resilience

Tag: resilience

CategoriesLifestyle

Futureproofing: How to Actually Invest in Your Future

by Big Calm

“Community is probably the best investment you can make.” ~ Charles Eisenstein

When we hear the word “investing,” most of us think about financial wealth—savings accounts, stock portfolios, or retirement funds. While financial capital is undeniably important, it is far from the only form of wealth that ensures resilience and fulfillment in life.

True resilience—what allows us to thrive no matter what challenges arise—is built by nurturing all the forms of wealth that sustain us as individuals, families, and communities. Aside from financial capital, there are 7 other kinds of wealth:

Social Capital

This is your network of relationships—family, friends, and community—and is a profound source of comfort, support and opportunity. 

Cultural Capital

The shared values, ethics, traditions, and knowledge that strengthen communities and provide a sense of identity. In the case of permaculture (and as a permaculture-guided community, Big Calm) shared ethics include: 

  • Earth Care: preserving and nurturing the natural world, reducing consumption and minimizing human impact to maintain biodiversity
  • People Care: ensuring the well-being of individuals and communities through cooperation, fairness, and shared prosperity 
  • Fair Share: the equitable distribution of resources and surplus

Material Capital

The physical goods and resources you and/or your community own—homes, tools, and equipment—that can sustain individual/community needs or help build a self-reliance.

Intellectual Capital

Knowledge and skills are assets that cannot be taken away. Investing in education, training, and the curiosity to keep learning pays dividends in adaptability and innovation.

Living Capital

This refers to the natural systems we rely on: soil health, clean water, air quality, and biodiversity. Often undervalued in traditional economic systems, these resources are critical to survival.

Spiritual Capital

A sense of purpose and connection to something greater than oneself fosters resilience during life’s inevitable challenges and helps us navigate uncertainty.

Experiential Capital

Life is the sum of our experiences. Traveling, creating art, or spending time in nature expands our horizons and enriches our sense of what it means to live well.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Our modern systems are designed to prioritize financial wealth above all else, but that model is failing us. Economic uncertainty, environmental degradation, and social disconnection have shown us that focusing on financial returns alone is not sustainable. Resilience comes from diversifying our portfolios with positions in all 8 kinds of capital, for example:

  • Build Connections: Volunteer in your community, host gatherings, and participate in collaborative projects to strengthen social capital.
  • Care for Nature: Plant a garden, restore native habitats, or support conservation efforts
  • Learn Continuously: Pick up new skills or hobbies that align with your values to build self-reliance and enhance well being
  • Simplify Ownership: Invest in quality tools and resources rather than accumulating unnecessary possessions
  • Create Culture: Tell stories, share your traditions and create new ones

When we expand our understanding of wealth, we free ourselves from the treadmill of accumulating money at the expense of everything else. Instead, we create lives that are rich in relationships, knowledge, and purpose—a wealth that no market crash can erode. It’s the cumulative effect of nurturing all forms of capital that leads to a resilient and fulfilling life.

CategoriesLifestyle

The Herd of Cats

by Big Calm

Big Calm cofounder Steve Hardy once ran a disaster and emergency management tech startup and would regularly speak at events about black swans, uncertainty, emergence, applied improv, resilience, and antifragility – all subjects that are even more pertinent today and that crossover to permaculture and tiny homesteading.

So, rummaging through the archives, here is a recording of that talk: The Herd of Cats: How Entrepreneurs, Improvisers, and Disaster Managers Approach an Uncertain World.

If you enjoyed this theme, here are a few other links – beginning with the wonderful Pablo Suarez of the International Red Cross/Crescent’s Climate Center speaking about harnessing humour.

Be sure to also check out our post outlining The Adaptive Cycle, which pairs nicely with this thoughtful reflection by Paul Chefurka on Finding the Gift in the darkness (audio here).

CategoriesLifestyle

The Myth of Self-Reliance: Why True Resilience Is Only Found in Community

by Big Calm

The term self-reliance brings to mind a lone homesteader living off-grid in a home built with reclaimed materials. They harvest their rainwater; capture and store energy with a solar panel and a battery; and grow and preserve their own food. They may have a wood stove to cook and heat their home with, and have probably amassed a lot of tools and equipment (a freezer, an axe, canning jars) to enable their lifestyle.

