Abstract
EFFORTS TO BUILD COMMUNITY RESILIENCE often focus on growing the capacity to “bounce back” from disruptions, like those caused by climate change. But climate change is not the only crisis we face, nor is preparing for disruption the only way to build resilience. Truly robust community resilience should do more. It should engage and benefit all community members, and it should consider all the challenges the community faces, from rising sea levels to a lack of living wage jobs. In addition, it should be grounded in resilience science, which tells us how complex systems—like human communities—can adapt and persist through changing circumstances.
How do you know community resilience when you see it? I think you look for the capacity for people to not have to go through extremes … being knowledgeable and having capacity to do something, to change your circumstances.
—Doria Robinson, Urban Tilth
We all need a sense of community. And we all need to believe that we have agency—a sense that we can make choices that will affect our lives.
—Stuart Comstock-Gay, Vermont Community Foundation
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Notes
- 1.
Doria Robinson and Ken White, “Living within a Limit Is OK: Talking Resilience with Doria Robinson,” interview with Post Carbon Institute, June 24, 2015, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-06-24/talking-resilience-with-doria-robinson.
- 2.
Stuart Comstock-Gay, foreword to Vermont Dollars, Vermont Sense: A Handbook for Investors, Businesses, Finance Professionals, and Everybody Else, by Michael Shuman and Gwendolyn Hallsmith (Santa Rosa, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2015), v.
- 3.
Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 2009): 24; see also “Specials: Planetary Boundaries,” Nature, accessed April 7, 2017, http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/index.html, and Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 1996).
- 4.
Richard Heinberg, Searching for a Miracle: “Net Energy” Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society (San Francisco: International Forum on Globalization, 2009).
- 5.
David Fridley, “Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy,” in The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010), 229–46.
- 6.
Richard Heinberg, “Our Renewable Future, Or, What I’ve Learned in 12 Years Writing about Energy,” Post Carbon Institute, January 21, 2015, http://www.postcarbon.org/our-renewable-future-essay/.
- 7.
Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2011).
- 8.
Noah Gordon, “Why Can’t People Feel the Economic Recovery?,” Atlantic, October 14, 2014.
- 9.
See also Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, eds., The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010); and William Rees, “Cities as Dissipative Structures: Global Change and the Vulnerability of Urban Civilization,” in Sustainability Science: The Emerging Paradigm and the Urban Environment, ed. Michael P. Weinstein and R. Eugene Turner (New York: Springer, 2012).
- 10.
Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 1. The social-ecological system approach to resilience is prominently explored by the international research community represented at Resilience Alliance (http://resalliance.org) and institutions like the Stockholm Resilience Centre (http://stockholmresilience.org).
- 11.
See chapter 3 of Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012). Other authors interpret characteristics or principles of resilience differently and for different purposes; see, for example, Reinette Biggs, Maja Schlüter, and Michael L. Schoon, eds., Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- 12.
Per Walker and Salt: “In a resilience framework, the concepts of complex and complex systems carry particular meanings. The three requirements for a complex adaptive system are: it has components that are independent and interacting; there is some selection process at work on those components and on the results of their interactions; variation and novelty are constantly being added to the system (through components changing over time or new ones coming in).” Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, 5.
- 13.
See, for example, My Sellberg, Cathy Wilkinson, and Garry Peterson, “Resilience Assessment: A Useful Approach to Navigate Urban Sustainability Challenges,” Ecology and Society 20, no. 1 (2015): 43, http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07258-200143; Noah Enelow, “The Resilience of Detroit: An Application of the Adaptive Cycle Metaphor to an American Metropolis,” Economics for Equity and Environment, August 1, 2013, http://www.academia.edu/7973544/The_Resilience_of_Detroit; Rolf Pendall, Kathryn Foster, and Margaret Cowell, “Resilience and Regions: Building Understanding of the Metaphor,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3, no. 1 (2010): 71–84, http://www.academia.edu/10183451/Resilience_and_regions_building_understanding_of_the_metaphor; and Nathan James Bennett et al., “Communities and Change in the Anthropocene: Understanding Social-Ecological Vulnerability and Planning Adaptations to Multiple Interacting Exposures,” Regional Environmental Change 16, no. 4 (2016): 907–26, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-015-0839-5.
- 14.
As philosopher John Foster noted, “Mainstreamed as sustainability or sustainable development, environmentalism has failed to reduce, even remotely adequately, the impact of humans on the biosphere.” John Foster, After Sustainability: Denial, Hope, Retrieval (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2. For an excellent exploration of sustainability thinking, see Jeremy Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 15.
