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Black Elephant Disasters

A better term than Black Swan

I came across this in a New York Times op-ed. It rang a bell for me — since, as I've written lately, that I don't believe there are Black Swan Disasters. We know all these things are possible. Therefore the quote below was very appropriate.

Opinion: "As I look back over the last 20 years, what all four of these global calamities have in common is that they are all “black elephants,” a term coined by the environmentalist Adam Sweidan. A black elephant is a cross between “a black swan” — an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications — and the “elephant in the room” — a looming disaster that is visible to everyone, yet no one wants to address."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-globalization.html?referringSource=highlightShare

Black Elephant Disasters they are! There is a whole list of those types of events looming on the horizon. I would put climate change right up there at the top, but there is not the will to change course — until "of course" we are staring it in the face and the mitigation and adaptation phases are behind us and all we can do is respond. 

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.
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