Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience

Daniel Lerch

How do you know community resilience when you see it? I think you look for the capacity for people to not have to go through extremes ... being knowledgeable and having capacity to do something, to change your circumstances.

— Doria Robinson, Urban Tilth

We all need a sense of community. And we all need to believe that we have agency — a sense that we can make choices that will affect our lives.

— Stuart Comstock-Gay, Vermont Community Foundation

Efforts to build community resilience often focus on growing the capacity to "bounce back" from disruptions, like those caused by climate change. But climate change is not the only crisis we face, nor is preparing for disruption the only way to build resilience. Truly robust community resilience should do more. It should engage and benefit all community members, and it should consider all the challenges the community faces, from rising sea levels to a lack of living wage jobs. In addition, it should be grounded in resilience science, which tells us how complex systems — like human communities — can adapt and persist through changing circumstances.

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

Virtually every American community is part of — and dependent on — a deeply interconnected and highly complex global civilization of nearly two hundred countries, tens of thousands of cities, and more than seven billion people. The prices we pay at the grocery store and the gas station, the investments our businesses make, the regulations our governments set, and even the weather we experience every day are potentially influenced by countless events and decisions made around the world, all to a degree that was barely conceivable just half a century ago.

Although many of the challenges our communities face would exist regardless, this global interconnection is the dominant factor of our modern world and brings us rewards and risks (neither of which are distributed equally) that we cannot ignore. If the aim of community resilience — at minimum — is to safeguard the health and well-being of people in the face of the twenty-first century's many complex challenges, those challenges need to be understood in a global context.

At Post Carbon Institute, we organize those challenges as a set of four distinct but intertwined crises called the "E" crises. They influence and multiply one another, and they manifest in myriad ways from the most local to the most global of scales. They are characterized as crises because they are pushing us toward decisive changes — tipping points that we may choose to fight, ignore, or take advantage of. The E crises do not encompass all the challenges facing humanity today, but they frame and highlight those that we feel most immediately threaten modern civilization.

1. The ecological crisis. Everything we need to survive — to have life, a society, an economy — ultimately depends on the natural world, but every ecosystem has two important limiting factors: its rate of replenishment and its capacity to deal with wastes and stress. The last two hundred years of exponential economic growth and population growth have pushed ecosystems around the world near or past these limits, with results like severe topsoil loss, freshwater depletion, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Humanity's "ecological footprint" is now larger than what the planet can sustainably handle, and we are crossing key boundaries beyond which human civilization literally may not be able to continue.

2. The energy crisis. The era of easy fossil fuels is over, leading the energy industry to resort to extreme measures like tar sands mining, mountain- top removal coal mining, hydrofracturing ("fracking") for shale gas and tight oil, and deepwater drilling. These practices come with significant costs and risks, however, and in most instances, they provide far less net energy than the conventional oil, coal, and natural gas that fueled the twentieth century. Renewable energy is a real but imperfect alternative, as it would take decades and many trillions of dollars to scale up deployment to all sectors of the economy and retrofit transportation and industrial infrastructure accordingly. Declines in the amount of affordable energy available to society threaten to create major environmental, economic, and social impacts as the twenty-first century progresses.

3. The economic crisis. Our local, national, and global economies are currently structured to require constant growth, yet with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, we reached the end of economic growth as we have known it. Despite unprecedented interventions on the part of central banks and governments, economic recovery in the United States and Europe has failed to benefit the majority of citizens. The end of the age of cheap and easy energy, the vast mountains of both private and public debt that we have incurred, and the snowballing costs of climate change impacts are all forcing us into an as- yet-undefined post growth economic system, whether we are ready for it or not.

3. The equity crisis. Inequity has been a problem throughout recorded human history, and not least in the United States, despite its professed values of liberty and justice for all. Although social progress since the Civil War has in theory brought political enfranchisement and legal protections to almost everyone, in practice the failure to...