Resilience

This may be the most important thing I’ll ever talk about.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. In the fall of 2018 I did some intensive reflection, which resulted in a page and half or so of notes that I saved and put aside. Then came 2019, closely followed by the Year Whose Name is Written on the Walls of Hell. If nothing else, 2020 certainly brought resilience to the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking.

There are some risks with that. First, that it becomes just a buzzword, a form of advertising. Second, what I’m seeing is an almost-exclusive emphasis on individual resilience – mental and emotional. I’m not denying that that’s important, but I think we also and more importantly need to talk about community and system resilience.

Why? Because, fundamentally, humans do not live as individuals. We all live embedded within communities, cultures, societies, and nations. Love it or hate it, that’s reality. We need other people in order to survive; we need sustained and sustainable infrastructure to communicate.

Also, because any time we focus solely on individual traits and behaviors, we risk blaming people for things that are actually out of their control. You collapsed under the strain of COVID? It’s your fault for not being resilient enough: never mind that you lost your job and your health insurance because your employer’s business went under, you were struggling to care for a sick relative or significant other, you were grieving (fill in a number) of friends and loved ones who were dead or dying and there was no-one to help.

Do the systems we live within – communities, cultures, societies, and nations –promote and nurture the individual traits that contribute to resilience? Or stifle and discourage those traits? Do they impose burdens that are already a standing cost to our resilience, that we simply don’t notice when times are not so hard? Or do they offer resources that can supplement our natural resiliences, at need?

Even beyond the properties of systems as they affect individuals, we need to talk about the resilience (or lack thereof) of systems themselves. It’s helpful to have an antonym: a good antonym for resilience is brittleness.

It’s also really helpful to have examples.

Brittleness: The Suez Canal blockage had a huge worldwide economic impact, for the actually just a few days that it lasted, and for being a very local event in itself. It’s instructive, not only because the Suez is a classic chokepoint, but because transportation experts worldwide had been warning that such an event was becoming increasingly likely. Container ships having been getting steadily bigger, average size, and the newest and biggest just have no margin of error for maneuvering in the tight quarters of the Suez.

(I’m not claiming prophetic abilities here. This is all stuff I read during and after the event.)

A further consequence of the growth in ship size is that fewer ports can accommodate these larger ships. Retrofitting a port for larger ships is prohibitively expensive, which means the larger the ship, the fewer places it can go. While the larger ships may be more economical per mile per unit cargo, they will also have to travel farther on average – and – the goods being offloaded will have to travel further to reach their point of sale. Goods bound for Portland on a super-ship will most likely have to offload in Seattle and be trucked or railed to retailers here (this is already true: even a couple of decades ago, Port of Portland could not accommodate the then largest ships).

What if Seattle is disabled by a natural disaster or, God forbid, an act of war or terrorism? The next closest is… Vancouver BC? Across an international border? Or San Francisco – and have you ever driven or taken a train between Portland and the Bay Area?

So, end to end, it’s not at all clear that the larger ships save time, money, or fuel for everyone. Only for the shippers themselves. And meanwhile, we lose redundancy; we create more chokepoints like the Suez (I wonder about the Panama Canal); we lose resilience on a global level.

Another example of brittleness: Texas power grid, ‘nuff said.

What are some good examples? Here’s one that paid off more than the originators ever thought it would: Portland’s beloved food carts. The legislation that made them possible was not put in place with the idea that we would someday have a global pandemic that would put a hard stop on indoor dining – but when the pandemic came, there they were, feeding folks and keeping people employed. I predict the hospitality industry in Portland will rebound faster than in many other cities. We have a big reservoir of talented food creators in the carts, some of whom will make the jump to brick and mortar restaurants when the time comes. At least one Portland favorite closed its restaurant and promptly turned around and opened a food cart: I fully expect to see Bistro Montage back in a building within a year or so.

Another example, Portland Bureau of Transportation (full disclosure, I volunteer on an advisory committee for PBOT, but they don’t pay me anything) is rebuilding the Burnside Bridge to seismic codes. If we have a major earthquake (and we’re overdue for one), the BB is intended to be the lifeline between the east and west halves of the city. Now make no mistake, one bridge is not going to be enough – but it’s going to be hella better than not having any bridges.

Related to that, Portland is about to get its first ferry. Really, it’s ridiculous that we have this great river running through the city (TWO great rivers if you count the Columbia), and we treat it as a barrier. What if we think of it as a way to get somewhere? It’s only since we equate “travel” with “automobile” that we don’t think of rivers as avenues of commerce and travel. A river can be an asset, not a liability.

(I’ve wanted a ferry for Portland ever since I was in Vancouver and saw how casually people hop on the ferry to get back and forth from downtown to the North Shore. Also on that trip, I got a look at some of the many ferries plying Puget Sound in multiple directions. I came home and bent everyone’s ear whom I could get to hold still about Why don’t we have a ferry?)

So the Frog Ferry is going to run from a location on the east bank north of downtown to the west bank in downtown. My hope is that more sites are added, and the ferry line becomes like a zipper, stitching back and forth across the Willamette. Clearly, this reduces our dependence on bridges. (Currently the plan is that the ferry will not carry auto traffic: pedestrians including mobility devices, bikes, and scooters.)

Another example: Years ago, the law made it basically impossible to have a mural on a building other than a private residence, because it was considered to be a billboard, and Clear Channel had a monopoly on billboards. I think they still pretty much do. City lawmakers figured out a way around it. Now Portland has some of the most street art per capita – soory, that’s extremely clumsy phrasing, I’m trying to avoud saying we have the best street art around. But there certainly is more street art than in most other cities I’ve seen, and while some of it is mediocre, some of it is outstanding.

It’s also a much more democratic art form than most public art. The materials cost to create a street mural is way lower than to put up a statue or build a fountain. We have municipal and regional programs that give small grants for this sort of thing, but also, many are just created by individuals who come to an agreement with the building owner.

I see some principles emerging.

Redundancy. Antonym: chokepoints. See Suez Canal.

Multiple transport modes. Antonym: Automobile and road dependency. See Frog Ferry.

Low entry barriers. See food carts and street murals. Antonym, I’m not sure exactly, but high capital costs would be a big piece.

Clearly there's a lot more to think about here. Watch this space as I learn more...

Books Available
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Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
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