Resilience is attractive to me. I want it. I think of it in relation to disasters: environmental, political, economic. The polycrisis. We need resilience for these things. In this forum I'll share ideas, research, discussion, and paradigms of resilience.

Resilience is fraught. Why resilience rather than, say, sensitivity? As Tracie Washington is famous for saying, "Stop calling me resilient." She is done with people thinking she and her home can take more neglect, more pollution, more harm. Yet I remain attracted to the idea of resilience, if for no other reason it's kind of a trendy way to talk about survival.

The first example of a resilience paradigm is from the place where Tracie Washington said, "Don't call me resilient," which is Louisiana after the 2010 BP oil disaster. HERE it is.

In this article, focused on ecology, the author says, "resiliency is about how to maintain the functionality of any system (ecosystem, economy, community, weather system, etc.) in the face of external disturbances, natural or artificial."

I don't always appreciate when analogies are drawn between people and systems. But I'm ok with this: the ecosystem functionality as analogue to nervous system functionality. What is needed for ecosystem functionality? Interconnections between diverse fungi, flora, fauna, water, soil, and air create an ecosystem that can withstand shocks without major disruption. For a nervous system to function, to be able to withstand shocks without major disruption, there needs to be diverse emotional expression. For both, harm is useful to the extent that it sparks the creation of harm mitigation mechanisms.