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A few key definitions

Change: Adaptation, Innovation, Resilience, Tragedy











Adaptation:    Any alteration in the structure or function of an organism or any of its parts that results from natural selection and by which the organism becomes better fitted to survive and multiply in its environment
We have 50,000+ years-worth of experience with doing things pretty much the traditional way, and we are therefore, as a species, conditioned to think of changes as imposed on us from external natural forces or other people’s aggression – so we think of change as the adaptive response to crisis.

Innovation:  The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay.
When an innovation occurred, it caused big changes (e.g. ceramics, metals, refractory linings, pulleys, cheese…) but these changes only happened every hundred years or so and they never felt imposed from outside, so didn’t require adaptation per se.  
 The last 200 years, and really the last 60 years, of human experience the tinkerers have gone off the chain. The resilience and sustainability you seek is in response to the immediate or eventual failure of the engineered systems which have really only emerged in the last 60 years. It is not possible to be resilient to this. It is a boom and bust thing. We can manage the bust as best we can, but it is really a problem of change management of those engineered systems. 

Tragedy:  A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavourable circumstances.
This impending shock we are trying to respond to is not a slow thing from outside our traditional systems. It is a failure of our amazingly short-term experiment (on human history scale).  
 Resilience:  The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune
As a professor teaching students currently about how internal combustion engines, power plants, jet engines, pumps, and all of these amazing things work…. I am pretty sure that they will need this knowledge throughout their careers, but not in the same way their grandfathers did.
Self-sufficiency:  Able to provide for oneself without the help of others; independent.  Having undue confidence; smug.
Self-sufficiency is hopeless – it’s like garlic in the face of the plague.  It might give you hope of a solution, but you’d be better off instituting massive changes to the systems that breed and feed rats and bring them into contact with humans.

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