What is Resilience?

I recently received a response from a reader wanting to know what I mean by resilience.  So, I decided that I would give you the whole nine yards.  Don’t stop reading!  There is actually some interesting stuff to know about this concept. 

Resilience is the ability of an object to regain its shape after an impact with another object. In the context of communities, when exposed to unexpected disturbance or change, it refers to the ability to avoid collapse, respond, adapt, and maintain its basic function and structure.  In other words, to be able to “take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’”.  There are at least three features that figure importantly in the resilience of any system or community:  Diversity, Modularity, and tightness of feedbacks.

Diversity has many different aspects.  Firstly, it provides alternate ways of doings things in the wake of failure in any one system, ie. “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”.  If the food fails to get delivered to the island, do you have an alternative source?  If the power goes out, do you have a way of getting water and providing heat for your home? In the same sense, having a variety of skills and knowledge yourself, or amongst your neighbors, will increase the likelihood of your adapting successfully to unexpected change.  A plumbing leak could be dire on an island of  electricians.

Diversifying the local economy is also important so as to maintain business activity when one market is weak.

 Diversity amongst communities means that each community can pursue the solution that takes advantage of the unique qualities and strengths inherent in each, rather than a top down “one size fits all” approach. 

Modularity means that each community maximizes its ability to function independently of all the others.  This is where economic globalization has made us seriously vulnerable.  For the sake of efficiency, we are directed to eliminate all redundancies and to specialize in that one product or service that is optimal for our community, and with calamitous results!  We have taken the land from millions of self sufficient farming families around the world, put all that land into an export monocrop, sent the starving families to live in squalor in cities, with the hope of finding bare subsistence jobs, either in their home countries or in another.  We’ve turned a huge population of people that were effectively taking care of themselves into a huge problem for all of us.  At the same time, we’ve  made ourselves vulnerable to monocrop failures and disease exposure that have repercussions around the world.  The same goes for manufacturing:  note the recent tsunami and earthquake in Japan caused the Toyota plants in the US to shut down for lack of parts.  This doesn’t mean that we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world; only that we “engage the rest of the world in an ethic of networking and information sharing” rather than utter mutual dependence. .  Efficiency is a double edged sword;  here’s another cliché, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

Tightness of feedbacks refers to how quickly and strongly the consequences of actions in one part of the world are felt and responded to in other parts.  When we provide money to corporations or governments to provide goods and services from remote parts of the world, we tend to be unaware of the consequences of those actions, and, therefore, unable or unwilling to make needed changes. Certainly, not all the money we pay out  is siphoned off by scammers, goes into unsustainable production, or produces misery and destruction, but the point is that we don’t really know.  Doing more locally and regionally will make it easier for us to monitor and make changes in the way we do things.  The world will always be large and complex, but we can do better.

If you look at our island with the above in mind, you may see that we are very unresilient in many ways.  Disruption in our ferry service, gasoline, food supply, water, or power are not within our control and we have few or no alternatives.  Our premise at Transition Vashon is that a careful reading of the trends indicates a very strong probability for those disruptions sometime in the not too distant future, and it would be smart for us to become more resilient.  Even if we were completely wrong, it is still a good idea to become more resilient.

Coming events:  Wisenergy Energy Fair, June 18, 10 to 4, at the parking lot north of the Village Green.

Comments?  terry@vashonloop.com