Resilience

I would like to share the results of my research, thinking and writing with the U. S. Resilience System in the hopes that its viewers can incorporate some of it into their own work.  I also hope to receive feedback so I can improve my ideas.

My background is in city and regional planning.  More recently it has expanded to include futures research.  I believe that the much-needed resilience many of us are seeking can best be achieved if we are working on immediate plans and actions plus long-range plans and actions at the same time.  Immediate or short-term actions are seldom sufficient by themselves.

Resilience to the wide variety of critical problems and uncertainties we expect to face this century requires systemic changes in our country and world.  It requires changes in the way we think, act, organize and communicate, and in what and where we build.  We slowly build our man-made environment to fit our needs and then our man-made environment shapes and controls us for many decades - even after our needs have changed. 

Young and old hockey stars reach for the puck in a game of shinny on a frozen pond in Palgrave, something the NHL worries may become less possible as the climate changes.  Jim Wilkes / TORONTO STAR

Hockey is taking steps to reduce its carbon footprint, for good reason: more than other pro sports, it depends on cold weather and clean water.

thestar.com - by Kevin McGran - July 23, 2014

NHL Commissioner to receive 2014 Environmental Leadership Award

nhl.com - July 21, 2014

The Green Sports Alliance will honor NHL commissioner Gary Bettman with the 2014 Green Sports Alliance Environmental Leadership Award for his visionary work and guidance in establishing NHL Green and promoting sustainable business practices across the League.

The Green Sports Alliance Environmental Leadership Award is presented to a member of the sports industry who has demonstrated leadership and has provided significant contributions to environmental sustainability. The award is voted on by the Green Sports Alliance Board of Directors, which is comprised of representatives from professional sports organizations, leading environmental nonprofits and other organizations affiliated with the sports industry.

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Sites like Pueblo Bonito in northern New Mexico reached their maximum size in the early A.D. 1100s, just before a major drought began to decrease birth rates throughout the Southwest. Credit: Nate Crabtree

Scientists chart an ancient baby boom—in southwestern Native Americans from 500 to 1300 AD

phys.org - June 30, 2014

Washington State University researchers have sketched out one of the greatest baby booms in North American history, a centuries-long "growth blip" among southwestern Native Americans between 500 to 1300 A.D.

It was a time when the early features of civilization—including farming and food storage—had matured to where birth rates likely "exceeded the highest in the world today," the researchers write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A crash followed . . .

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CLICK HERE - PNAS - RESEARCH - Long and spatially variable Neolithic Demographic Transition in the North American Southwest