense to build temporary or easily repairable structures. But that is different from saying, “This has been my family’s home for generations, and I want it to remain so.” The river may say otherwise, and the river speaks more loudly than we do.

Insurance is therefore an invisible infrastructure. It gives us security, but sometimes it also allows us to pretend nature is not there.

In the United States, for example, flood insurance became so financially difficult for private insurers that the federal government took over much of it. That socialized some of the risk. But the politics of rebuilding often overrode the common sense of strategic retreat. People may rebuild the same structure repeatedly in a place that is guaranteed to flood. That is a failure of vision.

On the other side, insurance companies may cover buildings on coastlines without requiring them to be designed for rising waters. They could say: we will insure this building only if it is designed for the water conditions that are coming. It must be resilient, elevated, absorbent, or otherwise adapted. Similarly, perhaps we should not finance large urban structures in deserts if the water infrastructure cannot sustain them.

The deeper problem is that human beings struggle to understand risk. We tend to live in a historical present, as if what is happening now is the past and the future. But the past was different, and the future will be different too.

Risk as Narrative, Category, and Power

Ali: Risk is not only measured; it is also declared. It is narrated into categories that decide what counts as reasonable, what counts as too risky, and who gets protected.

You suggest that this crisis is not only technical, but also a failure of imagination tied to how institutions describe risk. Who benefits from the dominant way we narrate risk? And what does that narration make invisible?

Joshua Harrison: Risk is usually defined by those with the most financial power. It is defined in ways we have taught ourselves to consider smart: short-term financial categories, immediate returns, and visible transactions.

What gets excluded are externalities: the consequences that do not fit into a simple economic calculation. When someone builds a factory, we calculate inputs, labor, operating costs, and output value. But many other costs are pushed outside the frame.

Our economic system was built on the assumption that land was indestructible, water inexhaustible, and air immeasurable. We now know that none of this is true. Industrialization has forced us to confront the damage done to land, water, and air, but our mitigating processes are usually after the fact and decentered from the core conversation.

Other societies have offered different models. The Haudenosaunee, for example, developed a concept often described as seven-generational thinking: considering the consequences of actions not only for ourselves or our children, but for our children’s children and beyond. Today we might call these “knock-on effects” or “unintended consequences.” But we can no longer pretend those consequences do not exist.

We know the atmosphere is not inexhaustible. We know carbon dioxide has changed its behavior in ways that affect planetary life. We know water must be managed carefully. We know land use matters. All of these issues require us to rethink how we look at the world and ourselves.

The injustice is profound. Most of the world’s population did not create the problem and is not responsible for the worst causes of it, yet many of those people suffer the worst impacts. Meanwhile, a relatively small number of corporations and high-consuming populations have caused disproportionate damage.

That is why I call insurance an infrastructure and why I think socialization of risk must be part of the conversation. We need to rebalance how we support the systems that make life possible: water, air, land, food, and resilient communities.

To do that, we have to change the balance sheet of what counts as important.

Why Did Insurance Forget Prevention?

Ali: One of your strongest arguments is that insurance has historical precedent for prevention: risk reduction as a design system, not merely claims paid after damage. Why do you think modern insurance, in many places, forgot prevention as a core institutional practice?

Joshua Harrison: I do not know the full answer, but I see at least two major causes.

First, insurance shifted from a mutual model to a profit-driven shareholder model. The basic structures of insurance remain, but the industry is increasingly governed by financial return. In many business sectors, the money extracted from the business has become more important than the business function itself. Managers are pressured to maintain certain numbers, even if that weakens long-term viability.

Second, there is a reluctance to accept that the world in which the old business models were developed has changed. People believe strongly in the world that worked for them. Thomas Kuhn’s account of paradigm shifts in science is useful here: an old paradigm remains powerful until it can no longer explain reality, and even then the old guard often struggles to let go.

The changes insurance companies must now confront are planetary. Coastlines will change. Rainfall patterns will change. Drought patterns will change. Crops that once grew reliably in a particular place may no longer be viable. Stabilizing influences are becoming unstable.

Ali: In your essay, you call this a governance failure, not a knowledge gap. You propose four pillars for transformation: capital reallocation toward prevention, product innovation, governance and regulatory reform, and equity as structural design. Could you walk us through those at a high level and say which is most urgent?

Joshua Harrison: Before any of them, institutions must accept that change needs to happen. You cannot make change unless people are willing to act.

