June 2020 Newsletter Essay

Greetings!

Recent weeks make life as global citizen upsetting, with an eye towards unrest and tragedies in many countries, not least my own. I am having difficulty balancing frustration with patience on many issues that have little to do with climate and water and everything to do with justice and empathy. Sometimes, I have had difficulty breathing too.

Yet there is a lesson I have gathered from watching many of you in your resilience work: complex problems are not solved with simple answers. And complex problems are only rarely solved by breaking them into simplistic pieces. Resilient solutions must match the scale of the problems we care about. 

A good friend working in Thailand for several years found many people in one city facing various isolated issues: competition between energy and farming, limited navigation, increasing flooding, uncontrolled growth and declining quality of life. All of them with a blue thread of water resilience running through them. In the end, he helped make that connection — that a group of water solutions could help solve all of the challenges. Together, they even found NBS applications. He made the problem bigger rather than a smaller group of isolated interventions. And he brought in more people, rather than trying to reduce the number of stakeholders and institutions. Those solutions are now being implementing, moving from discussions to plans to earth, stone, and water.

I have colleagues and friends in Mexico, in Zambia, in South Africa, in the Pacific, and in eastern Europe who have all taken an approach that brings warmth and vision to terrible, unjust conditions. Resilience as a solution works best this way — from infrastructure and institutions to communities and ecosystems. 

Resilience is not a narrow word. Resilience is a value like justice and wisdom — a process rather than a product. And many of us need resilience now.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA