{"id":3468793,"date":"2017-10-12T18:59:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T18:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3468793"},"modified":"2017-10-13T09:34:11","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T09:34:11","slug":"introduction-community-resilience-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2017-10-12\/introduction-community-resilience-reader\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to The Community Resilience Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re pleased to announce the publication of our latest book,\u00a0The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval<\/strong>, edited by Daniel Lerch and published with Island Press. Here is the Introduction chapter, which explains why we\u2019ve produced this important new collection of essays. You can also see the annotated Table of Contents\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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For over thirty years, the world community has tried to resolve the combined challenges of environmental degradation, fossil fuel dependence, economic inequality, and persistent social injustice\u2014largely under the banner of internationally brokered \u201csustainable development.\u201d Despite some partial successes, it is clear today that the pace of these global trends has not been slowed, let alone stopped or reversed. Their scale has grown and their impacts have become so widespread that they now threaten the stability\u2014in some cases even the existence\u2014of communities around the world. The global sustainability challenges of the past have become the local resilience crises of today.<\/p>\n

Resilience<\/em>\u00a0is the ability of a system\u2014like a family, or a country, or Earth\u2019s biosphere\u2014to cope with short-term disruptions and adapt to long-term changes without losing its essential character. We depend on the resilience of all the systems that support us for life and well-being; if these systems falter, we suffer. A\u00a0crisis<\/em>\u00a0is an unstable state of affairs in which decisive change is both necessary and inevitable. Today we face four major crises\u2014environmental, energy, economic, and equity\u2014that threaten to overwhelm the resilience of the systems we care about, particularly at the local level.<\/p>\n

The failure of international sustainability efforts to thwart these crises means resilience-building efforts at the community level\u2014working on all issues and systems, not just climate change and infrastructure\u2014are needed more than ever. But the charge to build community resilience raises important questions: Resilience\u00a0of<\/em>\u00a0what, exactly? Resilient\u00a0to<\/em>\u00a0what, exactly? Building resilience\u00a0how<\/em>, and benefiting\u00a0whom<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Our latest book,\u00a0The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, aims to answer these questions.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong><\/center>In 2010, Post Carbon Institute produced a book titled\u00a0The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0Century\u2019s Sustainability Crises<\/a><\/em>. The shocks of the 2008 stock market crash were still reverberating, energy prices were at historic highs, and climate change\u2014though broadly accepted\u2014was still largely seen by mainstream government and business leaders as a manageable future threat.[1]<\/a>\u00a0We and many other observers of modern industrial society\u2019s long-term trajectory were deeply concerned that the end of 20th<\/sup>-century-style economic growth\u2014coupled with the end of cheap oil and the beginnings of irreversible climate change\u2014could ultimately prove too much for the system to bear. It seemed humanity\u2019s interconnected sustainability challenges were coming to a head, and only deeper understanding of their systemic nature could point to effective responses.<\/p>\n

Awareness of these challenges grew quickly in the decade that followed, but the responses of the international community ranged from ineffective to counterproductive. The world\u2019s major economies, having (barely) stopped a global collapse in 2008, doubled down on efforts to produce short-term growth, but with no serious concurrent effort at fundamental reform. The world\u2019s fossil fuel producers, flush with profits from sky-high prices, reinforced society\u2019s fossil fuel dependence with investments in more-expensive, more-destructive energy resources like shale gas, tight oil, and tar sands. And the world\u2019s most powerful nations, though well aware of the threat of climate change, decided at one high-profile international conference after another to delay effective, coordinated reductions of carbon emissions. Instead of making decisive changes in the face of these challenges, the international community in each case opted for business as usual\u2014both postponing the days when change would no longer be a choice, and ensuring that needed actions (whenever they finally got around to them) would be that much more difficult.<\/p>\n

Now, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, decisive changes are indeed inevitable\u2014and we have clarity on what this transition from\u00a0challenges<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0crises<\/em>\u00a0looks like:<\/p>\n