Considering resilience (and art)
· 5 min read
While in Wales, I visited the memorial for the Senghenydd coal mine disaster a hundred years ago. My family were Lancashire coal miners and it’s moving to see this memorial as a reminder of times when this dangerous and dirty energy dominated the industrialised world.
But, in the hills next door to the mine, the organisation I was with is now planning to build wind farms. It is quite inspiring I think, that near to the biggest mining disaster this country has ever seen, there are plans in place to use the same landscape for clean, safe and sustainable energy.
I find it deeply poignant to look back at the troubled history of industrialisation, and my own personal connections to it, as well as to look forward and try to guide decision-makers towards choices that can help build a better life for people with a healthy planet. We can’t do anything without energy, and more people in our world need the decent quality of life many of us take for granted, but the things we actually do aren’t worth very much if our planet becomes trashed as a consequence.
Resilience is a property of a complex system – it is the capacity to survive, adapt and grow in the face of change and uncertainty, particularly related to disturbances that may have a high impact and low likelihood. It is a property of any complex system, be it your body, a company, a sector, a city, or a country.
Unlike sustainability, resilience doesn’t have a moral connotation. For example, a drug cartel can be very resilient. More resilience therefore is not always good, although we are often actually concerned with systems that we would like to become more resilient. Nevertheless, when considering resilience, it is necessary to always answer the question ‘resilience of what, against which stresses?’
By now, folks will be aware of my growing interest in the history of art, and I was wondering about what work of art might resonate with the ideas of resilience or challenges to resilience. I thought of the modern installation “Can’t Help Myself” by the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which an industrial robot arm attempts to entertain observers while mopping up blood-red hydraulic fluid leaking from it. In the end, however, I was swayed by my love of paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn.
The painting below is, “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and was painted in 1633 so it is an early work by Rembrandt. The painting depicts the biblical event in which Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, as described in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. In this painting, therefore, you see multiple disciples desperately struggling to control their boat in the midst of a sudden storm – a system outside their control. The waking Christ, however, is calm as he knows he has the ability to address the larger system and calm the sea.
A particularly fascinating feature of the painting is that it was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and remains missing! So, we can only hope that it is physically resilient wherever it is so that it may be viewed again by the public when re-discovered. And we can hope that the criminal arrangements involved in its theft are not resilient and will break down at some point so its location is revealed!
In considering Resilience, I suggest it is useful to reflect on the following 5 features which we’ll dive deeper into in future newsletters:
Multiple layers:
Resilience is never achieved at one level only – it can require a perspective on the resilience of the communities, cities or countries in which we operate, and the resilience of the industry and sectors within which we work. A distinction can also be made between specific and generic resilience. Specific resilience refers to a particular known risk or stress, e.g. the capacity of New York City to deal with the next Sandy storm. Generic resilience is the capacity of a system to deal with many different kinds of stresses including those that are unknown. The following layers of resilience merit attention.
Structural resilience:
This is the basic layer of resilience and refers to the capacity of a system to sustain a shock without falling apart or losing key functionality. It is enabled by features like buffers and diversity.
Integrative resilience:
This involves an understanding of the multiple interacting physical and human systems at different scales (e.g. local/global) that affect your environment, and how these may interact to create, for example, self-reinforcing cycles, boundaries and thresholds.
Transformative resilience:
This is the capacity of a system to evolve and even transform significantly as circumstances change while retaining the deeper essence that defines its identity.
Anti-fragility:
Anti-fragility is a property of systems in which they actually increase rather than decline in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The concept was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Anti-fragile.
This article is also published on the author's blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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