This is an admirable feat, but in reality, this brave soul will never be completely self-reliant because of their hidden dependencies: at some point a company manufactured those upcycled building materials, solar panel and battery, and all the other equipment this off-gridder relies on. Even if they were to “reset the self-reliance clock” once everything needed for this lifestyle is obtained, complete self-reliance has a shelf life. The freezer may short out, canning jars may break, appendicitis may strike. 

This individual may have a lot of knowledge, tools and skills, but they don’t have all of them. 

Does this mean we should abandon our self-reliance goals? Not at all. Instead, it’s important to understand that true self-reliance, paradoxically, is only possible through interdependence with others.

One of the 12 permaculture principles is “Integrate Rather Than Segregate,” or to foster connections between elements (including humans!) to increase synergy and efficiency. Humans are inherently social beings who thrive in collaboration. A functional, connected community shares resources, distributes labour, and collectively tackles challenges. This model mirrors nature, where ecosystems rely on diverse species working together for mutual benefit. One community member might specialize in gardening, while another provides carpentry or medicinal knowledge. Together, they create a resilient and sustainable network that no individual could achieve alone.

By building relationships, sharing resources, and fostering cooperation, we can create resilient communities that allow everyone to flourish. True self-reliance isn’t about isolation; it’s about embracing the power of connection.

A green plan emerges from the black ashes of a wildfire
CategoriesLifestyle

Resilience: The Adaptive Cycle

by Big Calm

This infinity loop is called the Adaptive Cycle. It was first developed to explain the life cycle of forests, and is the most powerfully simple way to describe resilience.

More than just bouncing back from adversity, resilience is a loop – constant and in multitudes. Once you see it this way you’ll see it everywhere – in life, relationships, career, industry, projects, and nature.

There are four phases (sometimes referred to as: r, K, Ω, and α) to the Adaptive Cycle.

Let’s start with perhaps the most pleasant one. This is a young forest, a true love, a growing scale-up, a newly elected government, the beginning of a new job. It’s the phase where we’ve found something special and want to run with it.

We then progress up the front loop. It’s on the front loop that we’re strongest, happiest, and most constructive. Life is beautiful on the front loop.

The next phase is success, maximized and extended by standardization and optimization. There’s comfort with the status quo, but also some signs of complacency and decay. This is an industry’s best quarter, an athlete’s top performance, a lifetime achievement award, a mature forest.

We like this phase so much that we often do everything we can to avoid moving beyond it. We lose adaptive capacity and fall into the Rigidity Trap. It’s here that we see big corporate bail-outs, Blockbuster ignoring Netflix, in-it-for-the-kids marriages, climate change denial.

All good things eventually come to an end – one way or another. There comes a moment of disruption, often not of our choosing. Injury, death, break-up, divorce, disaster, downturn, revolution, even good things like invention, retirement, or winning the lotto. A before and after.

Next comes the release phase, when everything just falls apart (unless you’re the disruptor). There’s a period of denial and mourning, of coping and confusion. What was isn’t and what will hasn’t. Uncertainty abounds.

Then, following some acceptance of a new reality, we try to make sense of our place in it. This can move surprisingly fast or painfully slow, but regardless – beware – the beast is in the back loop. This climb can be very difficult, lonely, and hopeless.

The fourth phase is where we begin to regain hope. Exciting possibilities emerge – often many of them! Vegetation pushes through the burnt forest floor. Individuals date, create, and try new things. Startups start up. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The most promising of those possibilities go on to where we started, where winners get the nourishment they need to thrive. But if they don’t, those ideas risk falling into the Poverty Trap. Startups need capital, relationships need time, books need editing, forests need water.

Adaptive Cycles can be micro and personal, like writing a new song or grieving the loss of a pet. Or they can be macro and global, like the birth of cryptocurrency or the extinction of species. They can move slowly like human rights movements, or quickly like an improv scene.

Humankind is here, at the convergence of multiple disruptive events caused by late-stage capitalism, major political/cultural shifts, and climate change. There was a before and there will be an after this macro moment in time.

We are immersed in uncertainty and we should know to expect some difficult times ahead before seeing the hopeful light of new order at the end of the tunnel. As they say, the only way out is through.

What makes the Adaptive Cycle such a powerful visual is that the front loop crosses the back loop. It’s the intersection of the strong and capable with the weak and vulnerable – positions everyone is in at various times – that makes community an x-factor for resilience.

