Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and resilience can be understood easily enough by considering an ordinary bridge. All bridges these days have vastly more structural strength than they need in order to support their ordinary load of traffic. This is inefficient, to be sure, but it makes the bridges resilient; they can withstand high winds, unusually heavy loads, deferred maintenance, and other challenges without collapsing.
I have come to question some of the assumptions that underpin mainstream education, and to consider what can be done…to provide an education that is appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century.
A conversation with two former state chief executives on bridging the partisan divide and adapting to climate change.
In ways both scientific and pragmatic, there can be no resilience without transformation.
From the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Superstorm Sandy, the last decade has seen an incredible array of natural disasters…The proliferation of disasters is raising awareness about our collective need to minimize vulnerability and to bounce back afterwards – our need for greater resilience.
When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the U.S. East Coast last October, it was the latest in a series of “teachable moments” about our growing vulnerability to climate change.
Years of contact with the Roma, whom we also call "Gypsies," have changed in many ways my view of the world… Perhaps, from them we can learn something useful for the hard times that are coming.
Confucius said that the health of a nation could be determined by the integrity of its homes. If we apply that standard, we’re in trouble.
Usually when I go to events I tend to be the ‘resilience guy’, or one of a handful of people who work with and think about resilience who tend to gather at the back of other events and bemoan the fact that no-one has talked about resilience yet. So I was fascinated when I saw that the British Red Cross was hosting a one-day conference on resilience, the first that I’ve been aware of.
Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book ‘Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit’.
The word “resilience” is bandied about these days among environmental designers. In some quarters, it’s threatening to displace another popular word, “sustainability.” This is partly a reflection of newsworthy events like Hurricane Sandy, adding to a growing list of other disruptive events like tsunamis, droughts, and heat waves. We know that we can’t design for all such unpredictable events, but we could make sure our buildings and cities are better able to weather these disruptions and bounce back afterwards. At a larger scale, we need to be able to weather the shocks of climate change, resource destruction and depletion, and a host of other growing challenges to human wellbeing.
•The Decline of Communities Could Explain America’s Health Problems
•Understanding Resilience
•We’re Hooked on ‘Growth,’ But It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
•Social democracy in the age of austerity: the radical potential of democratising capital
