Living and Breathing in a ‘Black Swan’ World | Solutions.
A Marine Corps friend of mine defines resilience as the ability to take a gut punch and come back swinging. More formally, it is said to be the capacity to maintain core functions and values in the face of outside disturbance. Either way, the concept is elusive, a matter of more or less, not either/or. The combination of slow, cumulative changes like soil erosion, loss of species, and acidification of oceans with fast, Black Swan events, such as the Fukushima disaster, like intersecting ocean currents, will create overlapping levels of unpredictable turbulence at various depths1. Against that prospect, the idea that we can improve resilience at scales ranging from cities to global civilization is becoming an important part of policy discussions, but mostly in reaction to crises like the global economic crisis of 2008 and the prospect of rapid climate change. If we are serious about it we will have to improve not only our capacity to act with foresight but also develop the wherewithal to diagnose and remedy the deeper problems rooted in language, paradigms, social structure, and economy that undermine resilience in the first place.
The theoretical underpinnings of the concept go back to the writings of C. S. Holling on the resilience of ecological systems and to metaphors drawn from the disciplines of systems theory, mathematics, and engineering. More recently, scholars such as Joseph Tainter, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Jared Diamond have documented the histories of societies that collapsed for lack of foresight, competence, ecological intelligence, and environmental restraint.2
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