Resilience isn’t just bouncing back to normal. It’s ensemble sense-making. It’s an assortment of emerging adaptive cycles – from hopeless to hopeful, creative to confused, weakness to strength, helper to helped. Resilience is a knowing embrace of the emerging uncertain.

Adapted from a Twitter thread originally published on April 19, 2020.

Pictured: New growth emerging from ground charred the previous summer by the 5992 hectare Trozzo Creek wildfire in 2021.

wildfire on a mountainside at night
CategoriesLifestyle

Fire Break

by Big Calm

Old-timers in the Kootenays sometimes refer to June as “Juneuary,” a month with cooler, wetter weather. But June 2021 definitely didn’t resemble anything they would have seen before. It was record-shatteringly hot.

list of temperatures in BC cities

Just as, earlier this year, the jetstream had parked a cold weather system over Texas, it contorted to form a stagnant heat dome that baked much of western North America. 

weather map with jetstream heat dome

For several days, temperatures across BC reached into the 40s (Celsius) before settling into weeks of 30-degree temperatures, with no rain. Perhaps nice for the beach, but not so good for temperate rainforests.

On July 9th, lightning struck a peak east of Winlaw and started a fire. It quickly grew out of control into a “Fire of Note” and began spreading to the backcountry behind us. 

An evacuation alert was issued on July 21st. We raced to remove fuels (both gasoline and dry foliage), set up sprinklers, and collect essentials. Groundworks crews, which had finally mobilized just a week earlier, packed up and rolled out. Safety crews visited every property in the alert area to ensure that everyone was accounted for and was aware of the possibility of an evacuation order. Meanwhile, overhead, we could actually feel the drops falling from the water buckets under a constant cavalcade of helicopters. It was surreal.

water bucket helicopter overhead

The winds picked up that night and the alert was upgraded to an order, blocking us from our new property and kicking off a few smoky weeks of intense worry. The fire was once again upgraded, but this time to an “Interface Fire”, indicating structures (homes) were threatened. At one point, Big Calm was just a few hundred metres from going up in flames.

Fortunately, the persistent efforts of BC Wildfire Service crews, with ground support from the region’s forestry service, Sifco, and others, held the fire from jumping the ridge and into the Valley. The order was downgraded 12 days later and the alert rescinded on August 18th, following some much needed rain. 

We moved to BC knowing that wildfire is an annual risk. Though Big Calm already has extensive fire breaks, we had consulted experts early on about further firesmarting the property. We knew that, at some point in the future, our region could be affected by fire–we just didn’t expect it to be so soon. We mourn for the loss of forest and the wildlife it sustained. 

But, a silver lining can be found: the fire has effectively added an impressive 6000 hectare fire break around us, which will provide a buffer for many years ahead (and perhaps some morel mushrooms next year).

We moved here to be closer to nature. It’s been a true joy to experience more fully the comings and goings of the seasons…

The squirrels, the bears, the flowers, the trees, the birds, the bees, the worms, the weeds… everything in its time.

But it’s also been disconcerting to experience a heatwave that breaks records by double digits; to see robins standing over, rather than sitting their eggs; and to see an inland temperate rainforest thirsting for water. Even coastal Vancouver went 46 days without rain. 

The effects of the global climate emergency are becoming more evident, everywhere. Every part of the world, both urban and rural areas, will experience the impact, whether it’s ice storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts, or wildfires. There is no safe haven.

So what are we to do? We choose to focus on what we can do at Big Calm – and that’s empowering. Ongoing fireproofing, installing an emergency water tank, and planting fire-resistant plants and trees. But we have a vision that goes far beyond that: a community whose strength is greater than that of each individual combined, so it’s better able to withstand whatever shocks the future holds.

And we saw that kind of cooperation last month: the community opened a resiliency centre for those affected by the fire, so all their needs were provided for. In addition to the designated intake centres set up throughout the region, people offered their spare bedrooms and RVs as a place for evacuees to stay. The community hosted a large BBQ for the firefighters as a gesture of gratitude.

We learned a lot from this experience: being prepared is not only wise, it’s empowering, and the cooperation of a community is integral to its resilience. And, while we cannot control the climate, we can find comfort and meaning in collectively caring for our own little piece of this fragile planet.

Photo: Jon Miller