Energy Reality: What We’re For
Recognizing that all human economic activity is a subset of nature’seconomy and must not degrade its vitality is the starting point for systemic transformation of the energy system.
resilience
The flight to the ephemeral
The unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and resilience can be understood easily enough by considering an ordinary bridge. All bridges these days have vastly more structural strength than they need in order to support their ordinary load of traffic. This is inefficient, to be sure, but it makes the bridges resilient; they can withstand high winds, unusually heavy loads, deferred maintenance, and other challenges without collapsing.
Learning What Matters: An Integrative Education Programme For Young Adults
I have come to question some of the assumptions that underpin mainstream education, and to consider what can be done…to provide an education that is appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century.
Risk and Resilience: Governors Ritter and Whitman
A conversation with two former state chief executives on bridging the partisan divide and adapting to climate change.
No resilience without transformation
In ways both scientific and pragmatic, there can be no resilience without transformation.
On Building a Better (and More Resilient) World: Complexity, Community, and the Precautionary Principle
From the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Superstorm Sandy, the last decade has seen an incredible array of natural disasters…The proliferation of disasters is raising awareness about our collective need to minimize vulnerability and to bounce back afterwards – our need for greater resilience.
Goldilocks Had It Right: How to Build Resilient Societies in the 21st Century
When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the U.S. East Coast last October, it was the latest in a series of “teachable moments” about our growing vulnerability to climate change.
Survival tips from the Gypsies
Years of contact with the Roma, whom we also call "Gypsies," have changed in many ways my view of the world… Perhaps, from them we can learn something useful for the hard times that are coming.
Radical homemakers
Confucius said that the health of a nation could be determined by the integrity of its homes. If we apply that standard, we’re in trouble.
Six resilience “aha!” moments
Usually when I go to events I tend to be the ‘resilience guy’, or one of a handful of people who work with and think about resilience who tend to gather at the back of other events and bemoan the fact that no-one has talked about resilience yet. So I was fascinated when I saw that the British Red Cross was hosting a one-day conference on resilience, the first that I’ve been aware of.
The Five Stages Of Collapse, By Dmitry Orlov – Book Review
Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book ‘Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit’.
Toward Resilient Architectures I: Biology Lessons
The word “resilience” is bandied about these days among environmental designers. In some quarters, it’s threatening to displace another popular word, “sustainability.” This is partly a reflection of newsworthy events like Hurricane Sandy, adding to a growing list of other disruptive events like tsunamis, droughts, and heat waves. We know that we can’t design for all such unpredictable events, but we could make sure our buildings and cities are better able to weather these disruptions and bounce back afterwards. At a larger scale, we need to be able to weather the shocks of climate change, resource destruction and depletion, and a host of other growing challenges to human wellbeing.