Governance may be the first priority. Climate is a collective-action problem. Different systems of governance respond differently, and some respond much better than others. The key is whether a society can make collective decisions, regulate intelligently, and build a framework within which markets operate toward long-term goals.

Equity is equally central. Most people on the planet are not responsible for the problem, and even within high-emitting countries, responsibility is uneven. We need to protect people regardless of their economic output, social position, or geographic location. Infrastructure is only as strong as its weakest link. A road cannot be well-designed only for wealthy neighborhoods; people use the whole road. The same principle applies to ecological, social, and financial infrastructure.

Product innovation also matters. We need alternatives to traditional insurance models. Parametric insurance is one example. Rather than evaluating every claim individually, it pays out when a measurable threshold is reached—such as wind speed in a hurricane or fire conditions in a wildfire zone. If the threshold is met, the payout is triggered. It is administratively simple, predictable, and can protect communities rather than only individuals who can afford conventional policies.

Resilience bonds are another example. Many ecological interventions—reforestation, forest thinning, watershed restoration, or landscape-scale fire treatment—require significant upfront investment. Financial tools can help bridge the gap between long-term ecological benefit and short-term cost.

Agriculture offers another example. Farmers assume risk at the beginning of the season, investing before they know what the weather or harvest will bring. Across cultures, practices like debt forgiveness emerged partly because farming has always involved that mismatch between upfront risk and delayed outcome. In this sense, debt forgiveness can also function as a kind of social insurance.

All of these examples show that risk-sharing is broader than conventional insurance. We need a wider imagination of how societies absorb risk and build resilience.

Ocean, Voice, and Ecological Imagination

Ali: The key claim here is that risk is not simply managed; it is built through design, incentives, and language.

I want to move to your work in art and ecology because it connects directly to imagination and to the kinds of knowledge that become felt, not just known. One of your projects, Sensorium for the World Ocean, is organized around a radical question: what if the ocean had a voice? What would you ask it, and what might it want to say?

I am not asking for the about page. I am asking epistemologically: what changes when we treat an ecosystem as a speaking subject rather than a data object?

Joshua Harrison: This is one of the central challenges of Western society. We have placed ourselves apart from nature, even though we are part of it.

As artists, activists, scientists, and human beings, we have to learn how to return to balance with the world we inhabit. Sensorium is an attempt to do that through technology.

The idea that nature has rights, that it has sentience, and that it deserves a place at major decision-making tables is common in many societies and is gaining ground in contemporary legal and political conversations. Several countries have recognized rights of nature in different ways. The broader idea is that the world has value beyond its transactional use to human beings.

Western society spent a long time trying to engineer that idea out of the conversation. Now we have to return to reciprocity, empathy, exchange, and interdependence.

The ocean is central to planetary life. It stores carbon, produces oxygen, shapes weather, and sustains vast life systems. Yet most people encounter it only from the edge, from the sky, or from a boat. For many of us, it remains a mystery, even though it is one of the most important parts of the planet.

Sensorium asks whether we can create a multisensory experience of the ocean. We now have technologies that measure ocean heat, acidification, sound, movement, and ecological change. We can also transform data into immersive visual and auditory experiences. We can begin to decode some communication patterns among marine mammals and other sound-producing animals.

So what happens if someone enters an immersive visualization of a watery environment and can ask it questions? What happens if it can answer back? Does that experience change sensation, empathy, identification, and response?

The goal is to help us feel that we are part of the planet, not apart from it.

Fire, Stewardship, and Reading the Landscape

Ali: Let us shift from ocean to land, and from perception to stewardship.

Your Store the Knowledge work in the Tahoe Basin involves co-creating spaces where Indigenous stewardship, scientific inquiry, and public education intersect. In many public narratives, fire appears only as catastrophe, while Indigenous frameworks often speak of good fire or cultural burning.

What does it mean to ask, “What does healthy fire look like?” And why is that question so hard for institutions to hold?

Joshua Harrison: This returns us to epistemology: how we understand the world.

Fire is everywhere in human history. As human beings evolved and moved across landscapes, fire became a tool. In forested regions across the planet, fire has long been part of how people interacted with land.

The question is whether we interact wisely, structurally, and with regard to long-term risk—or whether we act foolishly, with short-term thinking and little understanding of consequences.

California has a Mediterranean climate: short, wet winters and long, dry summers. That pattern produces bursts of plant growth followed by drying, which makes landscapes prone to burning. These are fire-adapted ecologies.

