|
|
| (13 intermediate revisions by 5 users not shown) |
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| | Resilience is a way of living, preparing, and creating abundance. |
| | |
| Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from hard times and shocks. They do this by influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. They do this both actively and also passively through the inherent design of the system. | | Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from hard times and shocks. They do this by influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. They do this both actively and also passively through the inherent design of the system. |
|
| |
|
| When times are bad they can call upon the many resouces that make them a healthy community. Their [[social capital]] means that they have good information and communication networks, and a community that shares and helps as needed. | | When times are bad they can call upon the many resouces that make them a healthy community. Their [[social capital]] means that they have good information and communication networks, and a community that shares and helps as needed. |
|
| |
|
| == What is resilience? ==
| | Resilience uses ancient wisdom and modern science. It relies on [[design]], [[technology]], and action, that enables people and communities to absorb change and bounce back from shocks and hard times. Resilience means being able to call upon resources we prepared beforehand. Our social capital gives us good information and communication, and our community shares and helps. Our design and preparedness strengthen us, and the diversity and creativity of our solutions respond to local circumstances. |
| The concept of resilience is central to this book. In ecology, the term resilience refers to an ecosystem’s ability to roll with external shocks and attempted enforced changes. Walker et al. define it thus:
| | |
| | Resilience has important economic and social implications. |
|
| |
|
| “Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.”
| | {{TOCright}} |
|
| |
|
| In the context of communities and settlements, it refers to their ability to not collapse at first sight of oil or food shortages, and to their ability to respond with adaptability to disturbance. The UK truck drivers’ dispute of 2000 offers a valuable lesson here. Within the space of three days, the UK economy was brought to the brink, as it became clear that the country was about a day away from food rationing and civil unrest.
| | == Fragility == |
| | Without resilience, highly ordered social structures are reduced to chaos and crisis in the face of adversity. With resilience, we create abundance in good times and security in bad. |
|
| |
|
| Shortly before the dispute was resolved, Sir Peter Davis, Chairman of Sainsbury’s, sent a letter to Tony Blair saying that food shortages would appear in “days rather than weeks”. The fragility of the illusion that, as DEFRA said in a 2003 statement, “national food security is neither necessary nor is it desirable,” became glaringly obvious. It became clear that we no longer have any resilience left to fall back on, and are, in reality, three days away from hunger at any moment, evoking the old saying that “civilisation is only three meals deep”. We have become completely reliant on the utterly unreliable, and we have no Plan B.
| | Optimization for efficiency in a routine context with little change leads to fragility in the face of the unexpected. There is usually a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.{{analyze}} |
|
| |
|
| The concept of resilience is distinct from the more-often-mentioned concept of sustainability. A community might, for example, campaign for plastics recycling, where all of its industrial and domestic plastic waste is collected for recycling. While almost certainly better for the environment as a whole, it adds nearly no resilience to the community. Perhaps a better solution (alongside the obvious one of producing less plastic waste), would be to develop other uses for waste plastics requiring minimal processing, such as tightly compressed building blocks or an insulating product for local use. Simply collecting it and sending it away doesn’t leave the community in a stronger position, nor is the community more able to respond creatively to change and shock. The same is true of some of the strategies put forward by climate change campaigns that don’t take peak oil into consideration. Planting trees to create community woodlands may lock up carbon (though the science is still divided on this) and be good for biodiversity, but does little to build resilience; whereas the planting of well-designed agroforestry/food forest plantings does. The Millennium Forests initiative missed a huge opportunity to put in place a key resource: we could by now have food forests up and down the country starting to bear fruit (both metaphorically and literally).
| | However it may be that too much emphasis on putting aside reserves, at the cost of efficiency, would not be ideal for resilience either. Less productivity compounded over a few years will lead to significantly less reserve, in terms of production capacity and reserve stocks (emergency supplies),{{analyze}} |
|
| |
|
| Economist David Fleming argues that the benefits for a community with enhanced resilience will be that:
| | In contrast to efficiency, focusing on [[abundance]] enhances everyday life and effective productivity as well as creating resilience. An abundance focus - avoiding [[waste]], |
| | improving productivity through the nurturing of soils, reuse of resources - |
|
| |
|
| * If one part is destroyed, the shock will not ripple through the whole system
| | Even with [[technological advances]] and even if we choose [[simple living]] (which seems unlikely) however, the closer we approach the limits of the earth's carrying capacity, the less [[buffering capacity]] and the less resilience we have. Maintaining a spreaded (little-urbanized) and low population number is hence also part of creating resilience. (see [[Human population management]]) |
| * There is wide diversity of character and solutions developed creatively in response to local circumstances
| |
| * It can meet its needs despite the substantial absence of travel and transport
| |
| * The other big infrastructures and bureaucracies of the intermediate economy are replaced by fit-for-purpose local alternatives at drastically reduced cost
| |
|
| |
|
| Increased resilience and a stronger local economy do not mean that we put a fence up around our towns and cities and refuse to allow anything in or out. It is not a rejection of commerce or somehow a return to a rose-tinted version of some imagined past. It is an acceptance of remarkably direct access to well-being and an approach to integration of the best we can recall and devise. What it does mean is being more prepared for a leaner future, more self-reliant, and prioritising the local over the imported.
