Tinkering our way into a Resilient Future

May 16, 2012

Are there new technologies that will zoom local production and improve our resilience? Of course. In fact, nearly all of the technologies we need, will be developed by people tinkering with solutions and sharing the results online. Tinkering?  Yes. Tinkerers working in networks invented airplanes, light bulbs, and personal computers.  These networks operate on the [...]

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How You and Your Community Can Avoid Catastrophic Failure

May 15, 2012

How do you and your community avoid catastrophic failure? To give you a good answer, I need to share with you a lesson I learned while flying airplanes professionally. I find this lesson very useful in thinking about resilient homes and communities.  I hope you do too. NOTE:  You’ll also learn why takeoffs are the [...]

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Weekend Edition: Are you Going to Waste Time or Prepare to Prosper?

May 13, 2012

IS the global financial system still breaking down? Given the drumbeat of news we are getting, it’s just getting started. We see the breakdown in Europe, where Spain is nationalizing banks in a futile attempt to prevent bankruptcy and a bankrupt Greece is playing political lotto, on its way out of the Euro. We also [...]

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Contagious Community: An Inside Look At the West Philly Tool Library

May 12, 2012

Today’s letter is from Arun Prabhakaran, an entrepreneurial member of our rapidly growing resilient network. In it, he interviews Michael Froelich, the founder of the West Philly Tool Library (here’s a previous letter on tool libraries for background), to get an inside look at start and running a tool library.  Hope you enjoy it as much [...]

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Is Community Resilience Contagious?

May 10, 2012

Here are two extremely simple ways to get a neighborhood thinking like a community.   It’s always amazing to me how even a small project can grow into a community wide project that is trans-formative. Put your thinking caps on, we need more small projects like these to spur our communities to take the path to resilience [...]

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Don’t Throw Away Your Wealth

May 9, 2012

I met Dr. T.H. Culhane a couple of years ago at a National Geographic conference. He is on a lifelong mission to help the world’s poor, both urban and rural, bootstrap themselves out of poverty and improve the quality of their lives. How?  He shows people how to avoid throwing away wealth. Specifically, he teaches [...]

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Weekend Edition: The Failure of Central Planning

May 6, 2012

Networked resilient communities aren’t only a great hedge against the global system run amok.  Networked resilient communities are also the future of the global system. Here’s a very simple reason why this is true. The decentralized social and economic configuration of networked resilient communities — communities that produce most of what they need locally and [...]

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Windbreaks or Gone with the Wind?

May 4, 2012

I learned early on that wind matters. Here’s why: I received my professional pilot training in West Texas. If you haven’t been there before, the flat terrain of West Texas produces lots of wind.  Enough wind to make learning to fly jets a significant challenge. The wind of West Texas has other surprises.  It produced a [...]

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Extreme Resilience: Nomadic Farms and Farmers?

May 3, 2012

Nomadic farming — farms that move from location to location — is interesting.  Let’s explore it a bit. If you are wondering what a nomadic farm looks like, here’s a gallery of photos for a nomadic farm called Riverpark.  It’s located on an empty building lot at Alexandria Center in New York City. As you can [...]

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Are Today’s Grasshopper and the Ant in the Same Situation?

May 2, 2012

This letter is about ways to become resilient.  However, before you do that, you need to think resiliently.  Here’s an example of what this means. Almost everyone has heard the Aesop Fable called “the Grasshopper and the Ant.” Here’s a quick recap if you don’t remember it: During the bountiful summer months, the Grasshopper goofs off while the ant [...]

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