In his review of a draft of this report, William Rees commented: “Resilience planning, emerging from chaos and catastrophe theory, recognizes that the changes coming may be unprecedented and inherently unpredictable.… The global systems in which humans are interfering are vastly too complicated for the human mind to understand all possible outcomes, so we must be able to (in [resilience scientist] Buzz Holling’s famous words) ‘manage for surprise.’ ”
- 16.
Charles Redman, “Should Sustainability and Resilience Be Combined or Remain Distinct Pursuits?,” Ecology and Society 19, no. 2 (2014): 37.
- 17.
17. US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted how a state may “serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932).
- 18.
As theoretical physicist Geoffrey West noted: “One of the great things about being in a city is that there are a lot of crazy people around. I suppose that’s another way of saying cities have lots of cognitive diversity.… They provide a landscape that allows the spectrum of ideas to blossom. As the city grows, this makes it more and more multidimensional. Cities seem to open up: the spectrum of functionalities, job opportunities, connections, etc. That is key to the vitality and the buzz of successful cities.” Quoted in Andrew Zolli and Marie Healey, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (New York: Free Press, 2012), 99.
- 19.
Among many others, see Paul Willis, “Engaging Communities: Ostrom’s Economic Commons, Social Capital and Public Relations,” Public Relations Review 38, no. 1 (March 2012): 116–22.
- 20.
Phil Myrick, “The Power of Place: A New Dimension for Sustainable Development,” Project for Public Spaces blog, April 21, 2011, http://www.pps.org/blog/the-power-of-place-a-new-dimension-for-sustainable-development/.
- 21.
As Bruce Goldstein et al. noted: “It is crucial to recognise that urban scales are socially constructed, culturally maintained and politically contested.… Cities are relational accomplishments, which matters profoundly to the theorisation of resilience for urban city regions.” Bruce Goldstein et al., “Narrating Resilience: Transforming Urban Systems through Collaborative Storytelling,” Urban Studies 52, no. 7 (May 2015): 1288.
- 22.
Andrew Zolli noted that “resilience is predicated on trust in a system, allowing potential adversaries to move seamlessly into cooperative mode.” Andrew Zolli and Marie Healey, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (New York: Free Press, 2012), 145.
- 23.
“What is considered as effective and legitimate adaptation depends on what people perceive to be worth preserving and achieving. How to adapt to climate change therefore hinges on the values underlying people’s perspectives on what the goals of adaptation should be.” In Karen O’Brien and Johanna Wolf, “A Values-Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1, no. 2 (2010): 232.
- 24.
See, for example, Thriving Earth Exchange (http://thrivingearthexchange.org), a project of the American Geophysical Union that makes scientists available to advise communities on climate and natural resource issues.
- 25.
Identity is a complex concept with a long history in the social sciences, including cybernetics; see, for example, Luc Hoebeke, “Identity: The Paradoxical Nature of Organizational Closure,” Kybernetes 35, no. 1/2 (2006): 65–75.
- 26.
Bruce Goldstein, email message to the author, August 19, 2015.
- 27.
See, for example, the Vision PDX undertaking by the City of Portland, Oregon, from 2005 to 2007 (http://www.visionpdx.com). The local government led this multiyear project to develop a community vision for the next twenty years through interviews, surveys, and outreach. See also Goldstein et al., “Narrating Resilience.”
- 28.
Of the many conceptualizations of social capital, a commonly used one is from Robert Putnam, author of the classic Bowling Alone: “Social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms and trust that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit.” Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 35.
- 29.
As Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty noted: “Centralized, distant, and locally unaccountable power cannot accomplish the transition to low-carbon, ecologically sustainable communities.… Resilience requires a quality of social capital—trust, collaboration, cooperation, and leadership—rooted in the places where people live.” Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty, The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2012), 25. See also Jeffrey Potent, “Employing a Knowledge Systems Approach to Creating a Sustainable Future,” State of the Planet blog, Earth Institute, Columbia University, February 21, 2014; http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/02/21/employing-a-knowledge-systems-approach-to-creating-a-sustainable-future.
- 30.
As Gillian Bristow and Adrian Healy noted, “The networked nature of governance and policy is critical in resilience” (governance being understood as emerging from the interactions of many public and private actors, of which government is but one). Gillian Bristow and Adrian Healy, “Building Resilient Regions: Complex Adaptive Systems and the Role of Policy Intervention,” Raumforschung und Raumordnung 2 (2014): 97.
