“What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) one idea stands out: resilience. ” So begins a must read piece in Fast Company by futurist Jamais Cascio.
The concept of resilience, as defined by Cascio,
means the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an institution, or a system–to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards. Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient structure would bend, but would be hard to break.
Resilience Science, a blog run by geographer Garry Peterson, tipped me off to the Cascio piece. The RS blog is an offshoot of a larger network of interdisciplinary scientists that form the Resilience Alliance, which works
to develop a practical theoretical foundation for a sustainable civilization.
As Cascio explains in his article for Fast Company,
One reason why the idea of resilience resonates with those of us engaged in foresight work is that, as troubling as it may be to contemplate, the current massive economic downturn is likely to be neither the only nor the biggest crisis we face over the next few decades. The need to shift quickly away from fossil fuels (for both environmental and supply reasons) may be as big a shock as today’s ”econalypse,” and could easily be compounded by accelerating problems caused by global warming.
Category: global warming, Resilience Science
