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A Visit to Titusville: Building Resilient Communities
A Visit to Titusville: Building Resilient Communities
The University of Pittsburgh recently invited me to their Titusville, PA campus to speak about the Transition Towns movement.I chose the theme of creating communities that have the resiliency to withstand the inevitable challenges of this century. I met with three classes, had lunch with student leaders, made a public presentation that was well-attended and interactive, and spoke with community leaders.
Titusville, where the oil industry began, is today a small, shrinking town in search of its future. It is fairly representative of small and mid-sized communities across the country. Like many, it has the potential to become a more resilient community if it chooses.
My message is one that Transition Centre has adhered to for nearly a decade. Below you will find the core principles of that presentation.
A bit of background: Transition Centre was modeled on Transition Towns. There are a number of popular options for developing a more sustainable community, but the TT model, as found in The Transition Handbook, had some attractive features. The key ideas were: local, grassroots, and community resiliency.
In 2009, we formed Transition Centre as an unofficial Transition Towns hub. In 2010, we formed two formal local Transition Town initiatives. In partnership with other organizations, we made a number of presentations in Pennsylvania and neighboring states. What is our model?
- Localization: Our problems may be on a global scale, but we embraced the motto: “Think globally, act locally.” In fact, we can only act at the level we can understand and solve our problems. That is our own community, our home place. One by one, a thousand points of light bring us out of darkness.
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What are the essential elements for successfully building community resilience?
Introducing Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience, PCI’s new report which describes how communities can approach the full scope of the 21st century’s challenges equitably and sustainably.
It’s all too easy to look at the news these days and find an instant reminder of how vulnerable, and in some cases broken, our communities are—whether the risks they face are due to terrorism, natural disasters, economic struggles, dilapidated infrastructure, or a dozen other disruptive forces. I could quickly provide some examples, torn from this week’s headlines, but if you’re reading this a month, a year, or decade from now it’s likely the task will be just as easy.
This is partly true, of course, because vulnerability has always been part of human communities. But in this age of global interconnectedness, those vulnerabilities are not only more complex and systemic, they’re chronic.
Since Post Carbon Institute’s formation a little over a decade ago, we’ve seen interest in building community resilience skyrocket—from the early days of the grassroots relocalization and Transition movements, in response to concerns about climate change and peak oil, to the more recent initiatives of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the United Nations to prepare cities for acute disasters.
In particular, interest in building climate resilience has grown exponentially since Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. Northeast in 2012, and as the need for climate adaptation, not just mitigation, has become more and more evident.
Having ourselves promoted community resilience for years, we’ve been pleased to see the concept of resilience being embraced by a diverse collection of grassroots groups, government agencies, politicians, and philanthropists. But we’re also eager to ensure that community resilience building isn’t simply adopted an aspirational goal divorced of concrete strategies, or as a strategy to “bounce back” from one specific set of disruptions to a normal state that no longer exists.
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