Indigenous peoples in what is now California understood fire as part of life. Fire was a tool, a companion, and a way to tend the landscape. It helped encourage plants needed for baskets, food, medicine, meadows, and sacred uses. It was not simply a catastrophe.

European colonizers arrived with a very different understanding of fire. They came from dense cities built partly of wood and heated by wood, where fire was associated with danger and urban destruction. When they saw Indigenous people using fire to maintain food systems and landscapes, they interpreted it as threatening.

The Spanish missions suppressed cultural burning, and later U.S. land management continued that suppression. But in a fire-adapted landscape, removing fire creates dangerous fuel buildup.

For a long time, dominant forestry science assumed that a green, densely forested mountain was healthy. But in many Mediterranean-climate forests, health means a thinner, patchier landscape: clumps of trees, open meadows, and spacing that allows water, light, and air to circulate. A forest with far too many trees becomes vulnerable.

That is part of what is burning in California, Australia, South Africa, southern France, and Greece. We are beginning to understand where we need to go, but we still have not fully solved the mechanics of getting there.

Two-Eyed Seeing as Practice

Ali: Here, risk is not only wildfire probability. It is also the risk of losing knowledge, stewardship practice, and the ability to read a landscape over time.

This connects to a concept at the core of the show: how ideas travel across systems and contexts. Two-Eyed Seeing is often described as learning to see with one eye the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and with the other eye the strengths of Western scientific knowledge, using both together.

How do you use this idea as a practice rather than a slogan?

Joshua Harrison: We have a program called Fire Brings Water, a phrase drawn from Indigenous ecological understanding: cultural burning can help shape small water cycles and support the growth of particular plants. Fire can bring water because it can cultivate the conditions that help water return to a place.

The project teaches Washoe youth, including high school and college students, both Western and Indigenous approaches to fire stewardship. They work with cultural burning on the land under the guidance of tribal elders, and they also work with scientific groups, including geospatial analysis labs and observatories.

Two-Eyed Seeing is not a homogenized synthesis. It is a complementary practice. Some questions are best answered through Western science. Others are best answered through Indigenous knowledge. The goal is to give young people the tools and judgment to know when and how to move between them.

We also hope they become ambassadors who can carry this understanding into their communities and beyond.

Ecological solutions are both systemic and place-based. Sometimes the system is dominant; sometimes the place is dominant. Systems may claim universality, but places are always particular. Two-Eyed Seeing keeps us grounded in both.

As an artist, I would add that one of art’s great tools is the ability to shift perspective. In that sense, the goal is not simply one eye or the other. It is the possibility of a third eye: a new way of seeing informed by both, but identical to neither.

Power, Trust, and Institutional Authority

Ali: Where does power enter this picture, especially when institutions try to include Indigenous knowledge without changing institutional authority?

Joshua Harrison: That is one of the central questions in allyship work: how do you build relationships that respect original authority rather than co-opting it?

In our work, we emphasize Indigenous management, ownership, decision-making, and control of information. It is all grounded in tribal sovereignty.

But there are larger questions about hegemony, authority, and who gets the final voice. In the tribal work I do, there is a phrase I often hear: you work at the speed of trust. You know you are trusted when you get there. You may not know exactly when it happens, but trust emerges through demonstrated good faith, mutual understanding, and shared responsibility.

This is foundational not only for Indigenous partnerships but for society more broadly. Many of our current problems come from attempts to build fear-based, impregnable social structures, where someone else’s gain is perceived as your loss.

In a trust-based society, everyone can win. In such a culture, rules can be based on principles because people are trusted to exercise judgment. In a fear-based culture, rules become overdetermined, rigid, and suspicious because no one trusts anyone to act well.

Closing Question

Ali: Reading the world means asking who speaks, from where, and for whom. So here is the final question: what assumption about risk, knowledge, or expertise would you most want listeners to leave unsettled after this conversation?

Joshua Harrison: I would leave them with two thoughts.

First, we need to think about the high cost of doing nothing. What happens if we ignore these risks? What happens if we do not pay attention?

Second, we need to recover the ability to value the money we do not spend because we prevented harm in the first place.

I often close with a Greek proverb: a society grows great when old people plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit. My aspiration is to be part of that society.

Ali: That is a powerful closing.

Josh, thank you. This has been a rich conversation about risk not as a neutral measure, but as a story institutions tell—and as a design problem with real consequences.

This has been Reading the World | قراءة العالم: one question at a time. If this conversation meant something to you, follow the podcast. Until next time, read slowly, listen carefully, and resist the shortcuts.