| | == Shocks == |
| | Shocks are by nature unexpected - in spite of the confidence of forecasts by government and other experts, we don't know what we face in future. |
|
| |
|
| == An idea catching on == | | == Complexity == |
|
| |
|
| Resilience is a serious topic with important economic and social implications - it is not a fringe environmentalist idea. For example, see the writings of [http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/about.html John Robb] and [http://jeffvail.net/ Jeff Vail], whose websites portray them as military intelligence and geopolitical experts, with specialties in counter-terrorism and the like, acting as consultants and lecturers to government alphabet agencies. Each talks at length about resilient communities. Vail also uses the phrase, which he may have coined, the [[hamlet economy]],<ref>[http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/07/re-post-hamlet-economy.html Re-Post: Hamlet Economy], Jeff Vail, July 28, 2008,</ref> and describes it as “as a non-hierarchal network of self-sufficient but interacting nodes.”
| | Humans and nature make up social-ecological systems - an ecosystem of [[Glossary_of_sustainability_terms#I|interdependent]] elements. Our systems are complex, unpredictable, in constant flux. There is no blueprint for being resilient, but a toolkit of solutions and a sourcebook and laboratory of ideas. |
|
| |
|
| == The three ingredients of a resilient system == | | == What is resilience? == |
| According to studies of what makes ecosystems resilient, there are three features that are central to a system’s ability to reorganise itself following shocks. They are:
| |
| * Diversity
| |
| * Modularity
| |
| * Tightness of Feedbacks
| |
|
| |
|
| Diversity relates to the number of elements that comprise a particular system, be they people, species, businesses, institutions or sources of food. The resilience of a system comes not only from the number of the species that make up that diversity, but also from the number of connections between them. Diversity also refers to the diversity of functions in our settlements (rather than just relying on one – say, tourism or mining) and a diversity of potential responses to challenges, leading to a greater flexibility. Diversity of land use – farms, market gardens, aquaculture, forest gardens, nut tree plantings, and so on – are key to the resilience of the settlement, and their erosion in recent years has paralleled the rise of monocultures, which are by definition an absence of diversity.
| | The benefits of resilience to a community include: |
| | * Diversity of character and creative solutions responding to local circumstances |
| | * Meeting local needs even in the substantial absence of travel and transport |
|
| |
|
| Another meaning of diversity is that of diversity between systems. The exact set of solutions that will work in one place will not necessarily work in other places; because of unique demographics and physical attributes, each community will assemble its own solutions, responses and tools. This matters for two reasons. Firstly because it makes top-down approaches almost redundant, as those at the top lack the knowledge of local conditions and how to respond to them. Secondly, because resilience-building is about working on small changes to lots of niches in the place, making lots of small interventions rather than a few large ones.
| | Resilience is a serious topic with important economic and social implications - it is not a fringe environmentalist idea. For example, see the writings of [http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/about.html John Robb] and [http://jeffvail.net/ Jeff Vail], whose websites portray them as military intelligence and geopolitical experts, with specialties in counter-terrorism and the like, acting as consultants and lecturers to government alphabet agencies. Each talks at length about resilient communities. Vail also uses the phrase, which he may have coined, the [[hamlet economy]],<ref>[http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/07/re-post-hamlet-economy.html Re-Post: Hamlet Economy], Jeff Vail, July 28, 2008,</ref> and describes it as “as a non-hierarchal network of [[self-sufficient]] but interacting nodes.” |
|
| |
|
| The term modularity, according to ecologists Brian Walker and David Salt, relates to “the manner in which the components that make up a system are linked”. Towards the end of 2007, the Northern Rock bank crisis led to major problems and uncertainty in the British banking system. It was caused by over-lending to high-risk house-buyers in the US thousands of miles away, but within a short period of time one system had knocked on to another and then another, showing how the globalised networks, often trumpeted as one of globalisation’s great strengths, can in fact also be one of its great weaknesses. The over-networked nature of modern, highly connected systems allow shock to travel rapidly through them, with potentially disastrous effects.
| | == How is resilience created? == |
|
| |
|
| A more modular structure means that the parts of a system can more effectively self-organise in the event of shock. For example, as a result of the globalisation of the food industry, animals and animal parts are moved around the world, leading to increased occurrences of diseases such as bird flu and foot-and-mouth disease. Reducing animal transportation and reintroducing local abattoirs and processing would lead to a more modular system, with local breeds for local markets and a much reduced risk of disease spreading with the rapidity that we have seen in recent outbreaks.
