Captación externa
CAPTACIÓN DE AGUA DE LAS NIEBLAS COSTERAS (CAMANCHACA), CHILE
community while you’re working toward a specifi c goal is the key to coordinating everyone’s efforts. Because our community was so geographically spread out, we had to be especially creative in the ways that we communicated. We agreed to meet on a weekly basis for nearly eight weeks to put our arguments together. During that time, we shared phone numbers, fax numbers, and physical ad- dresses, information that can be a hard to come by in rural areas. Members met over coffee, tea, family dinners, and late-night cook- ie feasts. And when all was said and done, our informal communi- ty of people who had reluctantly joined together to save their way of life became a close-knit community involving friendships that continue to this day.
One morning, just a few short months after we came together for the fi rst time, I drove with four community members three hours to New Mexico’s capital, Santa Fe, and met with one of the state senators who would help us present our case. I shared the groundwater assessments, the maps we’d created, and the impact that the proposed development would have upon communities throughout the state. The rest, as they say, is history. The State of New Mexico did not grant the permits the developers needed to proceed with their plans, and our valley has remained intact ever since.
What Does It Take?
I’ve shared the story of how a mountain community had to organize in order to illustrate how a real-life community can fol- low the template for resilience. In the case of the mountain com-
within themselves as they got to know one another. And while the community was created at first for a specific purpose, it con- tinued in various forms long after the original goals were met. It’s because of the strength and diversity the members found among themselves that the relationships persisted even as the commu- nity faced new challenges beyond the ambitious land develop- ers. These included evacuations during wildfires, aid in reaching stranded livestock during record-setting snowfalls that made the dirt roads impassable, and floods that washed away entire roads and kept some people away from their homes for weeks as the snow melted.
As we’ve seen in the previous sections, resilience is as much a state of mind as it is a way of life. It’s about being willing to hon- estly embrace the immediate realities that we face in our everyday lives and to act responsibly to meet the conditions of those reali- ties. Our mountain community coming together to preserve a way of life is one example of how a community can form and what it can accomplish. In our case, we found the knowledge, meth- ods, and relationships that helped us in a specific instance. And in doing so, we created a process and reservoir of skills that we can now draw upon in future times of need. Our community became resilient to the things that threatened our way of life.
As we’ll see in the following chapters, there are actions we can take immediately that will lead to the transformation of our own neighborhoods. The world is changing. It makes tremendous sense to adapt to the changes rather than fight them, and to do so alongside our friends and neighbors as we build healthy, resilient, and thriving communities.
What Is Your Threshold?
When we talk about resilience in general, one of the first ques- tions that comes to mind is: Resilience to what? What is the actual force or condition that we are shifting our thinking and lifestyle
to accommodate? It’s a simple question and one that makes a lot of sense. The answer is simple as well.
We’re learning to become resilient to the world we’ve created.
It’s in precisely understanding what this answer means, and what it is that we’ve created, that we can begin to build the resil- ience that makes sense according to our specific needs.
When you consider creating a resilient community, the fi rst question to ask yourself and other potential members is: “What would we like our resilience to address?” To get to the bottom of what this can mean, I invite you to consider the following:
1. What are the elements of your physical surroundings that you consider an absolute necessity in the short term (from a few hours to three days)?
2. What are the elements of your physical surroundings that you consider an absolute necessity in the long term (from three days to two weeks, or more)?
Different people have different thresholds of what they feel they can and cannot live without. This is especially true in times of crisis when we’re often frightened, caught off guard, and unprepared.
For instance, people will generally say that they can do with- out electricity for a brief time, ranging from a few hours to a few days. For young people, such an experience can even seem like an adventure. During the time when the luxuries of life such as elec- tricity are no longer available, the use of backup sources of light, such as lanterns, fl ashlights, and candles, will generally get people through the nights, and propane and natural gas will often sus- tain them for cooking and heat. Beyond this time, however, most people seem to need more. This is the time for long-term strategies to kick in.
The key here is to ask yourself what these questions mean to you. What is your threshold? Your answer will point you in the direction of what resilience means for you in a time of extremes. The way you answer these questions is your tip-off as to when you
need to seriously consider measures that can assure you and your family of a sense of normalcy when faced with the vulnerability of extremes. In other words, your answer will be the key to know when to store extra food in your pantry, and what kind and how much. Only you can know for yourself when it’s time to consider a backup source of power and whether yours needs to be a full-size generator to run your house or a large battery to power the lights in your living room.
While we sometimes feel reluctance, or even resistance, to put- ting our energy into thinking about such things, in view of the facts shared in this book and other sources of news and informa- tion, it actually makes perfect sense.
