Worse, I developed a growing suspicion that 'sustainability' has come to mean 'sustain' our excessive way-of-life. Were exchanging light bulbs or driving a hybrid car really acts of sustainability?
And don’t even get me started on the word 'green'.
Frankly, these words describe little more than the tweaking of the margins of our lifestyles - followed by a prayer that we earn a different future as a result. But as Einstein famously quipped, doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different outcome is a definition of insanity.
So I went looking for another word.
I found it among the language of land health. I love the words range professionals use to describe the elements of ecosystem function: integrity, diversity, resistance, thresholds, transitions, recovery, and so forth. That’s where I found resilience. It describes the ability of a community to recover from change or misfortune - how it handles surprise, in other words.
And Nature is full of surprises. How a community of plants or animals 'bounces back' from an unexpected flood, drought, disease outbreak, fire, hurricane or other perturbation depends largely on its health - its ability to resist degradation while the event is occurring and its capacity to recover once the surprise has ended.
Resilience applies to humans too, of course, and not just our physical well-being. It applies to social, cultural, and economic lives too - think about bankruptcy, or a crippling snow storm. In
The reasons for wondering should be obvious by now - climate change, Peak Oil, water and food shortages, etc. - I won’t go into them here. Let me just say I believe we’re entering The Age of Consequences, in which we are already grappling with consequences levied by our 20th century profligacy. I have little doubt that The Age of Consequences holds many surprises in store for us, most of them unpleasant I suspect. Therefore, as we move farther into the 21st century I think this question of resilience will become increasingly important.
Restraint. Resilience.
There’s one more "r-word" that’s been on my mind: recovery. I like the word because much of what I’ve been doing over the past decade with The Quivira Coalition is to help people recover important parts of our lives that have been lost to industrialism: grassfed food, herding, healthy riparian areas, collaborative relationships, a place in nature and so on. This fits with the dictionary definitions of recovery, which include: regain, reuse, restore, to find again, save from loss.
It doesn’t mean 'return' or 'go back' to something preexisting. Rather, it’s a form of rediscovery, as well as an updating. Grassfed food is a good example - humans ate grassfed meat for most of our history, until the corn industry convinced us that a steak tasted better if the animal spent time in a feedlot. But research indicates
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