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Daniel Yankelovich (1924-2017), an award-winning public opinion pollster, observed late in his career that government leaders, news organizations, and experts adhere to a dysfunctional, oversimplified understanding of public engagement. They put a premium on delivering information, often forgetting that when faced with hard choices, people make their decisions based on values and convictions more than information. This process takes time, sometimes decades. It requires conflict, dialogue, listening, growth, and deliberation. 

In our digital information age, speed wins. Faster and faster. Some people suppose that democracy and technical progress are incompatible because democracy is too slow. Controversies around artificial intelligence (AI) tend to focus on the rapid pace of its growth and scale, the rapidly increasing fears and hopes around its consequences, and the difficulties of governments, businesses, and citizens in coming to grips with it all, including the explosive buildout of data centers.

American historian Jill Lepore (author of These Truths: A history of the United States) has a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (Liveright, 2026). It's not just about artificial intelligence, but a larger context which she calls the Artificial State. From the book:

With the arrival of OpenET several years ago, we can now better understand water cycling in the western U.S. over space and time. If we know our territory, we might even detect the footprints of human decisions and agency in the differences and changes that show up.

A rewrite of what I said at the closing circle of a Carbon and Culture conference sponsored by the First Foods program of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation along with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on October 1, 2025 in Cove, Oregon.

In simple, right/wrong situations, information or data is often the key to solving problems. The right username and password, the right replacement part, the right analysis or diagnosis, the best practice to fix a dysfunction--these simply work.

In complex situations (such as those involving people, land, and money), ambiguity, conflict, and power struggles are reliable companions to almost any kind of problem, whether past, present, or future. With complexity, the habit of information delivery often persists. Experts, often self-appointed, supply facts, data, logic, and best practices to convince wrongheaded people to change their views, supposing that they are rational actors and will see the light. If that fails we can try ridicule, shaming, satire, and name-calling. We are defending our definition of the problem: a self-evidently simple one, with right and wrong answers or solutions. Who learns in this scenario, and what do they learn?

Conflict and power struggles are about people's values, feelings, perspectives, experiences, culture, and identity. I'll throw out a conjecture which I doubt is original: there are three primary pathways for acquiring beliefs, for learning, and for addressing and resolving conflict:

In the last post on the estimated losses of soil moisture worldwide I promised a more local example of water balances. Here are 1) a pair of charts of precipitation and evapotranspiration in central Montana, and 2) a kitchen-counter water cycle experiment that's easy to do.