Transition: Resilience

Jess Lundie — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:45:24 +0000

Welcome to the next installment of Transition Friday. Transition Tuesday would be nice and alliterative, but would require me to get my act together on Tuesdays, which isn’t going to happen.

If sustainability was the buzzword for 2009, resilience is it for 2010. That was my thought at the beginning of the year, and I was excited to hear that other people were thinking it too. (It’s always nice to have outside confirmation that you’re not just babbling gibberish. Or at least if you are, you’re not doing it alone.)

Part of the reason the Transition Initiative focuses on resilience is the peak oil PLUS climate change equation. On the climate change side, you may hear some discussion about resilience, but they probably don’t call it that. They are probably calling it “adaptation,” and it’s probably used in discussions about how developing countries and particularly “at risk” communities are going to survive the impacts of climate change. They are also most likely discussing it in terms of how many billions of dollars successful adaptation will require.

The peak oil types talk a lot about resilience, but frequently omit societal and global solutions to climate change. As I mentioned in Transition: An Introduction, not all responses to peak oil address climate change. However, most of the responses to peak oil are fundamentally about building resilience.

What Is Resilience?

resilient: adj. 1. Marked by the ability to recover readily, as from misfortune. 2. Capable of returning to an original shape or position, as after having been compressed.

The first definition is most relevant to discussions of community in terms of peak oil, climate change, and transition. (Although I am intrigued by the connotations of the second definition as it pertains to civic planning – developing the “shape” of communities in a way that fosters sustainability and resilience.) Resilient communities are able to withstand and recover from shocks to “the system.” “The system” can be the food system, the energy system, the distribution system for basic consumer necessities, or pretty much any other system you can think of. Resilience is also measured by a community’s capacity to respond and adapt to rapid change.

Shocks can take many different forms. From oil shocks to natural disasters to health crises to terrorist attacks, resilient communities will be more effective at responding to and recovering from these events.

Why Do We Care?

“Civilization is only three meals deep.”

“We are always nine meals away from anarchy.”

Whichever way you say it, the idea is the same.

The Transition Initiative addresses resilience on all levels, but particularly compelling are their arguments about food security. Food crises hit us where it hurts. Cold snaps, trucking strikes and rising staple crop prices are present-day examples – we’re talking within the last couple years! – of how fragile our food system is. Highly centralized (a very small number of large companies dominate grocery store retail), but spread over a great distance (the average meal in the US travels 1500 miles to reach your plate), it takes very little to jeopardize our food security.

The Transition Initiative is based on the idea that these kind of changes could happen more quickly than our systems can adapt to them. If oil prices spike, making food significantly more expensive to transport, we may not have the decades needed to establish alternate shipping methods or the technological advances to fuel trucks with something other than oil.

Have you ever been to a store at the beginning of a blizzard? Remember the empty shelves? If all the trucks stopped running tomorrow, where would you get your food? What about clothing and other basic necessities? How would you heat your house? How expensive would oil have to get before you could not afford to drive to work, or have to choose between putting gas in your car and buying increasingly expensive and scarce food? Transition proposes that the answer to these concerns is the development of resilient communities.

So what do you think? Is resilience an important consideration in the face of volatile systems?

More on Transition:

The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins
Transition Towns Wiki

Seed Saving, Garden Planning and Stupid Questions

Jess Lundie — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:18:44 +0000

This weekend, a friend and I went to a garden planning and seed saving class hosted jointly by the Olympia Food Co-op and GRuB. I didn’t know about GRuB before this weekend, but I think I’m in love. If you live in the Olympia area, I highly encourage you to check out their website and the great things they’re doing in the community. These are great people doing amazing work in urban gardening, community resilience, and youth education. If you’re somewhere else, you might see if there’s a group doing similar work in your area.

The class was held at the GRuB “farmhouse” in their beautiful main room. (Next to one of the coolest kitchens I have ever seen – I kicked myself for not bringing my camera!) Caitlyn Moore walked us through the basics of seed saving – fairly complicated, but absolutely crucial work – and basic garden planning.

Seed Savers Are Our Unsung Heroes

I came away from the class even more convinced that we owe what is left of our food security to a small band of intrepid individuals who have dedicated themselves to preserving varieties of food crops that would be driven to extinction in the face of corporate-driven market forces. Seed saving is an essential part of this, and I am grateful for all those skilled gardeners who have joined the effort to preserve heirloom crops and livestock. (Also, savings seeds helps you weather situations like this.)

Aside from all the wonderful information about seed saving, plant genetics, and calendar and grid garden planning, I learned two other interesting things.

1. I don’t know anything about gardening.

Houseplants love me, but I have never, ever gardened. I have definitely never grown food. This is all new to me. That means I ask stupid questions, such as “If my garden is mulched with wood chips, do I have to remove all the wood chips before I plant anything?” I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I know enough to know that it’s a stupid question. How do I store soil and compost and all the things they say you need? Where do I even get it? How long can it sit around before it gets weird? What’s the deal with thinning, and why wouldn’t I just plant them that far apart to begin with? More really basic, kind of stupid questions.

2. I know quite a bit about gardening.

I really do. I know about the leaf, root, flower, fruit rotation. I know about alleles and pollination and gene expression. I understand companion planting and feel fairly confident that I could create a garden plan that incorporates it. I know how to plant potatoes in a way that doesn’t require a ton of space and intensive labor. I know about nitrogen fixers and cover crops and till and no-till. I know that there’s a good chance that my greyhounds will eat my tomatoes.

Basically, I know weird things about gardening. I understand some of the more advanced concepts, but have massive holes in my basic, practical knowledge. And unfortunately, I don’t think knowing about gene expression is actually going to help me grow food. I suppose all of it will be useful in the long run, but right now, I just want someone who will answer my stupid questions without making fun of me too, too much.

Poor Google. It must have to put up with an awful lot of stupid questions.

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