Developing Resilience
Andrew Zolli writes in the NYT about how to bounce back. He notes that in Hurricane Sandy, newly redeveloped Lower Manhattan, which should have been the least vulnerable part of Manhattan, was not, because it was rebuilt to be "sustainable," not resilient, as urban planner and developer Jonathan Rose put it:

"After 9/11, Lower Manhattan contained the largest collection of LEED-certified, green buildings in the world," he said, referring to a rating program for eco-friendly design. "But that was answering only part of problem. The buildings were designed to generate lower environmental impacts, but not to respond to the impacts of the environment" -- for example, by having redundant power systems.

The resilience frame speaks not just to how buildings weather storms but to how people weather them, too. Here, psychologists, sociologists and neuroscientists are uncovering a wide array of factors that make you more or less resilient than the person next to you: the reach of your social networks, the quality of your close relationships, your access to resources, your genes and health, your beliefs and habits of mind.

Based on these insights, these researchers have developed training regimens, rooted in contemplative practice, that are already helping first responders, emergency-room physicians and soldiers better manage periods of extreme stress and diminish the rates and severity of post-traumatic stress that can follow.

...Unfortunately, the sustainability movement's politics, not to mention its marketing, have led to a popular misunderstanding: that a perfect, stasis-under-glass equilibrium is achievable. But the world doesn't work that way: it exists in a constant disequilibrium -- trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving in endless cycles. Indeed, it's the failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. That's why some of the most resilient places are, paradoxically, also the places that regularly experience modest disruptions: they carry the shared memory that things can go wrong.

"Resilience" takes this as a given and is commensurately humble. It doesn't propose a single, fixed future. It assumes we don't know exactly how things will unfold, that we'll be surprised, that we'll make mistakes along the way. It's also open to learning from the extraordinary and widespread resilience of the natural world, including its human inhabitants, something that, counterintuitively, many proponents of sustainability have ignored.

That doesn't mean there aren't genuine bad guys and bad ideas at work, or that there aren't things we should do to mitigate our risks. But we also have to acknowledge that the holy war against boogeymen hasn't worked and isn't likely to anytime soon. In its place, we need approaches that are both more pragmatic and more politically inclusive -- rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.

Zolli's book, co-authored with Ann Marie Healy: Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.