Adapting in a world that won't hold the key

Adaptation in a World That Won’t Hold the Key

Most contemporary talk about climate breakdown frames the problem as one of adaptation. The future is coming, it will be harsher, more volatile, more expensive, but if we prepare correctly—build the right infrastructure, adopt the right practices, internalize the right ethics—we will be able to play through it. This language treats climate change like a difficult piece of music: demanding, fast, full of accidentals, but still recognizably part of the same tradition. Practice harder, master the motifs, and you’ll be able to keep time when the tempo shifts.

That framing smuggles in an assumption so deep it usually goes unnoticed: that the music stays in the same key. That tomorrow’s performance will still be governed by the same score, just with less tolerance for error. Most human adaptation, from brining a chicken overnight to building an agricultural calendar to constructing legal and moral institutions, depends on this being true. The world changes, yes—but it changes musically. Themes recur. Variations are bounded. The skills you acquire by playing yesterday’s piece remain relevant when you sit down tomorrow.

In technical terms, this assumption is called stationarity. A process is stationary when the rules that generate its behavior remain stable over time. Notes may fluctuate, volume may swell, tempos may vary, but the structure of the music—the scale, the harmonic relationships, the expectations about resolution—does not drift. Stationarity is what makes rehearsal meaningful. It’s why practicing Bach prepares you to play Bach again. It’s also why implication feels like common sense: if I do X now, Y will follow later, because the relationship between X and Y is anchored in a stable structure.

There’s a second assumption layered underneath, even quieter but more important: ergodicity. Ergodicity is the claim that time spent playing teaches you the piece. In an ergodic system, the path you personally experience eventually exposes you to the full range of relevant possibilities. Practice accumulates. Skill compounds. Experience generalizes. When a system is ergodic, being good comes from having been there before. You don’t need to sample every possible performance; your lived history is enough to converge on mastery.

Climate breakdown breaks both of these assumptions, and it does so musically before it does politically. The issue is not simply that the tempo is increasing or that the piece is harder. It’s that the key itself is modulating mid-performance, and not in a way that resolves. The harmonic structure is drifting. Rhythms that once anchored coordination desynchronize. Extremes stop behaving like ornamentation and start functioning like the main theme. This is non-stationarity: the score is changing while you are still playing it.

Meteorology was one of the first fields forced to confront this reality. Early weather forecasting assumed a stationary atmosphere: learn the patterns, refine the equations, and predictions will improve. Instead, meteorologists ran into chaos—small errors in initial conditions producing radically different outcomes. But the deeper problem emerged later, as climate forcing accumulated: the atmosphere itself began to change its behavior. Historical averages stopped being reliable guides. Records fell not as rare climaxes but as a new baseline. The music didn’t just get noisier; the underlying scale warped.

The response was not better single predictions, but a different way of listening. Meteorology moved toward ensemble forecasting: running many simulations, each plausible, none authoritative. The question shifted from “what will the weather be?” to “what kinds of weather are now possible?” This was not a retreat from rigor. It was an admission that in a non-stationary system, insisting on a single correct performance is a category error. The musician stops trying to play the piece right and starts trying to stay oriented within a field of possible sounds.

This is where ergodicity finally collapses. In a non-ergodic musical world, no amount of rehearsal guarantees preparedness, because the future performance will not be drawn from the same distribution as the past ones. You can be exquisitely trained—able to execute Bach with precision and emotional depth—and still be fundamentally unprepared for a soundscape dominated by glitch, feedback, and stochastic interference. Some musicians will adapt, but their prior mastery will not scale in the way mastery used to. Virtuosity decouples from relevance.

Seen this way, much of contemporary adaptation discourse is mistuned. It treats climate breakdown as a harder score rather than a different kind of music. It assumes that institutions built on repetition, precedent, and motif recognition can simply practice harder. But politics, ethics, and law are ensemble performances designed for stationary worlds. They rely on recognizable themes—“the next time something like this happens”—to coordinate action. When the repetitions that matter are increases in variance, breakdowns of correlation, and the persistence of instability itself, those institutions lag precisely where responsiveness is most needed.

What adapting without stationarity and ergodicity looks like is not Bach played faster. It looks more like jazz, or like communal musics that never relied on a fixed score to begin with. In jazz, there is structure, but it lives in shared constraints rather than scripted outcomes: key centers that can bend, rhythms that can fracture and reassemble, motifs that are offered, taken up, distorted, or dropped entirely. Skill matters—but it is skill at listening, at responding, at leaving space. Mastery is not the ability to reproduce a piece, but to remain musically coherent when the piece dissolves.

Indigenous communal musics push this even further. Lakota drum groups, for example, do not coordinate by following a score that implies the next bar. They coordinate through collective timing, embodied memory, and continual mutual adjustment. The music holds because the relationships hold, not because the future is predictable. No single performer carries the piece. The form persists even as the moment-to-moment sound shifts. This is adaptation without ergodicity: continuity without the promise that repetition will teach you everything you need to know.

The danger is not that people will fail to adapt. The danger is that they will insist on adapting as if the music were still the same, and mistake fidelity for preparedness. Implication only works when the key holds. In a world where the score is dissolving in real time, adaptation becomes less about getting the right notes and more about sustaining the capacity to listen, respond, and remain in relation. Not playing Bach better, but learning how to make music together when there is no longer a piece to return to.