Making Resilience Possible: From Theory to Practice

Global stressors that are impacting on the rural community life such as energy stress as a result of scarcity of conventional oil; economic stress as a result of global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor; demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of mega-cities in poor societies; environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and, finally the climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth's atmosphere. The cumulative effect of the above variables contributes t the growing risk of a cascading collapse of systems vital to our human wellbeing - a phenomenon Thomas Homer-Dixon calls as "synchronous failure" (2011). Consequently communities are expected to do everything in order to avoid such outcomes, today. In sequence, this paper addresses three areas:

• Our ability to cope, become resilient and build home without hurricanes, storm surges, excess rainfall and winds that ignite fresh fires;
• Undertake a re-visit of the context of rural and remote stranded-ness and the 'ecological adaptive cycle metaphor' and finally address
• The social processes that facilitate the recovery and promote resilience identified in recent research in Australia.

http://youtu.be/qurJOnIq31E
Run time: 37 mins