Building Resilience into our systems
Hello and welcome to flourishing within planetary boundaries, I am your host Dr. Tara Naylor. On today’s episode I am going to talk about building resilience into our energy and food systems.
I am going to talk about what resilience is, in this context, why it is important and what some of the characteristics of resilient systems are.
I also want to talk about some of the ideas that excited me as a young engineer on the food and energy front. I also plan to discuss some of our key challenges going forward and some of the ways we can face them to have the best chance of successfully navigating them.
This is a topic that I think about daily. Where I live, we have been through a winter with multiple disruptions on the electricity supply front. In fact, many of my notes for this episode have been written with my headlamp on my head, as our power is out due to a storm.
On the food front, I have been working on my own food sovereignty and security for quite a few years now. Partly because I want to have the right to choose what goes into my body and where it came from, but also because I want to make sure I always have access to the food I want and need.
So what is resilience in this context? Resilience is simply the ability of an ecosystem, species or other system to absorb a disturbance and still retain its basic function, structure or identity.
There is a slightly different definition I found for community resilience and that is the ability of the community to absorb the effects of shocks and stresses and to recover rapidly to a better condition than they were in before.
Just think about some of our key human systems like water systems, energy systems, transportation systems, food systems, communication systems. What would life be like, particularly in a city if any or several of these systems failed? We have all seen the fear and panic buying that has happened on food, bottled water, toilet paper, batteries, gasoline and generators either in anticipation of a big storm or after one or when the global pandemic started taking hold in 2020.
So what are the characteristics of resilient systems? Because some of these characteristics are opposite to the way our major economics and other key systems are structured today AND, in some cases, they are opposite to the way some climate and sustainability actions are unfolding.
The simplest way I can sum up principles of resilience is with the saying “Don’t keep your eggs in one basket!”
In fact we have gone from a world that was diverse etc. to this globalized..world where a disturbance in one part of the world can cause all sorts of problems elsewhere, a few years ago an Ontario indigenous band blocked a rail line, this caused many knock on effects including the availability of propane to the province of Quebec, there have been shortages of shipping containers and back-ups at ports, and also the ongoing microchip supply chain issues that have ripple around the world
So, back to the principles of resilience…the main principle are diversity, modularity, social capital, innovation, overlap, tight feedback loops and ecosystem services.
Resilience of systems from (The Resilience Imperative by Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty)
Components of resilience:
Diversity: A resilient world would promote and sustain diversity in all forms (biological, landscape, social and economic). Resilient systems celebrate and encourage diversity. They would encourage multiple uses of land and other resources.
Modularity: A resilient world would be made up of components that can operate and be modified independently of the rest. Everything is not necessarily connected to everything else.
Social Capital: A resilient world would promote trust, well-developed social networks and leadership. The resilience of socio-ecological systems is rooted in the capacity of people to respond effectively to challenges together, not singly.
Innovation: A resilient world would place an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules, and embracing change.
Overlap: A resilient world would have institutions whose governing structures included redundancy. For example top-down, centralized, efficient structures with no redundancy tend to fail when faced with change outside their scope of their mandate
Tight Feedback Loops: A resilient world would possess tight feedback loops. This is the communication flow within a system.
Ecosystem Services: A resilient world would consider and asses all the ecosystem services that the market economy currently disregards.
(check out the Stockholm resilience centre for this)
So now we know this, let’s start talking about energy and energy systems. When I was a young engineering student, I became very interested in energy and environmental issues. What really interested me from studying ecology, environmental history and also engineering was the potential for small scale power generation to completely change how we operate. I could imagine a day where we did not need all these large-scale transmission lines across the country. When I did my Master’s in Energy and the Environment our class visited some different examples of this such as apartment building with a small cogeneration plant in the basement, I did a project on a papermill that got most of its heat and some of its electricity from on-site cogeneration. Between all the different solutions we studied, I could imagine a world where we used a lot less energy and matched the energy sources available, to their locations and needs. This world I was imagining had a lot of the characteristics of resilience, although I did not know it at the time.
But the way we are rolling out our modern renewable energy infrastructure, is opposite to what I imagined and this is going to be a huge problem. What we are doing, is trying to create the same system we have with fossil fuels to a world of renewables and I will tell you now, I do not think this will work. We are tying everything together into large grids, while needing to build extra capacity and storage because of the intermittent characteristics of renewables. This is going to make our switch over take longer, cost more and use more fossil fuels to build it.
Earlier I mentioned that I think about the resilience of energy and food systems every day. So, I thought I would tell you about my own experience of December 2022. In December we had several short power outages early in the month due to snow and wind issues. But the big disruption came just before Christmas. Two days of snow had left our power lines and many trees heavy with snow. A large wind and precipitation storm was forecast for much of Ontario, days of warnings were given. Before the snow storm even started our power went out (23rd), it was restored but went out again an hour later. Unlike many places that had wind storms, we got snow, 120cm of snow, so without the wind to blow the snow off the trees, many overladen evergreen trees were snapping or tipping up roots and all. This meant that power lines were down, phone land lines were down, and cell phone service is spotty at the best of times in this neighbourhood. To top it off, even though many of us cleared our driveways we could not get down our road to get supplies. We did not see a snow plow for 3 days and even then, they could not get through because the trees needed to be cleared. Many of us were getting low on gasoline for our generators. Now this was an extreme snow event, but the troubles on my stretch of road started before that. So essentially, we went 5 days in cold weather with no power. Most people where I live have some form of wood heat, also some form of generator either propane or gasoline powered, we have snowblowers, some have all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles, the odd tractor, many have chainsaws. But these machines that are all fossil-fuel powered and when the power goes out these machines can be a lifeline. At one point I was wishing I had a horse as part of my resilience plan.