| | Resilience is created through diversity, preparedness, wisdom and abundance. |
|
| |
|
| When designing energy descent pathways for Transition Initiatives, the concept of modularity is key: maximising modularity with more internal connections reduces vulnerability to any disruptions of wider networks. Local food systems, local investment models, and so on, all add to this modularity, meaning that we engage with the wider world, but from an ethic of networking and information sharing rather than of mutual dependence.
| | === Social cohesion === |
|
| |
|
| Tightness of Feedbacks refers to how quickly and strongly the consequences of a change in one part of the system are felt and responded to in other parts. Walker and Salt write: “Centralised governance and globalisation can weaken feedbacks. As feedbacks lengthen, there is an increased chance of crossing a threshold without detecting it in a timely fashion.” In a more localised system, the results of our actions are more obvious. We don’t want excessive use of pesticides or other pollutants in our area, but seem happier to be oblivious to their use in other parts of the world. In a globalised system, the feedbacks about the impacts of soil erosion, low pay and pesticide use provide weak feedback signals. Tightening feedback loops will have beneficial results, bringing the consequences of our actions closer to home, rather than so far from our awareness that they don’t even register. When people live off the grid in terms of energy, they are more mindful about their consumption partly because they are closer to its generation – the feedback loop is smaller.
| | Willingness to cooperate and share resources. |
|
| |
|
| == Life before oil wasn’t all bad ==
| | Solutions designed and implemented by members of the community, working together. |
| There was much in the past that we would never wish to return to: life was often miserable, debilitating and short, and in many ways there was a terrible lack of freedom. We would not want to return to this - and yet, there is much that we can learn in the inventive and careful ways that society responded to its challenges.
| |
|
| |
|
| These are not new ideas; rather they are the unstated principles that underpinned how things always were until the Oil Age began. It can be instructive to look back into the history of our settlements to see how people employed ingenuity and common sense before cheap fossil fuels enabled us to do without them. During the 1950s and 60s in the UK there was a concerted effort to vilify the local, the small, the simple, the rustic, the ‘old-fashioned’. It is a process that happened more recently in Ireland, and is happening aggressively now in China and India. Car good, horse-drawn cart bad; concrete good, cob bad; office job good, farming bad; TV good, hearthside storytelling bad. While not wishing to romanticise the past or paint an idyllic picture of localised economies, we have come to believe either that life before oil consisted of rolling around in the mud, incest, shoving young boys up chimneys and little else; or that it was some idyllic world where everyone respected their elders and had roses over the front door.
| | Local services and joint efforts focus on the ecosystem: [[community gardens]], [[urban gardens]], [[green roofs]], [[parks]] and [[forests]]. |
|
| |
|
| In fact there is much that we can learn from and reclaim in our history. People were generally far more skilled and practical, local economies were more diverse and resilient, and people more connected to where their energy and food came from. For example, in Totnes in Devon in the 1930s, the centre of town contained a number of allotments and market gardens, which provided most of the vegetables and some of the fruit consumed in the town. Apart from the railway station, all of the businesses were owned by local people. Contrast this with a recent survey by the New Economics Foundation which found that of the 103 towns and villages surveyed, 42% were what they called ‘Clone Towns’, which they defined as “one which had had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a monochrome strip of global and national chains that mean its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the county.” Locally owned businesses are a dying breed, and we are only just starting to appreciate how important they are, and the resilience they give to local communities and their economies.
| | === Diversity and redundancy === |
|
| |
|
| Of course, there was much that was miserable and debilitating, and in many ways there was a lack of personal choice that today we would find strange, if not intolerable. Lives were shorter, and less "soft" as George Monbiot writes. However, while not for a second advocating that we model our future on our past, I would agree that we ought not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take a walk around the endless streets, shopping centres, car parks and tarmac expanses of present-day London, and then compare them with this section from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations:
| | Each element in the system performs multiple functions, and each function is served by multiple elements. Diversity of action and design gives us choices and backups - multiple local sources for food, water and energy. In our gardens it gives us a variety of flavors, a longer harvest, and resistance to disease. In our living environment it gives us richness of experience. |
|
| |
|
| “Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns. . . .
| | This applies to skills also. For example medical specialists are very valuable having medical skills (first aid and more) throughout the community enables a better response than having ''only'' medical specialists. This is especially true in more isolated communities, or those with less availability of medical care; in all cases the need is greater in cases of disaster or shock that affect the availability of medical services. (See [[Where There Is No Doctor]]). |
|
| |
|
| ‘At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then, I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,’ said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, ‘if you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.’
| | === Preparedness === |
|
| |
|
| Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake on whose margin the bower was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.
| | Thinking ahead, conserving, studying and planning for our future. Preparing for hard times that may or may not come, in a form that we cannot predict. |
|
| |
|
| ‘I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,’ said Wemmick, in acknowledging my compliments. ‘Well; it’s a good thing, you know. It brushes the Newgate cobwebs away . . .’”
