The definition of “resilience” is up for grabs, opening up the risk that a potentially transformative concept will become the new “sustainababble,” Mazur and Fairchild write on Grist.
“Resilience, like sustainability before it, is an idea with potentially transformative power,” they write. “Resilience is all about our capacity to survive and thrive in the face of disruptions of all kinds. If we were to take resilience seriously (highly recommended in our increasingly disruption-prone world), we would make some far-reaching changes in how we live.”
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A truly resilient city would rely on distributed, renewable energy, support diversified local agriculture, foster social equity and inclusion, and reduce its carbon pollution. But now, “the co-opters are hard at work on ‘resilience,’” Mazur and Fairchild note. “For example, the pollutocrat-friendly American Enterprise Institute, which opposes efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promotes instead what it calls the ‘resilience option’ for climate change. (In essence: Deal with it.)”
If resilience is simply defined as bouncing back from disaster and sustaining the status quo, the term will be “defined too narrowly and deprived of its power to transform.”
