Resilient Systems : Lessons from the Christchurch rumble

Non-stop media coverage aside, it does feel like we are experiencing more frequent natural disasters. . Perhaps we should call them natural events since they seems to happen with such regularity that we should be very well prepared and learn to live with them. It was somewhat ironic then that the city of Christchurch should receive an international Civil Defence Award prior to the recent 7.1 earthquake. The response to the earthquake was very impressive from the Civil Defence HQ downwards into the community. Of course nothing is perfect and it’s probably telling about our level of expectation that some were unhappy about how the council handled things. The fact that no one died is quite incredible, due to a combination of strict building standards, low population density and the time of the quake. But what was of interest to me was how the city residents responded. There was a definite feeling of everyone looking outwards and willing to help. The fact that the city could get back on its feet so soon was testament to the resilience of its people.

So what makes systems resilient? Simply the ability to bounce back from a shock or unexpected event. Generally this is applied to ecosystem shocks: the ability of ecosystems to regenerate. But people can be resilient, in the way they respond to shocks such as the loss of a loved one. Communities can also be described a resilient if they can recover from an event which effects the whole community. More and more resilience will become a major part of any community planning scenario. Christchurch has done well in this area and I am sure lessons will be learnt from recent events.

When we look at building resilience into our systems it’s worth looking at the key stress points. During the earthquake a couple of these stressors became clear: one was money and the other was the exchange of  services. People needed to buy stuff yet with power down there was no way of paying via the usual channels and many people didn’t have cash on them. Also people needed to exchange goods and services but again there were problems with communication, power and availability.

It’s at a time like this that we see the promise of local community currencies come to the fore. One such system was the Lyttleton Timebank which operates in a small and geographically constrained community. This is a perfect setup for a successful community system. More and more these type of systems will become part of the fabric of a successful and resilient communities. Watch a story about them here

Ethnic Cleansing: A Dirty Business

So the Tamil Tigers are no more and yet another ethnic conflict comes to a miserable end. How many killed for this? Has it made any difference? It may take some time for that question to be answered. Like many ethnic conflicts, this one seems to have gone on for a long time making one wonder what exactly it was all about.

My parents actually lived in Sri Lanka for a short time just before the civil war broke out. I spent the Xmas holidays on 1980/1 visiting them and enjoying the gorgeous beaches of the south west and the green hinterland. When I heard that civil war had broken out it didn’t really resonate with me. As a 14 year old, the Sinhalese and Tamils I had met just seemed like people. Also growing up with the conflict in Northern Ireland never far from the news, it seemed par for the course.

People, even of the same colour and country, could still engage in war. Both sides of my family have been on the wrong end of the ethnic vacuum cleaner so maybe I was just inured to it.But these days I am very tuned into any mention of ethincity and references to improving the hygiene of ones home country.

Whilst pondering the end of the latest carnage I was floored by the story of a Catholic man who was beaten to death by a group of Rangers football supporters in a small town in Northern Ireland. It was after Rangers had triumphed by winning the Scottish soccer leage competiton that a bunch of Rangers fans, Protestants, decided to pay a visit to the Catholic part of town and basically murder someone. Which they did.

So it continues. It’s a bit 20th century though.

Nowhere is immune from this.

What about that gorgeous Kingdom of Happiness, Bhutan. Apparently a wonderful place to visit and a very progressive society. In fact about 5 years ago I included Bhutan in a paper on E-government. It was quite advanced for a small mountainous country. No mention in the Wikipedia entry of ethnic cleansing.

Yet in the last 15 Years nearly 15-20% of the population has been cleansed and evicted from the country. What the..???

They certainly kept that quiet. 120,000 Bhutanese have been transformed into refugees living in 7 camps in Nepal. Some have found their way here to Christchurch to start a new life.

It feels like an ongoing epidemic……it’s hard to know when it will stop. Our identity is so important to us, yet at the same time it allows the tyranny of the majority an easy way to express any kind of anger or frustration. As Amartya Sen writes in “Identity and Violence“,

“..a major source of potential conflict in the contemporary world is the presumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture”.

Indeed but it’s our willingness to succumb to group behaviour and peer pressure that allows atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide to happy. How can we move away from the “clash of civilizations” and to an appreciation of the person?

Actually I don’t know if we can. It seems so ingrained in our nature. Of course we can all educate our children and imbue them with values that include compassion, kindness and care.

I wonder how technology will help? I have a feeling that will play a bigger part than we realise. Maybe when all the teenagers around the world are connected through the semantic web……who knows?