Last week, I did a short, but intense interview with the author Jon Evans for the popular technology e-zine TechCrunch. The section of the interview on the necessity of networked resilient communities is a great place to start today’s letter.
Networked resilient communities is the topic where I spend most of my time.
Why? There are two globally systemic threats we can’t solve. Finance and the environment. Both systems are deeply broken and they are going to do considerable damage to all of us over the next decades. The only way to get ready for that is to build networked resilient communities. Resilient Communities efficiently produce most (not all) of the food, energy, water, and products we use daily. These communities 1) reduce our vulnerabilities to the future’s inevitable disruptions (disruptions that will damage/impoverish those that don’t transition to local production), 2) reduce complexity to a human scale, and 3) improve the quality of our lives.
Since these communities network with the global system economically and socially, they don’t lose any of the complexity/value we enjoy in the current intellectual environment. My bet, and it is the reason I started the resilient community newsletter, is that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.
That last phrase worth discussing today. The statement that the most successful, happiest people on the planet will be living in resilient communities.
Resilience or BUST!
Why will people living in networked resilient communities be the most successful and happiest people on the planet???
It’s simple.
The most immediate reason is that a resilient life, home, and community provides you protection.
Protection against an increasingly dire global financial and environmental catastrophe that our broken political system can’t (and won’t even attempt to) avoid.
- In personal terms, resilience is what will keep you in your home, feed your family, protect you, and provide you an income when the economic and political situation gets rough.
- In financial terms, resilience is the ultimate hedge. A hedge that increases in value as the global economic system shrinks and political systems run amok trying to catch up.
However, the protection resilience provides isn’t the source of my serene optimism. Instead, my optimism is based on the steadfast conviction that networked resilient communities — communities that produce everything they can locally and virtualize the rest — will out-compete the existing, centrally mismanaged global economic and social system.
Do you see this too?
Your thinking big thoughts on a sunny Sunday analyst,
JOHN ROBB
