After attending the Roundtable this past July on resilient communities, I soon found myself immersed in a dynamic community that raised new questions about resilience for me. The members of this community are two utterly devoted, brilliant, and lovingly-wacky teachers and 37 rowdy and insecure adolescents. Back in July, I began the conversation at the Roundtable as an aspiring teacher, fresh with a Masters, ready to harness ideas to bring to the classroom. I asked, “How can I continue this conversation with my students?” “How can I teach resilience?”   Now that I am in the classroom every day, I find that cultivating a resilient community is a less direct endeavor than I had originally envisioned. While I still delight at the idea of crafting a year-long curriculum around the theme of resilience with writing, ecology, economics and community service, I have found that cultivating resilience in our community also involves more nuanced, everyday acts of caretaking. It is, in fact, some of my most important and my most subtle work as a teacher.

At the Roundtable we learned about resilience as an ecological concept. We learned that ecosystems undergo cycles of response to internal and external changes that involve a “back loop” of regenerative reorganization of life (Holling 2004[i]). The resilience of an ecosystem is in its ability to recover from disturbances, yet the magic happens in the back loop, where the system is so unhinged by these disturbances that new possibilities unfold in the compulsion for survival. In my classroom system, disturbances abound, from fire-drills to intentional outbursts to students falling out of chairs. Individually, students are adjusting to a multitude of external and internal changes: developing social relationships, increased conceptual ability along with increased academic pressure, not to mention their changing hormones and bodies. Not to be unkind, but adolescents, it seems, are in kind of a “back loop” stage of development. They are disoriented by the horde of changes they are undergoing to a point where their identity—who they know and who they think they want to be—is called into question by the minute. And out of this crisis of self, comes a very raw but abounding capacity for creativity, for reinvention.

To continue the metaphor, as a teacher of adolescents, I see myself as a sort of Mother Nature: steering their recovery, nurturing their self-confidence, and planting seeds of possibility.

Cultivating resilience involves helping my students discover their qualities, interests, dreams, and potential, so that when future challenges derail them, they possess a rooted sense of self which can gracefully withstand life’s uncertainties.  In addition, by exposing my students to multiple perspectives and teaching them to never cease to question or be curious, I hope that when my students enter the more stable “front loop” of adulthood, they are not so rigid in their views that they can’t creatively problem-solve or collaborate with diverse individuals. Resilience is being strong yet flexible.

These efforts, I feel, are vital to being an effective adolescent teacher, and while I can design lessons that attempt to teach resilience, I also recognize that much of my work towards cultivating a resilient community happens between the seams of my lessons: in the hallways, in informal conversations, and in every small act of maintaining a supportive learning environment. Thus, we invite speakers that offer new stories about our home; equip students with skills from how to build a compost bin to how to speak before a crowd; challenge them to question their assumptions; and provide opportunities to act responsibly and feel successful.  As a classroom community, we nurture this supportive, stable, and sometimes wacky space which allows students to both explore and celebrate their back-loop capacity to discover themselves.

Thanks, Roundtable participants and facilitators, for providing me with a framework for understanding resiliency and the inspiration to continue working towards building my resilient community every day.

[Note: Terry made these very useful remarks during the Resilient Communities Roundtable. We thought it would be valuable to remind ourselves of what he said.]

It’s been exciting to be part of the roundtable. For me one of the really unique features of it has been that it brings together issues of resilience at the level of individual people and at the level of communities. As an ecologist I have often gotten together with people to talk about resilience of ecological systems or coupled human natural systems which combine people with ecology.  But I’ve never been to a workshop that brings together the issues of resilience within individual people and issues of resilience with respect to ecosystems or larger scale systems. And this was initially a real challenge because there are several different sets of scholars who deal with resilience at the level of individuals.  This comes primarily from psychology and mainly as has to do with the capacity of individual people to thrive to be health to be in a good place despite all the pressures each one of us feels from time to time. 