BUT and I think about this a lot, how do we manage, what would we do in a post-fossil fuel world? If I have an electric car, how do I charge it when there is no power? Same for electric chainsaws etc. When I replaced my oil and wood furnace several years ago, I opted for an electric and wood furnace, because I wanted to reduce my dependence on fossil fuels. But this does lead to some challenges in winter outages in very cold weather. Because ultimately when it comes to electricity, ultimately my home is fed by just a relatively small wire. These wires and the poles that bring them in are relatively fragile and with the increasingly violent storms and unusual weather events we are already experiencing due to climate change, this is a recipe for increasingly frequent outages.
Okay, so what can we do as individuals and communities to keep our important systems going? We need to start planning for societies and communities with a lot less energy. We need to change how we think and structure our systems and this includes food. On a previous episode I talked in more detail about energy inputs into our food system.
But once again, I think, this is where it gets exciting. I probably say this on every episode. The possibilities for change are so exciting, because this change will come from us as individuals and communities who are willing to think a little differently and connect together, to build locally appropriate resilient systems. I know the experiences many people went through in December have us thinking and talking about it and how to protect ourselves in the future.
This is where there are so many exciting examples in the past. But I want to give you just one simple one that almost anyone can imagine that it is about both food and energy. I am talking about wind and water mills. When I was child, of 7 or 8, my very first photos I took on my very first camera, were the gears on a wind or water mill. If you go back to the UK in the mid 19th century there were about 10,000 working windmills. There was one in a village my family visited quite regularly, I have been inside it. These mills served the local farms and estates and worked well with the local grains. What is exciting, is that these were built, maintained and operated by local skilled trade and crafts-people from largely local material resources. They operated independently and they used energy directly, they were not dependent on huge amounts of global materials and infrastructure. That was resilience, of course there were challenges back then about the quantity of grain that was sometime available.
When wheat became increasingly imported to the UK, it had the benefit of large quantities being available but it also meant that the large-scale mills were located near ports, of course they were fossil fuel powered and the milling worked differently. The different style of milling led to nutrient deficient white flour being the norm, but that is a story for another day.
But our modern take on wind energy is dependent on fossil fuel infrastructure to build them in the form of concrete, steel, aluminum, composite materials, the industry is highly specialized and the turbines have become larger, these turbines feed into electrical grids that are also dependent on a lot of resource and infrastructure to maintain. We are increasingly ignoring the old saying of “Don’t keep your eggs in one basket”.
Since we have started talking about food, let’s continue with that. In 2020 and some times since then, many of us in North America saw or experienced the fragility in some cases, or the resilience in other cases of food systems. In fact, it was interesting that once the global pandemic hit, so many people rushed out to buy seeds, soil, and even day-old poultry to raise. It was as if so many of us know that our food systems can be easily disrupted and our survival instinct was to protect ourselves and our families.
If you back to the main principles of resilience for example diversity, modularity, social capital, innovation, overlap etc. and then take a look at our predominant food systems you can see that we do have reason to be concerned. Our typical global food system relies on roughly 30 crops to produce roughly 90% of our calories. The large industrial farms and greenhouse tend to be specialized and only get one use from the land, this makes them vulnerable to pests and diseases. They are very dependent on infrastructure like energy and transportation. Most food comes to us via the grocery stores that store their food in large warehouses. In short, in my opinion, our global food system is relatively fragile, I think the reason many of us in North America have been able to avoid seeing this for so long is that we are relatively wealthy countries and have been able to weather the price increases, but that is changing now.
So I wanted to wind down by telling you about a fun exercise you can try. When I worked at one company, we were having a lot of problems with on time delivery and product scrap rates. So, we had these week-long events where we went through one process or department at a time looking at all the failures that could occur and what the knock on effects would be. We rated everything as low, medium or high and started looking at how to prevent failures or be able to recover from them quickly. It was really fun.
It was a bit like a disaster movie when you imagine all these things going wrong. If one thing fails then what happens next? Now many of the processes in my department were already built around being adaptable and resilient. In many ways the environmental department had to deal with issues when things went wrong in other departments. For example if something went wrong in a manufacturing process we were left with the wastes and the clean-ups for example wastewater, spills, waste disposal, tank cleanouts. But from that exercise, we found some key vulnerabilities and were able to find practices, procedures, equipment or spare parts to help us reduce their effects.
So along the theme of the disaster movie, start thinking about your food, water and energy systems and how to build the principles of resilience into your community and life. AND have fun with it. I regularly do this and when I combine it with wanting to live to my full potential and my food to be abundant, healthy, resilient and designed for the long term I have had a lot of fun with it. There are a few scenarios that are terrifying to me, that I do not want to confront and that I have not figured out a workaround for yet, and perhaps never will. But overall going through this exercise has allowed me to adapt to many situations and challenges so far. A few examples are growing an increasing diversity of food in my gardens and up walls and fences, buying foods from farms, processors and other vendors that reduce my dependence on the large grocery chains. I always keep some staple food stored. I have two small freezers, not one large one so that one can back up the other as I only need the extra capacity for less than six months a year. I have a back-up generator that powers my fridge and freezers, my gas oven, water pump, phones and internet. But most of all I have gained the skills, self-reliance and have started making connections with other people, so that that I can adapt and bounce back from many challenges and that is resilience too.
Finally, when you hear about ideas and plans for our energy and food transition, to mitigate and adapt to climate change, pandemics and other disasters, think critically about the resilience implications of what we are building.
That’s it for me today. Thank you for listening.