- 31.
Trevor Tompson et al., Resilience in the Wake of Superstorm Sandy (Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 2013), http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/resilience-in-the-wake-of-superstorm-sandy.aspx.
- 32.
As Wes Jackson noted: “I think there’s a general law: High energy destroys information, of a cultural as well as a biological variety. There’s a loss of cultural capacity. And from 1750, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the graphical curve for the use of high-energy fossil carbon is increasingly steep.” Wes Jackson, “Tackling the Oldest Environmental Problem: Agriculture and Its Impact on Soil,” in The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010), 133.
- 33.
Michelle Colussi, email message to author, August 19, 2015.
- 34.
Many primers on systems thinking exist; a fairly accessible one is Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008).
- 35.
Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, 5.
- 36.
“There are known knowns,” Wikipedia, last modified March 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns.
- 37.
Rees, “Cities as Dissipative Structures”; Jennie Moore and William E. Rees, “Getting to One-Planet Living,” in State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?, ed. Worldwatch Institute (Washington DC: Island Press, 2013), 39–50.
- 38.
Fridley, “Nine Challenges.”
- 39.
See C. S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson, and Garry Peterson, “Sustainability and Panarchies,” in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, ed. Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 63–102.
- 40.
Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
- 41.
Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, 92–98.
- 42.
Biggs, Schlüter, and Schoon, Principles for Building Resilience. Stockholm Resilience Institute has a useful summary at http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-news/2-19-2015-applying-resilience-thinking.html.
- 43.
Rockefeller Foundation and Arup, City Resilience Framework (London: Arup, December 2015), 5, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/city-resilience-framework.
- 44.
Andrew Zolli, “The Verbs of Resilience,” personal blog, October 28, 2013, http://andrewzolli.com/the-verbs-of-resilience.
- 45.
Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green Homes are a textbook example of the social and economic problems that have at times been exacerbated by “efficient” public housing; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini-Green_Homes.
- 46.
See, for example, James Hamilton, “Oil Prices and the Economic Recession of 2007–08,” Centre for Economic Policy Research blog, June 16, 2009, http://www.voxeu.org/article/did-rising-oil-prices-trigger-current-recession. For a much broader perspective, including the example of the “2008 financial-energy crisis,” see Thomas Homer-Dixon et al., “Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis,” Ecology and Society 20, no. 3 (2015): 6.
- 47.
Of course, this statement does not imply that this system has been fair or beneficial or that it will be resilient over the long term.
- 48.
Brian Walker, “The Best Explanation to Resilience,” Stockholm Resilience Centre TV, uploaded April 3, 2009, 5:33, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXLMeL5nVQk.
- 49.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhuon (1958; repr., London: Vintage, 2007), 19.
- 50.
Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, chap. 3.
- 51.
Laurie Guevara-Stone, “A High-Renewables Tomorrow, Today: Güssing, Austria,” Rocky Mountain Institute blog, October 8, 2013, http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2013_10_08_high-renewables_tomorrow_today_gussing_austria.
- 52.
These attributes of transformability are drawn from Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, 100–103.
- 53.
Walker and Salt, Resilience Practice, 101.
- 54.
See Paul Schmitz, “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2014.
- 55.
Jeremy Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5.
- 56.
Richard Heinberg, “Beyond the Limits to Growth,” in The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010), 3–4.
- 57.
Global Footprint Network, http://www.footprintnetwork.org.
- 58.
This question is an example of “strong sustainability” versus “weak sustainability” as understood in the field of ecological economics.
- 59.
Rockström, “A Safe Operating Space”; see also “Specials: Planetary Boundaries.”
- 60.
Richard Heinberg, “What Is Sustainability?,” in The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010), 13–24.
- 61.
Heinberg, “What Is Sustainability?”
- 62.
For example, John Foster lambastes “the distracting late-twentieth-century mind-set of ‘sustainable development,’ with its obsessive focus on inherently negotiable futures.” Foster, After Sustainability, 12.
- 63.
This sentiment was epitomized in the iconic little book by the Earthworks Group, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth (Berkeley, CA: Earthworks Press, 1989).
- 64.
Michelle Colussi, email message to the author, August 19, 2015.
- 65.
Email message to the author, October 28, 2015.
- 66.
Jenny Leis and Daniel Lerch, eds., City Repair’s Placemaking Guidebook (Portland, OR: City Repair and Southeast Uplift, 2003), 61.part i
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Lerch, D. (2017). Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_2
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