Now there are two different types of definitions of resilience that ecologists have used. In the earlier days ecology, people borrowed the engineer’s definition of resilience. Which is like the resilience of a thermostat.  Its goal is to hold the temperature of a room or a house, exactly constant no matter what.  So this type of engineering resilience is all about maintaining stability. Over the last 40 years or so there has been a different definition introduced into ecology about resilience.  And this has to do with the capacity of systems to withstand the shocks, the disturbances, the perturbations, and unexpected surprises that inevitably happen and which cause ecosystems to change. Now it’s been interesting because ecologists are becoming more and more interested in working with social scientists in bringing together a broader picture about how people interact with the rest of nature and coupled social-ecological systems so now we have people from the social sciences largely drawing from psychology , people from ecosystems drawing from that definition.  And so this is the type of workshop where we found sitting in our lap these two different concepts of resilience and we struggled with that a bit. One of the things we can say about these things is that what is in common is that it is all about maintaining the characteristics of the systems despite all kinds of disturbances that happen—to individuals or social-ecological systems.

Now in the case of the psychological definition of resilience, it’s all about thriving and being as healthy as possible. In the case of the ecological definition, it’s more about maintaining the characteristics of systems as they have been, and those may or may not be the most favorable characteristics.  So there are some important differences between these two definitions.  But in spite of that, we were able to get into the crux of the issues rather than getting strongly hung up on the definitions.  Maybe another thing I should mention is that both of these definitions deal with systems, and in one case it’s a system of an individual person that functions as an integrated whole.  In the case of the ecological definition, it’s also a definition of a system that is integrated—people and nature interacting in various ways.

And one interesting thing about systems they can be defined at various scales. We already talked about the difference between an individual and a social-ecological system.  You can also define a system at a scale of Totem Park, you can define it at a scale of Sitka, you can define it at a scale of Alaska, US, or the whole planet.  All these have interactions of social-ecological processes. And one of the things that is challenging about resilience is that the factors that govern resilience at different scales may be different.  For example, if you think about the pulp industry and its lack of resilience, that may have contributed to Sitka’s resilience in redefining itself, reinventing itself after the collapse of the pulp industry. So there are really interesting interconnections between resilience at different scales.  But the basic essence of resilience is to maintain sources of flexibility and maintain sources of diversity that provide you with a good tool kit to create a new system regardless of whatever changes happen in your environment.  So sources of ecological diversity, biodiversity, diversity of culture, economic diversity are important. All this contributes to resilience.

Maybe another thing to mention is that resilience is in a sense is trying to go beyond sustainability. Sustainability in my mind is trying to maintain the characteristics of a system over a long time and trying to stabilize things. Resilience in my mind is all about flexibility and being ready to deal with whatever comes up, surprises that happen.  We may not be able to know what they may be, it might be…well there’s no end of lists of what kinds of things that might happen for Sitka or the State of Alaska, or the globe.  What we are trying to do in this workshop is to think of whether Sitka, the planet as a whole, or the individuals who live in these communities can be resilient and continue to have characteristics that make us want to maintain these characteristics over the long term.   So that’s a short description of resilience.  Thank you.

There was a tension that arose the last morning of the Roundtable. One of the most difficult periods during the event perhaps. But one that, in processing over the past month, I keep being drawn back to.  It was a powerful and ultimately positive experience, and I think I’ve finally figured out why.

As I perceived it, the conflict that arose seemed to manifest from two main needs of the group: one side, a need to move towards action planning and small groups, the other needing more space for listening and continuing a larger discussion in the Fishbowl. Regardless if that was the case, and regardless of how effective the Fishbowl experiment was in reaching its potential for discussion, I think the fact that this division arose and was addressed in part is essential—and something I’ve never experienced before.

Let me try to describe this division, which is difficult because the sides are generalized and it exists on so many levels.  So bear with me.  It’s a partition between immediacy and long-views, between practice and study, between streets and academia, between fight and self-care (or “fight or fort,” as Diana described it during the Roundtable storytelling evening).  The first side I’m deeming “resistance:” it holds urgency, innovating, movement, outer-focus, action plans. The second side, I’m calling “persistence:” it holds long-views, listening, introspection, sharing, and stillness. Persistence identifies what we love enough to protect; resistance fights to protect that which we love.  Persistence is the perpetuation of what we love, through education and sharing values and grieving and relationships and self-care to keep ourselves going. Resistance is then the act of standing in front of bulldozers, of moving towards and standing against.  Resistance can be both an act of creating change or pushing back against unwanted change.  Persistence is both against change (what values do we want to save?) and through change (allow ourselves to grieve and process in a space of safety in the face of loss).  Resistance and persistence are perhaps not the most accurate words to describe these sides—but hey, I needed a distinction, this worked for me, and they rhymed!

