Excerpt:
"For some time now, I've had resilience on my mind--even though I wasn't sure what the word meant exactly. All I knew for certain was that the word "sustainability" had worn me out. It is used so frequently and in so many different ways, for so many different purposes, that I had no clue any longer to its meaning. Worse, I developed a growing suspicion that "sustainability" was coming to mean "sustain" the status quo. Were exchanging light bulbs or driving a hybrid car really acts of sustainability? And don't even get me started on the word "green."Frankly, these words describe little more than the tweaking of the margins of our lifestyles--followed by a prayer that we earn a different future as a result. But as Einstein famously quipped, doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different outcome is a definition of insanity.

"So I went looking for another word.

"I found it among the language of land health. I love the words range professionals use to describe the elements of ecosystem function: integrity, diversity, resistance, thresholds, transitions, recovery, and so forth. That's where I found resilience. It describes the ability of a community to recover from change or misfortune--how it handles surprise, in other words. And Nature is full of surprises, as we all know. How a community of plants or animals "bounces back" from an unexpected flood, drought, disease outbreak, fire, hurricane, or other perturbation depends largely on its health--its ability to resist degradation while the event is occurring and its capacity to recover once the surprise has ended."