Weekly Climate Word: Resilience
Resiliency is a term that gets thrown around a lot along the Gulf Coast, usually to describe communities that have been near-destroyed by hurricanes, flooding, and other industrial disasters. It’s also been a buzzword in the disaster recovery and environmental planning world for a while.
Outside the context of the climate crisis and disaster recovery, the word resilience describes something’s elasticity, durability, and toughness. It’s the capacity for something or someone to recover from difficulties. And the climate crisis, and all of its unprecedented-ness, is stretching resiliency to its breaking point. Many of these communities’ resiliency banks are depleted after decades of overexploitation.
The connotation of resiliency has soured significantly in these communities—especially when it’s applied by an outsider—and many community members and leaders are pushing back against the concept of resiliency.
This resistance comes from the expectations implied when being described as resilient. That unspoken expectation that people living in threatened communities are accustomed to disasters and therefore better equipped to handle them. But these assumptions and expectations ignore the flipside of the resiliency coin: vulnerability.
Resiliency and vulnerability are intimately related but I think many people—and agencies—ignore or misinterpret the relationship between the two. We assume that resiliency only makes people less vulnerable to difficulties, inuring them to harsh conditions. But like the other resources that are historically exploited in fenceline communities and industrial pathology zones, resilience is finite.
Our assumptions that resiliency is a personality trait is part of the problem. I am not saying that there aren’t people out there who are more mentally/physically durable than others. (I mean, being an endurance athlete is a choice some people are able to make.) But in the United States, we place the expectation of resiliency on individuals instead of on our systems. In our commodified society, resiliency has more to do with access to resources and infrastructure than with access to some internal, mystical source of moxie or gumption.
How can we classify communities and individuals as vulnerable and then expect them to be resilient? It seems perverse to “celebrate” someone’s resilience while ignoring the circumstances that force them to be resilient. Sure, people can do hard things, but at what point do we stop and ask why something is so hard?
We allow development and industrialization to turn the environment against certain communities; then we expect those communities to go to battle with that altered environment over and over again. And if those communities complain—admit that they’re more tired than resilient—we then ask them to justify their decision to live in such vulnerable places in the first place.