Community Resilience: It Just Makes Sense!
The Introduction of this book, as well as the next chapter (Chapter 4), identify the rare conditions of climate, debt, popula- tion, and energy that are converging as a period of extremes and vulnerability in our lives. In light of the specifics, there can be lit- tle doubt regarding just how volatile things have become, and in all likelihood will remain for the foreseeable future. It’s precisely the certainty of so much uncertainty that gives even greater mean- ing to a culture of resilience. For example:
• It’s because we’re living amidst what the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2013 report, detailed in Chapter 4, called the “perfect storm” of conditions that it makes sense to expect volatility in places where life has been smooth sailing in the past.
• It’s because climate change and a warming of the world’s oceans is a fact that it makes sense to expect record-setting extremes in rainfall and snowfall, sizzling summers, and frigid winters.
• It’s because the world’s economies are weakened and fragile that it makes sense to expect cutbacks in
manufacturing and the loss of jobs in supporting industries.
• It’s because the already-reduced workforce and extremes in climate have placed a strain on the supply chain of services, food, and necessities that it makes sense to expect temporary disruptions in their availability.
It’s because these extreme conditions, and others, are converg- ing in our lifetime that the choice to create a resilient community is also the turning point from simply surviving change to thriving
through the change. Just as we’ve seen with the turning points
described previously, we now have two possible ways to deal with the reality of a shifting world that has unexpectedly arrived on our doorstep. We can choose either to:
1. Discount the facts that tell us the world has changed, and that we need to think and live differently, leaving ourselves and our families vulnerable to the new conditions.
or
2. Be honest with ourselves about the volatility that comes from the convergence of extremes, and learn to adapt our thinking and ways of life to minimize the negative impacts of the change.
With both choices, resilience plays a powerful role. In the fi rst choice, we fi nd a way to become resilient after the fact—after the crises of the superstorms, back-to-back tornadoes, record-setting fl oods and droughts, and the seemingly endless wildfi res catch us surprised and unprepared. In the second choice, we can live resiliently, in a way that makes room for such changes in our lives.
Our answer to a single question makes all the difference in our experience. It changes the way we’ve lived and the way we’ve been taught to think about ourselves and our security. It’s also the
foundation for developing a new way of living. That question is: In
our time of extremes, what can we do to make our lives better?
By the year 2050, only 36 years from the initial publication of this book, it’s estimated that 75 percent of the world’s popula- tion will be living in urban environments and large cities. Fifty percent does already. As the factors that contribute to our time of extremes continue to unfold, a shift in the way we build our cities and live our lives will, by necessity, be a part of that shift. When we take these factors into consideration, the conclusion is clear: adapting our lives to meet the uncertainties of a world of extremes is like packing what we need as we begin a journey to a place we’ve never been.
Just as it makes sense to begin any journey with the things necessary to maintain our daily routines, community resilience in our time of extremes makes good sense. A growing number of community leaders are recognizing this fact and beginning to act accordingly.
One of the innovative projects that has emerged from lead- ers recognizing our time of extremes is the 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge, an opportunity to build proven strategies of resilience into 100 cities, using projects that will be selected through a nomination process ending in 2015. The stated goal of the challenge is “making people, communities and systems bet- ter prepared to withstand catastrophic events—both natural and manmade—and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses.”27
Additional projects to create resilience on the larger scale of cities and beyond include Philadelphia’s Reinventing Older Com- munities conferences28, the San Francisco Planning and Urban
Research Association (SPUR) project The Resilient City29, and the
Municipal Art Society of New York’s Resilience Agenda.30
The transformation of societies, cultures, and everyday life that has been envisioned by so many people for such a long time will come about only in response to a need that is shared across the board. From urban families and mom-and-pop businesses, to the home offices of global corporations, research institutions, and
universities, we all need a society that works for us. The building of resilient communities on the scale of cities is an opportunity for just such a transformation. This is where the ideas of resilient community and the principles described in books like David Ger- shon’s Social Change 2.0, Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity, Lester Brown’s Plan B series, Edmund Bourne’s Global Shift, and others (see Resources) can become invaluable road maps on our journey of transformation.
For us to benefi t from the kind of transformation envisioned in such forward-thinking projects, however, there is a key element that must fi rst be fi rmly in place—we must begin by being honest with ourselves about why there is a need for such transformation. What’s so different about our world today that requires us to think and live differently than we have in the past? What’s driving the change? It’s a good question asked by many people from many walks of life. The answer can be a surprise, as well as a wake-up call, when it comes to the choices we make for ourselves and for our families.
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