| | Although it involves planning for the worst, resilience allows us to live with the best when things go well, by giving us abundance and security. |
|
| |
|
| Although fictional, Dickens is painting a picture of areas within walking distance of central London around 1870. Wemmick was simultaneously a consumer and a producer. Most of us have long since abandoned the latter. Nowadays we might call Mr Wemmick’s set-up ‘a low-impact building constructed from local materials set within a biodiverse urban edible landscape integrating protected cropping, aquaculture, chicken and pig tractoring’. By 2008 it is probably a car park.
| | ===Wisdom=== |
|
| |
|
| == The cake analogy ==
| | Globally shared solutions to local challenges, a commons of tools and ideas, an understanding of context. |
| I like to use the analogy of a metaphorical cake. In Totnes, as an example, prior to the advent of the railways in the 1850s, the town and its hinterland were largely self-reliant. Its milk, cheese, meat, seasonal vegetables and fruit, as well as the bulk of its building materials and some of its fabrics were all produced locally (until the Industrial Revolution, when fabric production was moved to the north of England). What came in on small sailing boats up the River Dart to be offloaded at the Quays were Baltic timber, apples for cider from Brittany (the area drank and exported a lot of cider but didn’t grow enough apples) and some wool. If, for some reason, those boats stopped coming, the area would manage. It was resilient. The cake was produced locally. and the icing and the cherries on the top were imported.
| |
|
| |
|
| Now it is the other way round. The cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local agriculture produces the icing and the cherries on top. We have moved from resilient to precariously unresilient. The process of dismantling the complex and diverse rural economy that supported communities over centuries, and that was unconsciously designed on the principles of resilience has, thanks to the relentless forces of globalisation, been dismantled and thrown into the large yellow skip of history over the last 40-50 years. As ecologist Aldo Leopold observed, “Who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” We have kept very few of the parts, and the idea that we might need some of them again is only just starting to emerge.
| | ===Abundance=== |
|
| |
|
| == Echoes of a resilient past ==
| | Creating more than we need, a buffer against harsh times. Resilience is joyful, abundant living, creating more than we need - preparing for hard times whenever they come, and creating a thrivable future whatever may come. |
| Two examples from Totnes’s recent past offer both wider insights into how our settlements functioned prior to cheap oil, and some of the strategies and infrastructure they may need to consider beyond it. In the middle of the town you’ll find Heath’s Nursery Car Park. While to the modern eye it looks like any other car park, what it replaced is extraordinary. It used to be a vibrant and productive urban market garden, as were another two of the town’s car parks. This is not unique to Totnes; it is a pattern you’ll find in any settlement. The orchards, the market gardens, the coppices, the nut trees and the fish nurseries were all grubbed out and replaced by the relentless surge of urbanisation which transformed our towns and cities. Now their legacy can only be found in the street names, ‘Orchard Rise’, ‘Nursery Lane’, ‘Sawpit Lane’. As James Howard Kunstler is fond of telling us, places are often named after what was destroyed to make space for them.
| |
|
| |
|
| Heath’s Nursery was begun by George Heath in 1920, when he bought land in the middle of the town to start a nursery. In Totnes Museum is an invoice from that year for the dismantling, moving and re-erecting of a glasshouse, the first to go up on the site. In the 1930s the business expanded, as Heath’s son, also called George, came into the business, and a shop premises on the High Street was obtained.
| | == Resilience is distinct from sustainability == |
|
| |
|
| The market garden was in two parts: the first was a large open area with one heated glasshouse where seedlings were started; the second, below it, had a series of glasshouses which were also heated. George Heath (the son) also kept pigs on the site from 1940 until the late 1950s. People I have spoken to who were at school then remember being given time off class to walk down to Heath’s with the pig swill from the school kitchen, and swill was also collected from other local schools, shops and hospitals. Much of the fertility came from the local bacon factory, either in the form of pig manure or (vegetarians might choose to look away at this point) as congealed blood which was added to the water used in the glasshouses as a nutritious plant feed.
| | Resilience is distinct from [[sustainability]], but with much overlap. |
|
| |
|
| The nursery produced tomatoes, beetroot, cabbage, lettuce, runner beans, broad beans and also a wide range of flowers, such as chrysanthemums and dahlias, all of which were sold through the shop on the High Street. They didn’t grow crops such as potatoes, as these could be grown far more competitively by local farmers, and in essence, they took up too much space. Heath’s also sold seed potatoes and a large range of packeted seeds which were well patronised by local gardeners. Other ways in which the nursery was linked into the local economy included the use of wood from the local sawmill (‘Reeves’) to make their seed trays and the selling of produce, such as strawberries, from other local growers. | | The concept of resilience is distinct from the more-often-mentioned concept of sustainability. For example, plastics recycling is almost certainly better for the environment as a whole, but adds nearly no resilience to the community. However, developing other uses for waste plastics requiring minimal processing, which can be processed and used locally, adds resilience - for example compressed building blocks or insulating products. |
|
| |
|
| Running a nursery like Heath’s was hard work. This was a seven-days-a-week business, but it performed an invaluable service to the town and provided a reasonable living. In the early 1980s when Mr Heath retired, neither of his sons wanted to take on the business and it was gradually wound down. The glasshouses were dismantled (around the same time as they were also being dismantled in the town’s other market gardens) and the land was sold to the Council, which turned it into a car park. Imagine the wonderful soil that was lost! The site is marked as productive land back as far as records exist.
