Three things I think I think – about resilience

With apologies to Peter King of Sports Illustrated …

I think I think I’m starting to hate resilience.  Not the concept, but the word.  Like sustainability, it has been adopted as a fad by so many, that it is losing its meaning.  In CARRI, we are focused on the concept of being able to bounce back better, but that injects a tincture of resistance into our definition that sometimes confuses people.

I think I think that our ballooning federal deficit is the single greatest threat to the resilience of our communities.  From 2005 to today, the federal government has lost one “Katrina” – the federal government’s payments to service our national debt have increased by slightly more than it cost to recover from Katrina.  Simply put, communities will have to develop creative ways to find and use the resources they will need to recover from a disaster.  This is one area where I hope that CARRI’s Community Resilience System Initiative will have a great impact.

I think I think that we as a nation need to put a spotlight on rural America.  In a very real sense, our rural communities are under siege.  Their ability to respond to disasters is at its lowest ebb since the Depression.  Many are struggling to reinvent themselves because they have lost their original reason for being; others are just holding on trying to stave off their inevitable death.  But if some of the predicted impacts of global warming are real, it is likely to eradicate a large number of rural communities across the country.  Rural citizens most likely will go to coastal areas that will already be coping with their own impacts from climate change.  Ideally, we’d like to see the migration go the other way – away from coastal communities.  We need to figure out how to help rural communities become more resilient – in this case, able to recover quickly from acute disasters and respond to the chronic problem of reinventing themselves in a changing world.