I’ve spent time on both sides, on many different levels. In college, I tried to live in both spaces through where I was putting my time—trying to resist through immediate environmental activism (sign this petition! Shut down this coal plant!) and persist through founding an environmental education group.  Education was where I was drawn, but the pressure of urgency, from myself and others, made it hard for me to allow myself into that other space fully. So I tried to do both, to the detriment of all my work. Finally, I had to convince myself that I was doing good work in that “persistent” side: though I hadn’t saved the world that weekend, it was equally as important to create a generation that cared the world was saved for them.

In that instance, the division manifested on the level of how I engaged with my community.  On a personal level, I’ve often found myself, regardless of the work I was doing, on the “go, go, go” side of life; I was forced to step back from the resistance of always acting to the persistence side of self-care because of my chronic disease diagnosis. I hated it at first, being forced to hold, forced to listen, forced towards a longer look because I physically wasn’t able to be involved in urgency. Though I’m drawn towards resistance, I now know I have to prioritize space for self-persistence in order to avoid burn-out.

I’ve since swung from one side to the other, on personal and community levels.  And it’s interesting—whichever side I’m on, I think I’m subconsciously and simultaneously judging the other side and feeling judged by the other side. I should be doing the other side as well, yet the other side isn’t valuing fully the merits of where I’m currently sitting.

This conflict is typically not talked about.  It lies under the surface, an internal struggle or subconscious group decision. In the Roundtable, we did address it somewhat before Friday—the “struggle between urgency and giving time to build relationships” was acknowledged, though not delved into. Because these two sides, examples of this resistance/persistence coin, appear in apparent “conflict” and rarely engage with each other, work on either side, I believe, falls short.  Action without full listening and conversation, and you’ve missed aspects of intention essential to the success of your work.  Time spent all in stillness and conversation, and a window is missed for making movement.

In my own life, since my diagnosis I’ve been trying to find a balance between passionate urgency and space for stillness, and now have a word for those two desires pulling me in seemingly different directions.  It’s difficult to find space for both.  Perhaps we can’t ever fully, and finding balance means continuing to swing from side to side. Hopefully, we can follow the motion of a pendulum, and those swings can become smaller and smaller, more stabilizing, less of a jump.

It is important that these tensions were aired on Friday morning, and essential that we continue to hold this divide, talk about it, and intentionally incorporate it into notions of resilience.  For me, I’ve actually come to a new definition of resilience: as the tying together of resistance and persistence, of urgency and quiet, of action and listening.  It is intentionally creating space for both of these to exist in tandem, recognizing that one side isn’t more or less important than the other.  They have to intertwine for a full life, to move across boundaries, to create a new mindset and space for creative capacities of all kinds, for full resilience. Resilience for me has to be both a more complete lens through which to look at community problems and solutions, and a concrete way of life to strive for.  For me, this new definition holds both.

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or

Always stretched open, you would be

Paralyzed. Your deepest presence

Is in every small contracting and

Expanding, the two as beautifully

Balanced and coordinated as

Bird wings.”

–Rumi

Resilience is bird wings.  Resilience is holding contracting and expanding in harmony, in closed fists and resistance, in open hands and persistence.  Both are essential.  Both have to act in tandem—one pushing in front of the other leads to unbalance, leads to flapping in circles.  Resilience can be that holding of these seeming contradictions, of creating space for resistance and persistence to exist in a harmony of perfectly organized chaos. I think that is beautiful. And I think that is something to strive for.

We’d like your help as well.  Have any sort of resource–books, articles, websites, organizations, songs, podcasts, exercises–you’d like to share? Please include it in the comments below!

The other resilience resource we’d like to share are the three articles sent out to Roundtable members for reading prior to the gathering. We felt these articles broadly addressed resilience theory’s history and present understanding. A very quick introduction for the group, but one we hope was helpful to ground the Roundtable members.  Have feedback on the articles? Please let us know in the comments!

