Cool Ideas for Locally Elected Leaders

RESILIENCY Cool Ideas for Locally Elected Leaders Going for Green Leadership Series Volume 5 RESILIENCY Cool Ideas for Locally Elected Leaders Edited by the Columbia Institute Centre for Civic Governance Going for Green Leadership Series Volume 5 RESILIENCY Cool Ideas for Locally Elected Leaders Going for Green Leadership Series Volume 5 Columbia Institute Centre for Civic Governance, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Edited by Pat Gordon and the Columbia Institute Original design by Pete Tuepah and Nadene Rehnby, www.handsonpublications.com Cover design, typography, and layout by Nelson Agustín, IT Republic.ca ISBN 978-0-9784309-9-3 1200 - 1166 Alberni Street Vancouver, BC V6E 3Z3 604.408.2500 www.civicgovernance.ca CONTENTS introduction ......................................................................................................................... 5 chapter 1 big picture: the jekyll and hyde of “resilience” / Bill Rees ......................................................................7 chapter 2 urban design responses ........................................................23 2.1 Cities in Transition / Ryan Walker ...............................................24 2.2 Seven Rules for Sustainability: Strategies for the Post-Carbon World / Patrick Condon ......................................... 40 2.3 North Vancouver’s 100 Year Plan Darrell Mussatto ........................................................................................49 2.4 Williams Lake: The Heart of Cowboy Country Kerry Cook and Liliana Dragowska ................................................. 56 chapter 3 new economy responses ......................................................69 3.1 Revitalizing Communities from the Inside Out Michael Shuman ........................................................................................70 3.2 The Craik Sustainable Living Project .......................................... 85 3.3 Big-Box Retail vs. Communities: The Leslieville Case Paula Fletcher ............................................................................................. 90 chapter 4 leadership tools ..........................................................................97 4.1 Surviving and Thriving at the Council Table Donna MacDonald ...................................................................................98 4.2 Engaging Your Community on Climate Change Kerri Klein ................................................................................................... 102 4.3 Communicating Effectively with Constituents Doug McKenzie-Mohr ........................................................................... 116 4.4 Public Participation in Resource Management Laura Bowman ......................................................................................... 118 4.5 The Natural Step / Ken Melamed ..................................................130 chapter 5 ideas whose time has come ............................................139 5.1 Saving Forests, Making Money / Briony Penn ...................... 140 5.2 Municipal Finances: Looking for Fiscal Balance Gaëtan Royer ............................................................................................ 156 5.3 The Case for Watershed Governance Murray Ball .................................................................................................166 5.4 Swift Current’s Source Water Protection Story Arlene Unvoas ............................................................................................174 INTRODUCTION The word “resilience” refers to the ability to bounce back, the possibility of something returning to its original form after a disturbance. While we may be accustomed to talking about resiliency in individual people, more and more frequently it is being used in relation to communities. This includes the realm of Urban Design, where leaders are looking into the future and planning for cities that will meet the needs of our children and their children alike. It also includes economic responses that reflect the ways in which communities are strengthening their economies while protecting jobs and local businesses. Inspired by conversations at our Centre for Civic Governance forums, Resiliency highlights the bold and creative ways in which leaders and communities are responding to the major challenges of our time. We’ve highlighted some up-and-coming project and policy ideas, whose ingenuity will be central to our collective ability to bounce back. Included on these pages are leadership stories from innovators and visionaries along with some succinct new additions for leadership toolkits. —Charley Beresford, Executive Director, Columbia Institute 5 6 RESILIENCY: COOL IDEAS FOR LOCALLY ELECTED LEADERS CHAPTER 1 Big Picture: The Jekyll and Hyde of “Resilience” Dr Bill Rees’ ecological footprint model is a widely-used measure of human demand for planetary resources. The Ecological Footprint Society reported that we used the equivalent of 1.5 planets worth of resources in 2010. Clearly our behaviours need to change. This is the great challenge of our time. Renowned scholar Bill Rees continues to push the envelope to change this destructive path. In this article, Bill combines climate science and behavioural science, acknowledging the grave trouble we are in, and looking to the path ahead. He uses the idea of Collective Resiliency, and suggests that we need new visions and new stories that help us adapt toward sustainability. We’ve been talking a lot about resilience these days. Checking out the academic literature gives us one thesis of resilience, resilience as a positive quality. But I’m suggesting there is another thesis, that in fact there are two faces of resilience, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There is a generally accepted definition of this concept with which most people will resonate. Resilience is a measure of “the capacity of a system to withstand disturbance while still retaining its fundamental structure, function and internal feedbacks.”i CHAPTER 1: BIG PICTURE: THE JEKYLL AND HYDE OF “RESILIENCE” 7 Well, who can argue against that? We all hope that human society is sufficiently resilient to cope with any shocks that might be tossed at it. If we can withstand a disturbance, we will be able to continue indefinitely within the existing set up. Since disturbance, or change, is inevitable, people generally think of resilience in a positive light. a systems approach Resilience is a measure of “the capacity of a Resilience science has emerged system to withstand disturbance while still because the old scientific methods are retaining its fundamental not working out. Whether or not the structure, function and majority of us realize it, most of our internal feedbacks.” Since sciences and disciplines are based on disturbance, or change, is inevitable, people generally something called Cartesian dualism think of resilience in a and something called Newtonian positive light. analytic mechanics. We tend to think that humans are separate from nature and exempt from natural law; we tend to think in simple one- to-one relationships, in linearity, in very short-term cause and effect. Perhaps during the first two hundred years of the industrial revolution, when our civilization was less complex, that was an adequate approximation of reality. But the fact is that the real world never works that way. Resilience thinking adopts a “post-normal” scientific framework, a systems approach. This thinking recognizes that: • Any complex system is non-linear. For example, there may be significant lags between cause and effect. Global warming, for instance, is lagging greenhouse gas concentrations by 20 to 60 years. • Important systems variables or whole systems may be characterized by critical thresholds or “tipping points” whose existence is unknown until they have been breached. • Beyond a threshold the system may gravitate into a new regime or “basin of attraction” that is not amenable to human purposes or even human existence. 8 RESILIENCY: COOL IDEAS FOR LOCALLY ELECTED LEADERS Think of a bowl in which interrelated, interacting elements are whirling about. If a system spins too far out of sync, it is possible that the system may flip out into another bowl altogether. Such catastrophic change may not be reversible in practical terms. The collapse of North Atlantic cod stocks is an example. For hundreds of years we fished the cod stocks off the Grand Banks. Despite warnings from scientists, we continued to fish, with better and better technology, until the stocks were depleted. We stopped fishing there a couple of decades ago, long enough for recovery. But the recovery has not yet occurred because the system reached a tipping point and is now in a different stability configuration. Though the cod is not extinct, the previous ecosystem will not necessarily rebound. Environment? There are cultures for which that concept does not exist. We are not standing here, with the environment over there. There is no separation between us and nature. Resilience thinking accepts that: • The human enterprise is structurally and functionally inseparable from nature. We are a fully embedded subsystem of the ecosphere. • We belong to linked/integrated socio-ecosystems, complex adaptive systems that are constantly changing. • The sustainability of the human enterprise on a crowded and resource-stressed planet

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