[MCN] A "disconcerting" thing about the Extinction Rebellion

[Lance Olsen]

"The disconcerting thing about such radicalism, at this moment, is that it is the activists—rather than the state or law enforcement—who have the facts on their side. One of Extinction Rebellion’s favored tactics is to quote the first line of the executive summary of the 2018 report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” On the day I visited, a study commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a research organization which dates back to 1754, set a deadline of 2030 to fundamentally redesign British agriculture to withstand the climate crisis and worrying trends in public health. “What we eat, and how we produce it, is damaging people and the planet,” the report said. “This is not some dystopian future; this is happening here and now, on our watch.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/does-extinction-rebellion-have-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis <https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/does-extinction-rebellion-have-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis>

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A core question: What is “resilience”?

2018 — “Resilience is a popular narrative for conservation and provides an opportunity to communicate optimism that ecosystems can recover and rebound from disturbances.” (Emily S. Darling and Isabelle M. Côté, Science, March 2, 2018). 

2014 — “Emerging from a wide range of disciplines, resilience in policy-making has often been based on the ability of systems to bounce back to normality, drawing on engineering concepts. This implies the return of the functions of an individual, household, community or ecosystem to previous conditions, with as little damage and disruption as possible following shocks and stresses”  (Tanner et al, Nature Climate Change,  December 18, 2014). 

1938 — Resilience. 1- The act or power of springing back to a former position or shape. 2. The quantity of work given back by a body that is compressed to a certain limit and then allowed to recover itself, as a spring under pressure suddenly relaxed.”  (Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language, vol.2, M-Z 1938)




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