Bright Ideas No. 42
A TIME TO BAND TOGETHER
Given the enormous challenges we face, how do we respond? Will we get a future that is beautiful and just? The answer to that question is largely up to our ability to band together as communities.
Extreme weather events, like the brutal heatwaves that devastated many people in 2022, highlight the urgent need for shared resilience. During the pandemic, mutual aid groups sprang up to form support networks to help everyone.
Community Resilience
Community resilience is an example of a community’s ability to use available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. Initiatives may be as simple as local WhatsApp groups created to check on elderly and vulnerable members of the community at critical times. Setting up spaces as cooling centers during intense heat or warming centers in cold months are another example. The latter may be particularly important this winter if high fuel prices push millions into energy poverty.
In the future, we’ll increasingly need to depend on each other. Getting to know our neighbors will be a high priority. Having someone you can speak with candidly and seriously is always useful. And it’s always good to have someone you can trade favors with or share ideas about food or gardening. Friends you can depend on could make all the difference in the challenging times ahead.
Public Luxuries
Community resilience can also encourage demand for “public luxuries,” those parts of the public realm that make things better for everyone. Parks, libraries, and playgrounds are good examples. In the face of more frequent and severe heat waves, public swimming areas and spray parks may become public luxuries.
Livable Streets
As we adjust to climate change, we need to find innovative transitions that create win-wins. Livable streets, for example, where space is taken away from cars and given over to cooling trees, will cut emissions and pollution. As communities feel the benefits of such changes, they often don’t want to return to how things were when cars took precedence in urban areas.
Improved trash management is another win-win for everyone that promotes working with others who are committed to cleaning up and beautifying the neighborhood.
We are living through a time of extraordinary change.
Take the lead. Start by speaking to a few neighbors about community resilience.
Credits:
Rapid Transition Alliance Newsletter (8/23/2022)
Bright Ideas is brought to you by Portland Climate Action Team which, during the pandemic, meets online the fourth Thursday of the month, 6-7:30 p.m. All are welcome to join in. FMI: portlandclimateaction@gmail.com.
