Excellent work on the presentations! You guys did a great job of quickly producing professional-caliber work. Make sure you get a reflection blog up on your experience.
For next class, there are two readings in the blackboard folder. I suggest you begin this week’s readings with the Walker interview, which will acquaint you with the idea of resilience, which is rapidly challenging “sustainability” as a creative framework for thinking about a desireable future in light of the apocalyptic possibilities of climate change, peak oil, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and other looming threats. Then read my co-authored article on achieving resilience through collaborative storytelling.
Your blog question is:
Why does it enhance resilience if communities tell their own story, given that our profession could simply provide them with guidance for good planning practice, and other experts are available to help them understand other features of their social and ecological contexts? Can you think of an instance from your own life where community resilience was enhanced through storytelling (or, failing that, from your reading and coursework?) Please make specific reference to the concept of resilience as laid out by Brian Walker, which is not a garden-variety notion of sustainability through optimizing existing arrangements - as he says, this kind of approach might only “increase the metabolism of the system”!
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