| | See [[Industrial ecology]] and [[No such thing as waste]]. |
|
| |
|
| In 1980 George Heath was seen as being behind the times, but he was actually about thirty years ahead of the times. His model of a localised food system that was post-carbon and based on zero food miles (indeed, it allows us to coin the term ‘food feet’) is one we will have to rediscover and put back in place over the next few years. But often, owing to development, this option is closed to us. Some of the site of Heath’s Nursery is currently being developed, the possibility of its reinstatement gone for the foreseeable future.
| | == Looking back == |
|
| |
|
| Going back further in local history, we find another story with insights into how society functioned before oil, as well as how it might re-organise itself beyond it. The Blight family business was horses, in particular draught-horses, which provided much of the town’s horsepower (literally) prior to the arrival of the internal combustion engine. In the same way that a globalised, energy-intensive infrastructure now exists to keep motorised transport functioning, before the 1930s a localised, low-energy, diverse infrastructure existed to support the horse-powered economy. One could find a blacksmith within at most a five-mile radius of anywhere. Also there were saddlers, harness-makers, ostlers, wheelwrights, grooms, ferries, coachmen and vets.
| | There was much in the past that we would never wish to return to: life was often miserable, debilitating and short, and in many ways there was a terrible lack of freedom, that today we would find strange, if not intolerable. Lives were shorter, and less "soft" as George Monbiot writes. We would not want to return to this - and yet, there is much that we can learn in the inventive and careful ways that society responded to its challenges.{{expand}} |
|
| |
|
| The Blights’ business was set up by David Blight, who started his business providing horsepower for the cutting of the South Devon railway line in the 1870s. As well as that, he also provided horses for the tramway that then ran from Totnes station to the Quays. When he died in 1889, his son Robert took over the business. | | The [[Australian Aboriginal]] and [[Papua New Guinea]]n idea of [[sacred sites]] provided a reservoir of protected animals that would always be able to breed, giving resilience to their population. No-fishing zones work on the same principles today.{{fact}}{{expand} (No-fishing zones work well when enforced on a local or national scale, but they are difficult to apply in international zones, leading to a "[[tragedy of the Commons]]" dilemma). |
|
| |
|
| At its peak, the Blights owned eight horses, which were kept stabled in the middle of the town in what was, to all intents and purposes, the back room of their house. At that time, most of the hotels in the town had their own stables in order to be able to provide horses for carriages passing through the town. The Blights’ haulage business ran until 1930, when the Totnes Fire Brigade, one of their main customers, upgraded to a motorised fire engine. At this point Robert Blight sold his interest to a local transportation company and became a manager for them.
| | == Why local is important == |
|
| |
|
| What is interesting to me about the Blights, like George Heath, is the insight they offer into the infrastructure that was necessary before the internal combustion engine. If there was a fire, the Fire Brigade needed something to pull their engines, and they needed it urgently. Bringing the horses in from the surrounding fields would have been too time-consuming. Even though the horses were basically stabled in the Blights’ house, they were a key part of the town being able to function. With the arrival of the car and the tractor, the infrastructure that supported horses contracted rapidly.
| | The set of solutions that will work in one place may not work in other places, because of unique demographics and physical attributes. |
|
| |
|
| I asked a local farmer, who grew up farming in the 1930s with horses about four miles from Totnes, whether he mourned the passing of working horses. He replied: “It depended very much on the individual. If economics were your objective, then the change away from horses brought great pleasure. If you were artistic and poetic, it was a shame. I started retiring my horses in 1934 when the first tractor arrived, and I just stopped replacing them as they died out. The horsemen just became tractor drivers.”
| | When travel and transport become difficult or expensive, the resilient community experiences less impact. |
|
| |
|
| We can see the resilient rural economy, within which both of these examples sat, as being like a web of strings that connected all the various elements of the community together, similar to the ‘Web of Life’ exercise (see page 60). This web of connections was, while complex and resilient, very fragile. In effect, the Age of Cheap Oil took a pair of scissors to this web, replacing these functions with more energy-dependent versions. It is easy to understand why this happened and why people embraced it. Most of us would have done the same, had we lived in that time. It saved time, was less hard work, offered new opportunities, development, and was seen as providing a better life for the next generation. No one could have foreseen the implications fifty years down the line.
| | == Why wider networks are important == |
|
| |
|
| It is easy to forget the circumstances that led to many changes that we now take for granted. The move away from coal, for example, was driven as much as anything by the fact that on a bad day, city dwellers couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of them, and thousands died every year from the effects of smoke inhalation. However, now it is becoming clear that the cheap oil required to sustain our oil-dependent lifestyles is not going to be with us indefinitely, we find ourselves looking around at the severed strands of web and starting to wonder which strands might reconnect to which others. The Transition approach is one of re-weaving this web, and remaking the connections which will be needed by a resilient post-oil economy. Every new harmonious relationship we forge is a step back to sanity.
| | A large interconnected system offers advantages in resilience also - the whole can absorb shocks in a part. |
|
| |
|
| == Can we learn anything useful from Britain’s last ‘wartime mobilisation’? ==
| | [[Amartya Sen]] research on famines found that they have never occured in a [[democracy]] with a free press. A [[government]] concerned about what voters think will always fix the problem. This shows that there is enough resilience and response within the national system to respond to a calamity affecting part of the country. They can do that by mobilizing resources from the larger system and economy. |
| Can any lessons be learned from Britain’s most recent national ‘Powerdown’, World War II? While there are clearly many differences with the kind of proactive energy-descent planning this book advocates, there are also relevant similarities. We are clearly a very different society now, with different skills, expectations and values, and the nature of the challenge facing us is very different; yet even so, a look back to that time can be instructive. As Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation observes,
| |
|
| |
|
| | It is unwise to rely entirely on this, however, as a calamity on an unprecedented scale (national or larger) will be much more difficult to solve. Also, it is clearly better to not have the calamity in the first place, |
|
| |
|
| | == Design and technology == |
|
| |
|
| “Recent history demonstrates that whole economies can be re-geared in short periods of time, which is exactly the demand global warming makes of us. . . . Could it be that the experience of social and military mobilisation in wartime might answer the biggest question to do with global warming: are we capable of changing our lifestyles and economies enough and in time to stop it?”
| | [[Earthquakes]] and other natural disasters occur around the world - however it is usually only in poorer countries that experience major disasters, with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and larger numbers of people displaced. |
|
| |
|
| There is much that can be learned from both the run-up to the war and from the 1939-45 period itself. In the light of the need for broad engagement across sectors in response to a life-threatening situation, we can learn some lessons about how quickly governments can respond (when they have to) by looking at how the British Government prepared for the impacts war would have on food production.
| | This is due to a lack of: |
| | * '''[[Design]]''' - the awareness, financial resources and regulations to ensure that houses are safe and shelters are available. |
| | * '''[[Technology]]''' - advance warning systems and public alert systems are typically not prepared. Note that this is firstly a matter of prioritization and effective governance, as there are generally a range of possible solutions, including affordable systems using existing technologies and communication systems. |
|
| |
|
| In April 1936, with war against Germany a possibility but by no means a certainty, an Act of Parliament set up two committees: one was commissioned to design and prepare a scheme of food rationing, and the other to propose the commodities to be given priority in a programme of storing food. This led to the creation of the Food (Defence Plans) Department in the Board of Trade, which became the driving force in preparing the food sector for war. Even so, Alan Wilt argues, it was not until 1940 that the government produced a long-term policy. Committees were set up in 476 districts nationwide to co-ordinate the reorientation of agriculture. As well as attempting to increase levels of stored food, increasing home food production became a major concern. In 1936, two-thirds of Britain’s food was imported and much of the nation’s productive land was under pasture.
| | == The resilient community within society == |
|
| |
|
| By 1944 the amount of land under cultivation had increased from 12.9 million acres in 1939 to 19.8 million, food production had risen 91% and in effect Britain was able to feed itself for approximately 160 days a year rather than the 120 days it had been in 1939. Food imports to the UK halved between 1939 and 1944. Local authorities set up horticultural committees to advise people on growing food, complemented by a huge programme of promoting the virtues of thrift and economy, as well as teaching practical skills. Some of the posters produced at the time are great examples of how to promote conservation, frugality and food production.
| | Resilient communities influence their environments and prepare for change, whether economic, social or environmental. They are active in influencing their environments and passively prepared through resilient design. |
|
| |
|
| In 1942, Bristol (for example) had 15,000 allotments, and over half the nation’s manual workers had an allotment or garden, producing around 10% of the nation’s food. People sometimes remark that during the war, allotments and back gardens ‘only’ produced 10% of the national diet, but the important point is that the 10% it produced was the 10% that kept the nation healthy. While agriculture grew the carbohydrates and the fats, it was the back gardens that produced most of the fresh fruit and vegetables.
