How to Hold Resiliency & Resistance Together

Posted on July 24, 2012 by islandinstitute

Thank you to all who made our Community Resilience Roundtable such a powerful experience. Updates on the Roundtable will be posted here soon–for now, enjoy the last “pre-Roundtable” blog from Joe Solomon, Roundtable Core Member.

Hi friends.

I’m a bit new to the world of resiliency, and cannot wait to join so many others in the islands of Alaska to explore this rich topic.

My background is as a frog catcher, wildflower spreader, once theatrical clown, and as the former social media coordinator for 350.org. I’ve seen a number of ‘days of action’ bloom, and like many, have had the privilege of witnessing the rebirth of a politically charged environmental movement.

In preparation for our round of conversations — I’ve been trying to imagine what resiliency means, in light of resistance, and vice versa.

I wonder: what if we lived on another planet? What if the planet we lived on was being invaded by aliens? And what if those aliens were of the subtle planet-invading variety. What if their big plan was to surround our planet with force field stratified ships, and simply hover there, with arrays of cannons that endlessly pumped carbon? What if their big plan was pump so much carbon into our atmosphere, making the planet more or less uninhabitable, and cause enough climate chaos and societal chaos, so as to make conquering us that much easier? And what if they were willing to spend a number of years–decades even–weakening humanity at the knees with a hot and stormy planet? Continue reading →

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Posted on July 16, 2012 by islandinstitute

By Lauret Savoy, Roundtable Core Member

In “The Testing-Tree,” poet Stanley Kunitz wrote, “the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.” So many experiences that make a life, even in more ordinary times, involve breaking or being broken, physically, emotionally, and in other ways. But how does an individual, a family over generations, or a community find courage to be broken and transformed by experience, and to believe it possible to retain a sense of wholeness beyond the breaking?

I came to know many child-forms of despair as a brown-skinned little girl in 1968 America; a child who had believed that her skin was made and ‘colored’ by Sun, blue sky, and the land until told otherwise with spit. As an adult, I’ve needed to understand what hardness leaves of our lives. For hardness in this sense is not harshness or severity. Not difficulty or insensitivity. Instead, imagine the quality of rock or stone to retain some identity and physical memory even though broken or fragmented repeatedly.

It might seem counterintuitive but such hardness can feed resilience over time, and be a vital wellspring for communities for whom distress has been a norm across generations, whether a ghetto, a barrio, a reservation, or impoverished rural area. Continue reading →

Sharing Our Resilience Stories

Posted on July 13, 2012 by islandinstitute

By Elise Pepple, Roundtable Facilitator and Sustain Me organizer

“Buildings and bridges were made to bend in the wind to withstand the world that’s what it takes. All that steel and stone are no match for the air my friend, what doesn’t bend breaks. What doesn’t bend breaks.
We are made to bleed and scab and bleed again and turn every scar into a joke. We are made to fight and fuck and talk and fight again and sit around and laugh until we choke. Sit around and laugh until we choke.”
–Ani Difranco

I am interested in honest conversations about failure. Current educational research reflects that failure is the key to resilience. So here we are, sitting pretty.

Surprising things are resilient: cockroaches, bacteria, shapewear, memory foam…apparently this song from my teenage years. The land is resilient after it is scorched by fire, the fire can even be necessary. Continue reading →

Resiliency is Work

Posted on July 10, 2012 by islandinstitute

By Sam Skaggs, Roundtable Core member

Resiliency concepts helped me to integrate my layman’s knowledge in ecology and my conservation experience with my profession as an investment advisor. I come to this workshop looking for more ways to practice resiliency and to expand what I have learned toward applications to promote community resiliency.

As a way of background: when I began my investment business in Fairbanks over 30 years ago, I was one of the early advisors that tried to screen for companies that recognized the value of the commons and tried to avoid those that profited from passing on their external costs to the public. You can tell what side of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons argument I came out on. Continue reading →

Resiliency as Prayer

Posted on July 3, 2012 by islandinstitute

By Gordon Blue, Roundtable Core Member

‘Resiliency’ is the sign that life persists. ‘Resiliency’ describes the persistence of the activity of life, the creative and re-integrative assembly of factors which are separated by the entropy of all things. In some respects ‘resiliency’ describes the annoying tendency of certain irritating notions – about hope and justice and meaning, about the sanctity of life, and sacred connections in the between – to persist, despite crushing and overwhelming forces directed and focused on their suppression and control.

Such a characterization could easily mistake the reactive impulse for the thing itself. This misidentification (of the impulse for the thing) is abetted by the fearful possibility that one could wander off and be lost in a theoretical landscape. Yet, to lose oneself among those shadows and to dream opens a place of great beauty and power, and it is more refreshing than sleep. The bones of whole continents of thought become infused with all colors in the light of each successive dawn, and the play of light opens an acute awareness of the life that shelters and arises from the protected places, and awakens us. Continue reading →

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