John Plodinec in Community Resilience: Beyond Sustainability and Resilience
Excerpt:
Right away, we’re confronted by a huge difficulty – both “sustainability” and “resilience” have become fads; both words have become very imprecise concepts. The dictionary definitions of sustainability are about maintaining a certain level, or, as Wikipedia says, the capacity to endure. In essence, this means a type of persistence. However, if we look at the UN’s Brundtland Commission definition, then sustainability is all about balancing use of resources for current needs vs the resources needed in the future. In what follows, I’m going consider community sustainability as meaning a wise use of resources,
- Discriminating between wants and needs so that needs are met first, and
- Using resources efficiently – the least necessary to meet the maximal amount of needs.
Resilience has been tortured nearly as badly. To some it’s a process, to some an attribute; to some, it means resisting change, to some reverting to normal after a crisis. However, resilience has one advantage in that almost all of the faddish definitions have this kernel of bouncing back after an external stress is applied. In what follows, I’m going to consider community resilience as a community’s ability to
- Anticipate crises,
- Take action to reduce their impacts,
- Respond effectively to them, and
- Recover rapidly.
If we compare these two, we can begin to see a contrast. In thermodynamic terms, sustainability is about trying to maintain equilibrium while resilience is a kinetic property. In philosophic terms, sustainability is ontological, resilience is phenomenological. Or in my terms, resilience is about time and sustainability is timeless. Resilience is aimed at minimizing the time to recovery from an upset; sustainability is focused on the resources the community uses over its lifetime. Thus, to echo those nasty questions I used to hate on the SAT, resilience is to sustainability as weather is to climate.
In the next post, I’ll use the definition of community to further illuminate the sustainability-resilience relationship.