One of the mailling lists that I follow (Gordon Cook’s Arch-Econ list) recently featured a discussion about resilient communities (RC) that brought focus to many items of interest to me. Here a link to an excellent blog that regularly talks about Resilient Communities. Global Guerrillas
Essentially, RC is about making communities self sufficient in several important ways that will allow them to prosper even if they are disconnected from the national/global infrastructure. Here is a definition of Resilient Communities from John Robb:
This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list):
• Energy.
• Food.
• Security (both active and passive).
• Communications.
• Transportation.
The resilient community has broad applicability beyond just improving the ability of those of us in developed economies to preserve wealth and a quality of life despite severe system shocks. It can also be applied to the problems of counter-insurgency in semi-modern urban environment (to radically update a process that was built for the last century) and provide the potential for organic development in underdeveloped areas of the world. The key is that we need to support the open source efforts currently underway to expand this capability underway such as the transition towns movement to MIT’s low tech solutions effort.
The concepts that have special interest to me are communications, energy production and food production.
WISPs, some rural ILECs and a few CLECs are the only LOCAL IP-based communications providers left in the US. Outside of this sliver of the total telecom market, we have given up the control of the majority of our spectrum resources, lost local jobs to remote call centers and transferred larger portions of our income to national/international companies that contribute little or nothing to our communities. WISPs have an important role to play in the Resilient Community, as one of the few alternatives for locally controlled and maintained communications networks.
Energy production is another item of huge importance, as energy costs continue to skyrocket and there are little or no alternatives in place for local production. Instead of taking individual houses “off the grid” – how can we take entire communities “off the grid” and regain control of our energy? Developing alternative sources for energy outside of the traditional networks is going to be critical for independence and maintenance of all kinds of local facilities.
Finally, food production is a big point of failure for most communities. What would happen if WalMart failed or major problems with the transportation network caused food prices to skyrocket? In my area, I think that we could grow enough food locally to support the population, but the bigger cities not surrounded by arable land would be in big trouble.
I look at the idea of Resilient Communities as an insurance policy and an investment. Building up local resources and supporting those resources reduces the amount of money flowing out of communities and improves our chances of maintaining a decent quality of life if/when any of the global networks that we are so dependent on suffers a major malfunction.
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