| | ==Notes== |
| | <small><references/></small> |
|
| |
|
| Food rationing was introduced on January 8th 1940, and initially applied only to bacon, butter and sugar, before being expanded to cover most foods (apart from fish and chips!) as well as fuel and clothing. One of the successes of rationing was that it rebalanced inequalities in diet. While the wealthy saw their diet restrained, for the poor, particularly in industrial centres, diet improved significantly from the pre-war years. Total food consumption fell 11% by 1944, as did meat consumption. Infant mortality rates also fell, and arguably the UK’s general state of health was never better, before or since. In terms of car use, petrol rationing, introduced in 1939, was restricted to 1,800 miles per year for non-essential users, then gradually reduced until 1942 when individual allocations were abolished. Between 1938 and 1944 there was a 95% drop in the use of cars in the UK.
| | == See also == |
|
| |
|
| Much can be learned from the experience of World War II regarding how governments prepare for such a transition. The British Government was able, between 1936 when the Food (Defence Plans) Department was set up within the Board of Trade and 1939 when the war began, to co-ordinate a response which was able (just) to support the nation. The most important lesson from the war years, according to Andrew Simms, is that “when governments really want to, they can do almost anything, including good things.”
| | * [[Resilient communities]] |
| | * [[Glossary_of_sustainability_terms#I|Interdependence]] |
|
| |
|
| Clearly peak oil and climate change have yet to engender in the population or within government a sense of urgency anywhere near that of a Nazi invasion. However, as the Hirsch Report states, by the time a government considers it politically expedient to take the scale of action prompted by peak oil, it is too late. In terms of the model in Figure 8, the response during World War II was arguably closest to Heinberg’s ‘Powerdown’, although the government’s emphasis on local action and reskilling places it further round towards his ‘Building Lifeboats’. Alongside the war effort, the building of resilience became a national priority, and was actively encouraged and facilitated by national government.
| | == External links == |
|
| |
|
| ''This page contains content taken from [[TTH Chapter 3: Why rebuilding resilience is as important as cutting carbon emissions]] (on [http://www.appropedia.org/index.php?title=TTH_Chapter_3:_Why_rebuilding_resilience_is_as_important_as_cutting_carbon_emissions&oldid=66502 April 1, 2009]) - part of the [[The Transition Handbook]].''
| | * [http://transitionculture.org/2007/08/14/transition-resilience-and-tradeable-energy-quotas/ Transition, Resilience and Tradeable Energy Quotas], article by David Fleming and Lawrence Woodward, posted on Rob Hopkins' blog. |
|
| |
|
| ''This page contains [[public domain]] content from [http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2008/09/25/of-resilient-communities-ecovillages/ Of Resilient Communities & Ecovillages], timboucher.com, Sep 25, 2008.'' | | ''This page contains [[public domain]] content from [http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2008/09/25/of-resilient-communities-ecovillages/ Of Resilient Communities & Ecovillages], timboucher.com, Sep 25, 2008.'' |
|
| |
|
| == See also ==
| |
| * [[Resilient communities]]
| |
|
| |
|
| [[Category:Resilience]] | | [[Category:Resilience]] |
Resilience is a way of living, preparing, and creating abundance.
Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from hard times and shocks. They do this by influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. They do this both actively and also passively through the inherent design of the system.
When times are bad they can call upon the many resouces that make them a healthy community. Their social capital means that they have good information and communication networks, and a community that shares and helps as needed.
Resilience uses ancient wisdom and modern science. It relies on design, technology, and action, that enables people and communities to absorb change and bounce back from shocks and hard times. Resilience means being able to call upon resources we prepared beforehand. Our social capital gives us good information and communication, and our community shares and helps. Our design and preparedness strengthen us, and the diversity and creativity of our solutions respond to local circumstances.
Resilience has important economic and social implications.
Fragility
Without resilience, highly ordered social structures are reduced to chaos and crisis in the face of adversity. With resilience, we create abundance in good times and security in bad.
Optimization for efficiency in a routine context with little change leads to fragility in the face of the unexpected. There is usually a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.Template:Analyze
However it may be that too much emphasis on putting aside reserves, at the cost of efficiency, would not be ideal for resilience either. Less productivity compounded over a few years will lead to significantly less reserve, in terms of production capacity and reserve stocks (emergency supplies),Template:Analyze
In contrast to efficiency, focusing on abundance enhances everyday life and effective productivity as well as creating resilience. An abundance focus - avoiding waste,
improving productivity through the nurturing of soils, reuse of resources -
Even with technological advances and even if we choose simple living (which seems unlikely) however, the closer we approach the limits of the earth's carrying capacity, the less buffering capacity and the less resilience we have. Maintaining a spreaded (little-urbanized) and low population number is hence also part of creating resilience. (see Human population management)
Shocks
Shocks are by nature unexpected - in spite of the confidence of forecasts by government and other experts, we don't know what we face in future.
