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What Resilience Is Not
What Resilience Is Not
A little over a week ago I published an article at The Automatic Earth by our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III from Wanganui, New Zealand, named Resilience is the New Black. After being reposted at Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism and at least a dozen other sites, it may well have had more hits than everything he ever wrote put together. While that is obviously great, Nelson also did come away feeling a bit misunderstood – in particular, about what resilience actually is, and how he made it part of his life -, and he said he wanted to try and set the record straight. By all means. Here’s the doctor:
The other two things that surprised me were the misreading of the piece and a huge amount of confusion and uncertainty about what ‘resilience’ even means. I’ll address both in this article.
Ilargi first alerted me that Yves Smith had posted the article on Naked Capitalism with some comments of her own. I had a look and was a bit shocked at what she had written. Her comments appear to misrepresent the article and perhaps served to bias readers before they got into the piece itself.
It appears that the two main points of her critique miss the mark: 1) that I have abandoned the notion of sustainability; and, 2) that I have turned my back on the world and focus only on “me, mine, my family”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Resilience is The New Black
Resilience is The New Black
This is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand. Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience, especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore. Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark in that shift, but it’s not all bad.
Nelson Lebo III: Sustainability is so 2007. Those were the heady days before the Global Financial Crisis, before $2-plus/litre petrol here in New Zealand, before the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit, before the Christchurch earthquakes, before the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)…the list continues.
Since 2008, informed conversations on the economy, the environment, and energy have shifted from ‘sustainability’ to ‘resilience’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but I’ll focus on just two: undeniable trends and a loss of faith. Let me explain.
Since 2008, most of the pre-existing trends in income inequality, extreme weather events and energy price volatility have ramped up. Sustainability is about halting and reversing these trends, but there is essentially no evidence of that type of progress, and in fact the data shows the opposite.
Plenty of quantitative data exists for the last seven years to document these accelerated trends, the most obvious is the continually widening gap between rich and poor everyone else. The second wave of commentary on the Baltimore riots (after the superficiality of the mainstream media) has been about the lack of economic activity and opportunity in many of the largely African-American neighbourhoods.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
