Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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networks, are highly vulnerable, not just to terrorism but to the
cascading effects of breakdowns, accidents, and acts of God. Economist
Barry Lynn similarly argues that the same vulnerabilities
characterize the global economy that is “ever more interactively
complex and tightly coupled” while becoming less redundant and
less well managed (2005, p. 234). The issue has a long pedigree.
In 1978, geochemist Harrison Brown proposed a national strategy
of resilience that would build “redundancies into the system
by endowing the system with more effective means for repairing
itself by establishing buffering mechanisms such as improved
storage facilities for food and raw materials.” His vision included
cities that would be self-reliant for food, energy, and materials, in
the manner of peasant villages (1978, p. 218, pp. 242–244). Amory
and Hunter Lovins’ book Brittle Power is a blueprint for a resilient
energy system, based on nine principles of resilient design that
are more broadly applicable as well (1982, pp. 177–213). Yale sociologist
Charles Perrow, in his classic 1984 book Normal Accidents
and more recently in The Next Catastrophe, proposes to increase
societal resilience by downscaling and decentralizing organizations
of all kinds, as well as the electric grid and industrial supply
chains (2007, p. 296). But in the absence of any coherent national
effort to advance resilience, many citizens are taking matters into
their own hands by building local self-reliance for food, energy,
and economic support. The movement to build agriculture systems
organized on the principles of natural systems, the growth
of community-supported farms, the burgeoning Slow Food
movement, school gardens, and urban gardens are all promising
movements toward resilience (Pollan, 2008). In energy systems,
the rapid deployment of wind and solar, even with little government
support, similarly refl ects the kinds of changes that promote
societal resilience and locally based prosperity. But these still isolated
and intermittent efforts must be integrated into the broader
national effort now under way to improve the resilience, redundancy,
and robustness of basic infrastructure and systems.