Complexity
Humans and nature make up social-ecological systems - an ecosystem of interdependent elements. Our systems are complex, unpredictable, in constant flux. There is no blueprint for being resilient, but a toolkit of solutions and a sourcebook and laboratory of ideas.
What is resilience?
The benefits of resilience to a community include:
- Diversity of character and creative solutions responding to local circumstances
- Meeting local needs even in the substantial absence of travel and transport
Resilience is a serious topic with important economic and social implications - it is not a fringe environmentalist idea. For example, see the writings of John Robb and Jeff Vail, whose websites portray them as military intelligence and geopolitical experts, with specialties in counter-terrorism and the like, acting as consultants and lecturers to government alphabet agencies. Each talks at length about resilient communities. Vail also uses the phrase, which he may have coined, the hamlet economy,[1] and describes it as “as a non-hierarchal network of self-sufficient but interacting nodes.”
How is resilience created?
Resilience is created through diversity, preparedness, wisdom and abundance.
Social cohesion
Willingness to cooperate and share resources.
Solutions designed and implemented by members of the community, working together.
Local services and joint efforts focus on the ecosystem: community gardens, urban gardens, green roofs, parks and forests.
Diversity and redundancy
Each element in the system performs multiple functions, and each function is served by multiple elements. Diversity of action and design gives us choices and backups - multiple local sources for food, water and energy. In our gardens it gives us a variety of flavors, a longer harvest, and resistance to disease. In our living environment it gives us richness of experience.
This applies to skills also. For example medical specialists are very valuable having medical skills (first aid and more) throughout the community enables a better response than having only medical specialists. This is especially true in more isolated communities, or those with less availability of medical care; in all cases the need is greater in cases of disaster or shock that affect the availability of medical services. (See Where There Is No Doctor).
Preparedness
Thinking ahead, conserving, studying and planning for our future. Preparing for hard times that may or may not come, in a form that we cannot predict.
Although it involves planning for the worst, resilience allows us to live with the best when things go well, by giving us abundance and security.
Wisdom
Globally shared solutions to local challenges, a commons of tools and ideas, an understanding of context.
Abundance
Creating more than we need, a buffer against harsh times. Resilience is joyful, abundant living, creating more than we need - preparing for hard times whenever they come, and creating a thrivable future whatever may come.
Resilience is distinct from sustainability
Resilience is distinct from sustainability, but with much overlap.
The concept of resilience is distinct from the more-often-mentioned concept of sustainability. For example, plastics recycling is almost certainly better for the environment as a whole, but adds nearly no resilience to the community. However, developing other uses for waste plastics requiring minimal processing, which can be processed and used locally, adds resilience - for example compressed building blocks or insulating products.
See Industrial ecology and No such thing as waste.
Looking back
There was much in the past that we would never wish to return to: life was often miserable, debilitating and short, and in many ways there was a terrible lack of freedom, that today we would find strange, if not intolerable. Lives were shorter, and less "soft" as George Monbiot writes. We would not want to return to this - and yet, there is much that we can learn in the inventive and careful ways that society responded to its challenges.
This page or section needs to be expanded.You can help Appropedia by adding information on this topic. Thanks!Read more...
The Australian Aboriginal and Papua New Guinean idea of sacred sites provided a reservoir of protected animals that would always be able to breed, giving resilience to their population. No-fishing zones work on the same principles today.[verification needed]{{expand} (No-fishing zones work well when enforced on a local or national scale, but they are difficult to apply in international zones, leading to a "tragedy of the Commons" dilemma).
Why local is important
The set of solutions that will work in one place may not work in other places, because of unique demographics and physical attributes.
When travel and transport become difficult or expensive, the resilient community experiences less impact.
Why wider networks are important
A large interconnected system offers advantages in resilience also - the whole can absorb shocks in a part.
Amartya Sen research on famines found that they have never occured in a democracy with a free press. A government concerned about what voters think will always fix the problem. This shows that there is enough resilience and response within the national system to respond to a calamity affecting part of the country. They can do that by mobilizing resources from the larger system and economy.
It is unwise to rely entirely on this, however, as a calamity on an unprecedented scale (national or larger) will be much more difficult to solve. Also, it is clearly better to not have the calamity in the first place,
Design and technology
Earthquakes and other natural disasters occur around the world - however it is usually only in poorer countries that experience major disasters, with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and larger numbers of people displaced.
This is due to a lack of:
- Design - the awareness, financial resources and regulations to ensure that houses are safe and shelters are available.
- Technology - advance warning systems and public alert systems are typically not prepared. Note that this is firstly a matter of prioritization and effective governance, as there are generally a range of possible solutions, including affordable systems using existing technologies and communication systems.
Resilient communities influence their environments and prepare for change, whether economic, social or environmental. They are active in influencing their environments and passively prepared through resilient design.
Notes
See also
External links
This page contains public domain content from Of Resilient Communities & Ecovillages, timboucher.com, Sep 25, 2008.
