Re your translation, can we link to it from the Transition Network forums and “translated materials” pages?

Please email “benbrangwyn@transitionnetwork.org”.

Thanks. Ben.

Comparing to sustainable, transitioning for me is more like an action/ process to make something practical happening.

Alas for individuals, we are not really sustainable, but we can be resilient.

In terms of getting to scale, sustainability may approach the abstraction level of infinity, which for so many people is too far out for them to feel they have much to contribute.

We are often dealing with fairly serious demoralization and immediate challenge.

The research on resilience and challenged children is hard to read, but it is inspiring concerning the possibilities of recovering from trauma. Such stories provide a literature of beating daunting odds. When I worked with abused kids, I remember being astonished as I saw the changes gifted caregivers could bring about with ways I did not expect.

We need concepts that clearly call for different patterns in different locales. We also need to be able to credit ways of doing things that go back thousands of years, for example many traditional healing ways, and to understand the benefits of allowing individuals to choose these ways as primary if they wish, with Conventional Western Medicine as a choice adults can be referred to by traditional healers if everyone agrees.

It’s a petty name game if it is about sustaining the same songs with the same choirs.

If using new words are necessary for recruiting new singers, then I don’t see it as a petty word game at all, especially if we want to use seduction and cooperation above mandating stuff.

How to parcel out change so people want to get up in the morning to get to the community center to do their schtick , that is the hard part.

Supermarkets could be turned into meeting places and small-business incubators if need be, though it is a complicated negotiation.

In Portland, many retail locations get left by big companies when leases expire and the companies build elsewhere, after the depreciation tax advantages are used up.

Re-purposing such places may require zoning changes and other issues that could demonstrate resilience, but not sustainability with respect same purpose they started out with.

I found this an interesting exercise and not petty in the least. We must recycle words and phrases if they become shop-worn.

Resilience is a system’s ability to bounce back from a disrupting shock (like having too much cheap oil and then running out of it) and re-establish previous form and function. That is certainly one of the capabilities needed to achieve sustainability, not something different from it.

The operative questions, of course, are: What is to be sustained? and What is resilient? My humble suggestion in response to the last 200 years of totally unprecedented exponential growth in human population and consumption/pollution/depletion rates for all resources and the imminent prospect of major global collapse as we descend from overshoot is that the answer to both is the same: It is simply the human species’ existence as defined by its distinctive genotype, period.

The population size, distribution, forms of social organization and economic relationships, and means of selecting and using natural resources to fulfill basic survival needs and create the next phase of evolution are all malleable variables that must change to adapt to the new environmental conditions.

Given that understanding, the next key question is: Will we make those changes at least somewhat proactively by conscious intention and cooperative design, or will we only make them reactively under duress and random chance with no forethought??

I suggest that choosing the former path as best our intelligence, insight, instincts, imagination and intuition can provide is a higher spiritual, ethical, creative and optimistic, life-affirming calling than choosing the latter. So let’s stop playing these petty word games to compete about who is better than who, and just get going to be the best we each can be with the opportunities we find before us!

An interesting read, but why be so down on ‘sustainability’. I once worked with a leading eco-architects who had banned the use of the ‘S’ word in their office. I think it’s just a bit unnecessary. Obviously the Tesco promotion you mention is in no way ‘sustainable’ as I think many people would realise. Similairly fitting PV arrays on a supermarket and making it more energy efficient are ‘more’ sustainable than not doing it i.e. sustainability is a long range objective in the same way that resilience is. I love the concept of resilience as it embodies a different set of values to ‘sustainability’ but there is room for both concepts. I also support localisation, but we need to be clear about what we are trying to acheive, for example (setting aside other considerations)we may at some time in our low energy future discover that shipping a container of bicycles from a production plant in Asia might actually have a lower carbon impact than delivering them by road from the other end of the UK.
Is flexibility an attribute of resilience?

Fully agree with all of that, and well-written too.

This sort of thinking got me into the “3 Rs” of Transition concept.

Cheers – John