Resilience and Auroville

Auroville Today: ‘Resilience’ seems to be replacing ‘sustainability’ as a key concept for the modern environmental movement. Why, and what is the difference?

Dave: The concept of sustainability does not seem adequate to address the threats the world is facing today. It implies long lasting stability and a desire to stay the same, to resist change. Resilience, on the other hand, is about accepting change and learning to adapt to it, not only to be able to deal with challenging circumstances but also to come up with transformative solutions for the future. Resilience accepts that the present world situation is inherently unsustainable, so we need to figure out how we are going to live in this new context, and how can we grow.

What does this mean practically?

In my profession of disaster management, the first thing you look at is prevention. If this is not possible you consider your options for mitigation and preparedness, which means avoiding or minimising the potential impact. Then, in the context of resilience, comes adaptation, or learning from the experience so the next time it happens, you will be able to respond or learn to live with the new situation better.

Today, while we have become better at keeping people alive, many more people are chronically vulnerable, “living on the edge”.

So, for instance, while proportionately fewer are dying of starvation today, India has a huge number of people who are chronically malnourished. This may mean, among other things, that their mental capacities are reduced and this is a huge loss to the nation. At the same time, there are many aspects of India which are incredibly resilient, including the ability of people to reinvent themselves according to their circumstances. So we need to build upon this, to help the most vulnerable to recognise their strengths and adapt and learn.

How resilient is Auroville?

Well that depends, resilient to what? Firstly, we need to identify the challenges Auroville may have to deal with. These include the increased threat of extreme weather events brought about by climate change, the lowering of water tables with a gradual increase in salinity, as well as accumulations of solid waste and pollutants.

Then there is the threat of economic unsustainability. If our collective and individual incomes continue to increasingly rely on a few outside sources, like government funding, it’s putting all our eggs in one basket. Then there are socio/political challenges, like our inability to make collective decisions, our blueprint approach to planning, our rather poor relations with our neighbours, and the ever-present possibility of intervention from the Government of India.

A resilient community is able to respond to such challenges in a positive way, and is able to maintain its core functions as a community despite those stresses.

So how do we do that?

Rather than relying on external interventions, we need to build upon existing capacities that promote resilience. These include not compromising our environmental achievements, like the fact that a relatively high proportion of our land area is under vegetation; our local ecosystem is rather diverse and becoming increasingly so, with an emphasis on indigenous, relatively well adapted species; we have the basis for effective water catchment through traditional and new methods; and our initiatives in alternative energy, organic agriculture, solid waste management, waste water treatment and green technologies etc.

On the social side, we have basic services in place and basic needs are met; we have a flat and networked governance model which doesn’t rely on only one or two individuals; public participation and awareness is relatively high and feedback is strong; and systems of conflict resolution and basic behavioural and communication norms are gradually emerging.

Crucially, we need an approach that considers us as a part of (rather than apart from) our ecosystem as well as our surrounding social and political context, so that, for example, we balance our lifestyle choices with protecting our environment as well as the needs of others. We also need to ensure that our policies can more effectively cope with, adapt to and shape change, and that we strengthen our social networks. Also, that we create a more diverse and innovative economy.

Diversity is a key element in resilience, implying that we have to learn to embrace our differences. It is about acknowledging that other people have other ways of looking at the world and that it doesn’t have to make our life miserable if somebody has a different belief. In one way, of course, we are all fundamentalists because there are certain things we strongly believe in. However, this can make us less resilient to changed circumstances. We need to be better at choosing our battles and recognising that being able to compromise can be a strength and not a weakness.

But you could also argue the opposite; that having a core belief enables one to deal with change or adversity better. For example, some of the Holocaust survivors say they survived because they had strong fundamental beliefs.

I agree, some of the Holocaust survivors even flourished subsequently because they took something important from that terrible experience. I completely understand why people need those fundamentals because it’s about identity and we all have a need to know what we stand for. I think having fundamental beliefs is okay as long as we understand they are only tools and that is not how life really is. Life is in multiple shades of colour. Most of our beliefs are really just about us putting on some lenses to try to understand things better. But to be resilient we should be ready to change those lenses when the situation changes, and change is happening all the time.

So another important aspect of resilience is understanding that it’s all about change. If I am still learning, what I find true for me today may not be true for me tomorrow. It’s all about learning to deal with life as flow rather than stasis.

Like surfing a wave?

Yes, and being ready to move off that wave in case you see it is taking you towards a wipe-out!

But how can you build a community upon flow? One assumes there is a need for certain basic agreements if a community is to be held together.

I think having a plan and actively moving towards it is very important for resilience, even if you must change the details of the plan at some point. I believe that in Auroville we have a very clear vision and mission and that’s why we survive, because even though we feel we are far from achieving that, it is still something which is bringing us together.

In your course outline, you associate resilience with knowledge of interconnectedness. Why?

Holistic or Systems Thinking is a different way of looking at the world based on the understanding that nothing exists on its own, without reference to something else. So rather than focussing, say, on the individual plants and trees in a forest, it focuses on the relationships between them. I think looking at connections helps build resilience because it gives much more insight into a situation, and shifts our attention to where the action is, allowing one to adapt better to changed circumstances.

We need to understand that the way we divide things up into different things, like trees or academic disciplines, is all in our heads. Everything is boundless to some extent but we put boundaries around stuff to understand it, which is perfectly fine as long as we are aware all the time that those boundaries are artificial.

What I am trying to say is that we need a more developed sense of the complexity of context, one that involves all of the disciplines, emotions, cultural symbols and personal memories.

Are you saying that we need to learn to live with the fact that the world is much messier, less clear-cut, than we normally assume?

Absolutely. Resilience is about acknowledging that we live in a messy world and it’s not going to get any less so. So, one way or the other, we have to be okay with the mess.

But there are a number of ways in which we can become better at being okay with messiness. This is largely to do with how we choose to see the world. Can I accept responsibility for my own role in creating my view of the world? And can I choose to see the world differently by challenging my own assumptions, my own perspective and continue to engage and move forward?

However, I agree that ‘messiness’ can be very scary. For example, the way I am planning this course is very challenging for me because I cannot give any easy answers, even if it would make my life easier.

This touches upon a personal motivation you have in running this course.

Yes, and this is the hardest part to talk about. Although my whole life has been about changes, the last 10 years have been a period of huge personal changes for me and that’s been really difficult at times. For example, at present I don’t have a home of my own, and I can no longer work with ‘my’ trees that I planted in the forest.

I have had moments of sheer panic. On the other hand, it’s been really amazing because I’ve learned that at some point you have to jump in and have faith.

The thing in my life that has probably been the most challenging for me is that my parents were missionaries, so Auroville for them is not comprehensible. My whole life I pushed back against the religion / spirituality thing, but what I’m coming to now, seeing how messy and complex the world is, is you can never know what’s going to happen or what is connected to what, so at some point you have to jump in and have faith.

After all, almost anything we do now will have an environmental, social and spiritual impact, so there is no turning back. We must keep moving forward. This is a very important aspect of resilience because that’s how you learn. And unless we keep learning we will not survive, or, at the very least, as a community we will become irrelevant because the world will move on.

So do we really have a choice?