"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
LEARN1: Provide skills, (in addition to) finished technologies
The greatest idea I took away from superstruct came from Vinay Gupta. It was a "Needs Map." It consists of concentric circles that represent, abstractly, distance from you, and it was divided into 6 sections. Food, Water, Shelter, Healthcare, Energy and Security were the necessities tracked. The distance from you went from Self to Family, Community, Municipality, Nation and the Global. The idea was that you weren't Secure in any necessity unless it was provided both Locally and Globally. A local disaster would wipe out local resources, forcing you to rely on global resources. A Global disaster more likely cuts you off from global resources, but leaves local ones intact.
(Edit:: Hah! what luck that the link would expire the day after I link it!)
I think you can generalize this to any problem, not just the problem of not having necessities. Any solution needs to be secure, because people rely on it to solve a problem, and if access to the solution is disrupted, the problem returns.
So when you are solving a problem, you need to make sure that the solution can be produced locally. You need to teach people to provide the solution for themselves. This is what I think "Provide skills, not just finished technologies" means. If you can't solve your problem yourself, then your access to the solution can be disrupted. Shipping or communication can be disrupted, the owner of the solution could deny you access, you could run out of money to purchase it, etc.
On the other hand, there is a "Just" in there. In a real crisis, you often need solutions now, and you can train local problem solvers afterwards. Even after you have local problem solvers in place, you can't cut off access to outside solutions. Local conditions may disrupt local operations, just as problems abroad can disrupt distant solutions. You need to provide solutions to the problem both locally and globally in order for the solution to be "Secure".
I think it's worth pointing out that the solutions provided on the local level and on the global level need not be the same. A locally produced solution for water filtration, for example, could be a sand filter, while the globally produced one is a fancy nanoscale charcoal filter. The important thing is redundancy across multiple levels.
(Edit:: Hah! what luck that the link would expire the day after I link it!)
I think you can generalize this to any problem, not just the problem of not having necessities. Any solution needs to be secure, because people rely on it to solve a problem, and if access to the solution is disrupted, the problem returns.
So when you are solving a problem, you need to make sure that the solution can be produced locally. You need to teach people to provide the solution for themselves. This is what I think "Provide skills, not just finished technologies" means. If you can't solve your problem yourself, then your access to the solution can be disrupted. Shipping or communication can be disrupted, the owner of the solution could deny you access, you could run out of money to purchase it, etc.
On the other hand, there is a "Just" in there. In a real crisis, you often need solutions now, and you can train local problem solvers afterwards. Even after you have local problem solvers in place, you can't cut off access to outside solutions. Local conditions may disrupt local operations, just as problems abroad can disrupt distant solutions. You need to provide solutions to the problem both locally and globally in order for the solution to be "Secure".
I think it's worth pointing out that the solutions provided on the local level and on the global level need not be the same. A locally produced solution for water filtration, for example, could be a sand filter, while the globally produced one is a fancy nanoscale charcoal filter. The important thing is redundancy across multiple levels.
Views: 33
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Comment by Alyssa Laurel Crum on March 19, 2010 at 1:06am
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Comprehensive and concise. Nice work.
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Comment by Andrew Jensen on March 19, 2010 at 4:17am
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Thanks. I think this may be the first time my ramblings have been labelled concise. I must be tired to get to the point so quickly.
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Comment by Carlo Delantar on March 19, 2010 at 4:27am
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Your ramblings make a big point. The world should not look on the problem itself but reflect on what is happening and change it!
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Comment by Mikhail Shklyar on March 19, 2010 at 9:59pm
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Thanks for a new idea. The link is dead. More concisely, redundancy along multiple levels becomes more and more critical as we near a global disaster and as the rate of local disasters increases.
Knowledge Share +1
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Comment by Ryan Peterson on March 19, 2010 at 10:24pm
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I think that the problem of not understanding what is going on behind the scenes (aka "giving a womyn a fish, but not teaching her how to fish") really stems from the idea of specialization, which then traces back further to capitalism. If I'm a master fisherman in a capitalistic economy, it hurts me to teach you to fish, because I now have competition. How do we push past that to get to the point where skillsharing is beneficial rather than harmful, and copyrights and patents no longer keep people from the information and technology they need?
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The trick to that, I would think, is to teach a person to fish but to set things up that it's still more efficient for them to pay you to fish instead of do it themselves. I know how to fish, but I'd rather pay a person for a fish because I prefer to build.
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Comment by Turil Cronburg on April 16, 2010 at 4:08pm
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This is a great addition to this week's urban resiliency topic!
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