“Crash Course in Resilience” by Sarah van Gelder, posted in YES Magazine (you can also take YES Magazine’s Resilience Quiz)

“Resilience Ecologists Look to Nature For Strategies to Stay Afloat in Turbulent Times” by Mark Sommer, posted by InterPress Service

From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds by Buzz Holling (father of resiliency), posted by Ecology and Society

Again, please view the resilience library available on our website and give us your feedback! We aim to create a virtual library that will be useful in other towns and cities and planning committees.

The Roundtable crew in discussion in the Yaw Chapel building on Sheldon Jackson Campus.

So where do we go from here? We’re still in the process of compiling notes and documentation from the Roundtable, while also practicing personal resilience with some vacations over here at the Island Institute.  We hope to continue and expand the conversation around resilience here on the blog through posts and comments, and are opening up contribution possibilities to Roundtable Participants and beyond. Eventually, written and video documentation from the event will be posted here.  A Resilience Facebook page has been started to share shorter thoughts and comments.

Many key ideas came out of the Roundtable; one that we are focusing on going forward is that “Everything we need is right here.” In creating resilience in Sitka and in other towns, we want to explore how we can we look within our communities to find the tools we need, and to ask the difficult questions of what we love enough to work to preserve. Ideas for action and areas of focus came out of the Roundtable, and we hope to develop a series of ongoing resilience programs and gatherings in Sitka over the next year. (To do that we need your help! Consider supporting the Island Institute to contribute to this work) Again, stay tuned here and on our website for tools and documentation from the Roundtable and action plans for Sitka.  For now, here are some highlighted themes from the Roundtable–these foci were used during our Friday evening public event to expand the discussion to the Sitka community.

Resilience “Wordle” created from words submitted by Roundtable members during our introductions.

*The need for words, images, and visions

Storytelling, narratives, and arts served as important tools during the Roundtable to provide examples and inspirations. The need for this form of creative support and expression as part of resilience, and as a way to share resilience, was felt by all.

*Local Money

The issue of local investment and reinvestment came up in addressing a variety of issues.  How can capital stay in and benefit a community? How can investment help address issues of crippling student loans and community philanthropic needs? (Action plan on this issue to come!)

*Grieving and Celebration

The need for space to celebrate the joys and gifts that sustain us and to grieve losses–whether of a young person, an elder, a language, an economic base, a river, an animal, or a dream–was a common thread throughout our discussions in terms of maintaining personal resilience.  How can we incorporate formal and informal space and rituals for grieving and celebration in our resilience work?

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?

Admittedly: this metaphor is a bit transparent. This other planet could just as well be ours. Yet instead of subtle green aliens, we have not-so-subtle corporate giants who are sanctioned to burn as much carbon-releasing fuels as they’d like. Gigatons of carbon, annually. And they’re winning the day. Just type “floods” or “fires” into google news for daily unprecedented news of never-been-this-bad-before greed-accelerated weather disasters.

So–that brings me to where I’ve been struggling. How we dig our hands deep into the rich soil of resiliency (both metaphorical and literal) while holding true to the rebellion we still need to build?

And lest we think this rebellion is impossible to build–well, it’s already starting to bloom.

Mountaintop Removal protest in West Virginia

Over the next few weeks: hundreds of people plan to shut down a mountaintop removal site in West Virginia, while a group of Texans will train for a sustained blockade of the southern leg of the Keystone XL, and even in Montana folks will go through a week of civil disobedience to confront massive coal mining. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, of quite a special summer in store. And quite a special Spring before that.

And lest we think this rebellion is doomed–well, maybe it is.

Yet here we are. A movement is arising unlike one we’ve ever quite seen — it’s planetary in scope, and focused on the survival of all of us, the human race. Some of us are figuring out how we can best weather the first losses–the first wave of epic droughts, storms, and other changes that the fossil fuel industry have locked us into. Some of us are figuring out how we may yet be able to best that industry–and stop them from taking a livable planet totally out from under us.

Seemingly we need both. Both resiliency and resistance. But how do we best hold these two fronts together? What does resiliency mean when you both need to heal, build a shock-ready world, and play offense to the things that are threatening us all?

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. 

