Resilience

Please go to the link and read the whole article – this is an important concept our society lacks, and we need much, much more of this kind of thinking. I for one will be purchasing Chip Ward’s books soon.

Tomgram: Chip Ward, How Efficiency Maximizes Catastrophe

Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You’re going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. “Resilience thinking,” the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace “efficiency” as the organizing principle of our economy.

Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That’s what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one “best” way of doing something — usually “best” means most profitable over the short run — and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible — things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We’re skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one “best” way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

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3 Responses

  1. In engineered systems resiliency (although it is never the term used to describe the effect) is an effect of planning for inevitable failures. In some cases the effect is achieved with redundancy. In others it is achieved with careful planning. In still others it is achieved with training. But in all cases it starts by asking the same questions “What could go wrong?” and “How do I minimize the effects when things do go wrong.”

    If resilient thinking had been used in agriculture in Ireland two hundred years ago, there is a good bet that more different kinds of potatoes would have been cultivated, and the effects of the potato famine would not have been quite so serious.

    Frequently one has to give something up to get resiliency. One has to settle for a slightly higher first cost. But what one gets back is a much more robust system. And when one is playing with things like the environment or the global supply of energy and other key commodities, one cannot afford a major breakdown. Ever.

    ((Donna: You may wish to check the spelling in the title ))

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