Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Beliefs matter. So do stories. My inspiration often comes from the written word, and I’ve long been interested in writers who revel in the complexity of beliefs, understand how adept humans are at self-deception, but nevertheless provide a useful roadmap.
Resilience is a common principal of permaculture, says Dave Boehnlein, co-author of the book Practical Permaculture.
Resilience means seeking out the little normals – the constants in human nature, including the behaviors, institutions, and durable scales, that have stood the test of time – and reengaging with them meaningfully.
After two weeks of workshops and meetings, this group had come up with their Climate Change Adaptation Plan for the village.
As climate change puts ecosystems and species at risk, conservationists are turning to a new approach: preserving those landscapes that are most likely to endure as the world warms.
Restoring land to health means trying to return it to something like normal ecological conditions. But what if the definition of normal changes in the meantime?
Why are most meetings, conferences and other deliberative processes so bad?
Suddenly, “resilience” is everywhere. It’s the subject of serious books and breezy news articles, of high-minded initiatives and of many, many conferences. After Superstorm Sandy, it was triumphantly plastered on city buses, declaring New Jersey “A State of Resilience.”
Resilience must be a central concept for retrieval – that is, for the capacity of communities to bring something humanly habitable out on the other side of the unpredictable stresses and dangers to which climate change will (now unavoidably) expose us.
Cities may be our best hope for making meaningful progress in the area of sustainability.
What if Icarus’ father—knowing his son would fly too close to the sun—had made the wings he designed more resilient?
In modern economic thought, efficiency is paramount. The goal of economic systems, and entities within those systems, is to maximize efficiency.