The Center for Social Inclusion defines resilience as the capacity of a community to mobilize services and resources—human, financial, and otherwise—to prevent environmental, health, and economic threats from arising and to reduce negative impacts from those extreme events that cannot be prevented.  Resilience here requires access to opportunity, to what’s needed not just to survive but possibly to thrive.  Community transformation emerges as greater internal strength, and as better self-understanding of how to reduce vulnerability.

But how is this made real in marginalized communities that tend to be the hardest hit by stress or disaster, and then the slowest to recover?  What resilience exists within communities at risk that have long borne the brunt of environmental pollution, toxicity, and dirty energy?  How can resilience be nurtured, given the continued curtailing of civil rights and cutting back of even basic assistance to the economically poor and disenfranchised?

Almost seven years have passed since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf coast on August 29, 2005.  By some measures New Orleans has recovered significantly.  The city’s population exceeds three-quarters the pre-Katrina numbers, large-scale rebuilding efforts have boosted its economy, and local unemployment and poverty rates dipped below national statistics.  But who has moved back and who is being counted?

Even though most of those living in the Crescent City in August 2005 were renters and low-income residents, recovery programs like The Road Home favored property owners.  Corporate spending on rebuilding gave priority to privatizing or reducing many social services rather than ending the displacement and homelessness of poor people of color.  Investment goals focused on a smaller but more affluent city footprint, targeting areas where the economically disadvantaged did not, or could not, live.  Thousands of displaced families still live in “temporary” housing or are homeless.  Thousands more, largely low-income (former) renters and public housing residents, could not return to their communities as rents climbed out of reach and as mixed-income homes replaced affordable housing.  (The housing authority demolished intact affordable public housing projects (more than 5,000 units) to build mixed-income homes.)  Only a small percentage is set aside and subsidized for those with little means.  Lower poverty rates reflect the continued displacement of those with few resources more than an overall boost in the city’s economic well being.

Reconstruction and recovery efforts in New Orleans recall the failed promise of another reconstruction attempted nearly 150 years ago.  This reconstruction has changed the city’s racial and economic complexion, rather than restore separated families, communities, or the spiritual rootedness that made the city so culturally rich.  Yet polled by Gallup and other organizations on whether Hurricane Katrina and its impacts pointed to persistent racial inequality, fewer than half of white Americans thought so, while more than three-quarters of African Americans in the country said yes.

I think two of the most difficult things a human being can cultivate are the expansiveness of spirit and heart necessary to respond to life fully and imaginatively—with assumptions and stereotypes put aside—and a capacity to ask significant questions about our lives in a larger world, and about lives not our own.  We exist in relation—to each other, to the Earth and its inhabitants.  We might do well to regard such relation and responsibility as life itself.

“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.

But what I really care about more than memory foam and shapewear is human stories of resilience–I mean our species’ stories of resilience (not nature metaphors, but the literal and concrete details of how a person, a family, a ‘hood, or a town is getting itself through hard times). Because we are people, families, ‘hoods, and towns. And I need them. I need to hear and heed our epic messes and epic recoveries. Right now, in places like Toledo, Ohio, a great story of resilience is happening and I don’t know what it is. As we speak, stories of resilience are happening. And I think its safe to say that all of you have stories of resilience. Your stories are our resource.

We don’t need another conference on climate change and the end of times. We don’t need a list of micro-actions (recycling, turning out the lights) that contribute-ish to our future. The world will be here without us. What we are staring at is not the earth’s lack of resilience but our own.

I am interested in how this conference can be an experience of resilience. Part of what is making us unresilient is our propensity to sit around and talk about things. We need to create our own stories of resilience. And man, what fun!

I am interested in humility and what we don’t yet know. I am interested in the things I won’t be able to hear because some people I live near have don’t have the time, the money, or the inclination to sit at the table.

What is resilience? Some students I worked with at Pacific High said it best: its harnessing your badass self.

Join us in sharing resilience stories on Wednesday, July 18th, 7:30 pm, Allen Hall, for Sustain Me: Stories of Falling Down, Getting Up, and Finding New Ground

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.

