Restore wetlands, rebuild forests
I SERVE, as a councillor, on the sustainability and resilience committee of the City of Cape Town.
In my second year of university study, which was decades ago, the emphasis was on precise definition and interrogation of terms. The twinning of words required special scrutiny from us in our analysis. It was always moot to ask whether the words were really separate and arbitrarily put together, interchangeable or genuinely joined at the hip because of necessity.
Fuzziness, we understood, was the enemy of both meaning and action. If words meant different things to different people or were mere appendages to other words with no purpose, confusion and contestation would reign. I therefore asked myself what I had to be doing in the sustainability and resilience committee.
I did a lot of thinking and reading. It was Andrew Zollinov who provided the direction I sought.
Zollinov, in an article published in 2012, recognised that “the right mix of incentives, technology substitutions and social change” could no longer help humanity to “achieve a lasting equilibrium with our planet and with one another”.
The accelerating and intractable problems of environmental degradation, poverty, food security and climate change had put paid to the idea of sustainability. Today, the attraction of sustainability was, in his view, “alluring” from a moral perspective, but was of diminishing value in policy-making. Things have changed quite dramatically in the past decade.
The regularity and intensity of droughts, floods, heat waves and climatic change have pointed to how out of balance things have become on planet Earth. No wonder, the “sustainability regime” started to be “quietly challenged, not from without, but from within”.
He noted also that “among a growing number of scientists, social innovators, community leaders, NGOs, philanthropies, governments and corporations, a new dialogue was emerging around a new idea, resilience.
Indeed, our focus as public representatives should not be on the horse that bolted but on “how to help vulnerable people, organisations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions”, by focusing pointedly on the issue of resilience in the broadest sense of the word.
Zollinov holds that “where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world”. Putting the world back in balance is a bridge too far after what we have been doing to the planet.
Climatic change, for all of US President Donald Trump’s denialism, is existent and vengeful. Extreme events are occurring regularly all around us and frighteningly, with devastating consequences. When we had a chance to live sustainably, sensibly and prudently, we spurned that chance and now we can no longer hark back to the missed opportunities.
We are now forced to address the outcomes of our recklessness, greed and indifference. We brought about the climate change that is now afflicting us.
So what are we left with? We must now fall back on our resilience to face the hardships and severe challenges of our own making. We need new knowledge, intelligence and responsiveness to survive the impact of accelerating climate change. I agree with Zollinov that the future, which seemed so promising and so secure is now generating high stress and deep anxiety.
Forward-thinking individuals are grappling, not with sustainability issues but with concerns of resilience. Zollinov notes that “resilience thinking” in big cities “is starting to shape how urban planners think about updating antiquated infrastructure” which are proving to be “fragile in the face of unanticipated shocks like flooding, pandemics, terrorism or energy shortages”.
The infrastructure that cities will need in the coming decades will be of the type “more commonly associated with the army”. A dynamic approach to infrastructure creation will be a necessity.
All of this is going to be very challenging. Thinking in yesterday’s mode will be passé.
What else should we, as public representatives and officials, be planning and doing? We must begin “to use nature itself as a form of “soft” infrastructure”. This means restoring wetlands, resurrecting forests and giving serious attention to all aspects of ecology. Only vibrant nature will protect against raging nature.
In pursuing this line of thinking, Zollinov makes the following very telling point: “Hurricane Sandy hit New York hardest right where it was most recently redeveloped: Lower Manhattan, which should have been the least vulnerable part of the island.” Why? He says that Jonathan Rose hit the nail on the head when he observed that the improvements were “rebuilt to be ‘sustainable’, not resilient”.
The test, unequivocally, has to be “resilience”, not “sustainability”.
This is a very important distinction that we must accustom ourselves to making. I believe that we as city councillors should recognise the importance of giving 90% of our attention to “resilience” and 10% to sustainability. Calling ourselves the resilience committee will be the best thing we could do.
In the interim planning committee, where I also serve, I have repeatedly made a point that Zollinov himself is so strongly stressing, namely, that it is short-sighted and even wrong to seek to lower-environmental impacts and not to respond proactively to the impacts of the environment.
All of the reports seek to gloss over the coming impacts as though environmental issues are static and held still in time. I have said that as a 72-year-old, I despair at the destruction that my generation is going to leave behind. My anxiety on that score is becoming very acute.
Can anyone gainsay Zollinov’s point that it is not “how buildings weather storms”, but how people will do so. In Cape Town, I have just learnt, that many informal settlements exist on flood plains and near retention ponds. A big flood will see a major disaster. It is waiting to happen.
I have urged the committee to consider policies that build strong communities. I requested that the committee looks at the Danish model of “co-housing”, where cohesive communities are built before structures are erected to house them. We will all need, in Zollinov’s view, “social networks”, “close relationships”, “access to resources” and survival traits and qualities to meet the coming climatic Armageddon.
Human resilience will have to be matched with the resilience of infrastructure and technology as well. For Zollinov, the “third domain where resilience will be found” will be in “big data and mobile services”. He alludes to a survey by the US Geological Society, which “is testing a system that ties its seismographs to Twitter”. At the onset of an earthquake, the system will automatically scan social media service for posts from individuals in affected areas regarding fires and damages. That will permit swift action to be taken.
Not everyone will agree with Zollinov. He accepts that “as wise as this all may sound, a shift from sustainability to resilience (will) leave many old-school environmentalists and social activists feeling uneasy, as it smacks of adaptation, a word that is still taboo in many quarters.
If we adapt to unwanted change, the reasoning goes, we give a pass to those responsible for putting us in this mess in the first place, and we lose the moral authority to pressure them to stop. Better, they argue, to mitigate the risk at the source”.
Unfortunately, “a perfect, stasis-under-glass equilibrium” is not achievable. Trump, for example, will trump all good intentions on ameliorating climate change. It will be better to learn how to deal with the problems that are making themselves visible and to survive rather than cling to the notion that we should place our hopes on achieving sustainability. Things are falling apart and the centre is not holding.