Abstract
FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS, the world community has tried to resolve the combined challenges of environmental degradation, fossil fuel dependence, economic inequality, and persistent social injustice, largely under the banner of internationally brokered “sustainable development.” Despite some partial successes, it is clear today that the pace of these global trends has not been slowed, let alone stopped or reversed. The scale of these trends has grown, and their effects have become so widespread that they now threaten the stability—in some cases, even the existence—of communities around the world. The global sustainability challenges of the past have become the local resilience crises of today.
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Notes
- 1.
Two years later, then-ExxonMobil chief executive officer (and as of early 2017, secretary of state under President Donald Trump) Rex Tillerson said of the impacts of climate change, “It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.” Matt Daily, “Exxon CEO Calls Climate Change Engineering Problem,” June 27, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxon-climate-idUSBRE85Q1C820120627.
- 2.
See William Rees, “Thinking ‘Resilience,’ ” in The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010), http://www.postcarbon.org/publications/thinking-resilience/. Probably the first significant book to introduce social-ecological systems resilience to nonacademic audiences was Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006).
- 3.
In 2007, while researching for my book Post Carbon Cities, I attended the national conference of the American Planning Association (APA) (the largest professional organization in the United States for urban planners) in Philadelphia. At that conference, after realizing that I could count the number of sessions (out of hundreds) dealing with sustainability issues literally on one hand, I connected with other members to get the APA to allow an official special-interest division focused on sustainability issues. Over the course of the application process, we were told that there was resistance among some of the national leadership who believed that “sustainability” was no different from well-established environmental planning issues already represented in the APA. A few years later, however, the Sustainable Communities Division was established. Today it is one of the largest and most active of the APA’s twenty-one divisions; see http://sustainableplanning.net.
- 4.
For years, sustainability-focused efforts associated (accurately or not) with the United Nations and its various programs and summits have been the target of conspiracy theorists and political disinformation campaigns, including harassment of sustainability advocates and disruption of local government meetings and public processes dealing with sustainability issues. See, for example, Jonathan Thompson, “Fearful of Agenda 21, an Alleged U.N. Plot, Activists Derail Land-Use Planning,” High Country News, February 6, 2012, http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.2/fearful-of-Agenda-21-an-alleged-united-nations-plot-activists-derail-land-use-planning/.
- 5.
See Rockefeller Foundation, “100 Resilient Cities,” accessed April 5, 2017, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our-work/initiatives/100-resilient-cities/.
- 6.
Charles Redman, “Should Sustainability and Resilience Be Combined or Remain Distinct Pursuits?,” Ecology and Society 19, no. 2 (2014): 37.
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Lerch, D. (2017). Introduction. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_1
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