In the last ten years I began looking at clients’ financial needs much like I would look at how an ecosystem functions.  After the crashes of the 90’s tech boom, 9/11, and the financial meltdown of 2008, I began to realize that our economic system and therefore our investment options are becoming increasingly vulnerable to structural shock.  By this I mean our current capital market structure. Investing now is becoming a competition with, and between, predatory algorithms; high-speed trading is the game and it is created by some of the brightest engineers and physicists in the country. They used to build rockets and bridges; now they build code to extract fractions of a penny, billions of times in a day. This High Frequency Trading has turned Wall Street into a casino unhinged from what our capital markets were designed to provide—startup capital to create a new business ( read jobs) and transparent access to accumulating wealth from investment.

Today, at our firm, we try to square our knowledge of ecology with our financial experience and build models of investing and financial planning around resiliency.  Brian Walkers and David Salts’ Resilience Thinking was one book that gave us the intellectual underpinning to make the changes we felt we needed to help make this transition.   In this little book, the concept is simple:  Expect shocks when you have this complex of a world we have created today, and that ability to absorb shock without dramatically changing the regime that supports you, is one definition we have applied to our investment practice.  We screen stocks and bonds based on each company’s resiliency along with number of other values to make up our screens. We also spotlight each client’s financial picture, and we suggest one of our model allocations as well as ways to strengthen each family’s financial resiliency.  This is our work and each day we are challenged by understanding what is really going on and having the conviction to execute on this knowledge.  Our resiliency strategy gives us the keel we need to keep sailing in troubled waters.

We are in a period of time of great upheaval. We are at peak-easy to obtain oil, peak capital (we are swamped with debt by any historic measure), peak public stock ownership (there is de-equitization going on) peak pensions, peak soil, peak water, etc.  I believe these “bumping up against limits” create a great opportunity to use our local knowledge to build resiliency into our communities. I believe the future will hold investment opportunities where we live and where our money will have the most value to our lives.  Another new book that pushes the front of this thinking is The Resilience Imperative-Cooperative Transitions to a Steady State Economy by Canadian’s Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty.

I hope our Roundtable discussions can add ideas to Sitka’s blueprint to become a resilient community. This place has all the ingredients needed to be successful: scale, hydro power, a location on the ocean’s edge in a pristine environment, diverse economic opportunity, motivation of highly skilled citizens, indigenous knowledge and practice, and I must mention- a twenty-acre campus in the heart of town providing a regional base for art, culture, the humanities, and science.

Non Satis Scire. (To Know Is Not Enough)

‘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.

Perhaps, the loss of awareness in midst of the persistent activity of life is also to be feared.  For me, prayer has become a daily discipline of contemplation of the resiliency of life.  This has become essential to a self-awareness that can pattern daily activity and sustain it with hope.  When I’m faithful to this discipline, it invests mundane acts with the capacity to heal and the power to access life in all its phases.  It is life changing.

I call this ‘finding the Gospel in this place (or moment, or event).’  It has necessitated a re-thinking of centuries of practice.  In the missionary zeal which was the wake of European enlightenment, teachers of all kinds (including the religious) conceived themselves as bringing good news to others ‘less privileged.’  This conveyance of knowledge packaged and bound created a commodity which retails alongside so many others, in an economy of scarcity which is based on fear.

When we are able to focus on finding the Gospel which is already here, we are able to participate in an economy of abundance based on love.  This provides us with the remarkable power of resiliency, and it has illuminated wonderful changes taking place in world consciousness.  It is permission to be ‘righteous’ in a way that is resilient:  less than perfect and accepting this in others as well as ourselves.

Then resiliency allows us to repent, to make amends, and change comes to reflect our creative hope for justice and the sanctity of life, rather than an irritated reaction to imperfection in others.  Actions which flow as the consequence of repentance value healing above control, and trust in the restorative powers set loose.  For instance, repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery by a church three years ago has not led to the complete restructuring of property rights in law, which is openly implied by the action.

O, well.  It is early yet.  Even the dimensions of this repentance are still to be imagined.  Yet, some manifestations are visible.  Inhabitants of Kivalina feel empowered by this to take on global petrochemical interests, in their efforts to redress harmful effects of climate change.  People in Fairbanks, and Anchorage, and Sitka have been compelled by this thinking to redefine cherished notions of property and social justice, and create local responses to intractable difficulties of homelessness.  Resiliency is the sign of life in prayer.