INTRODUCTION
Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global Ecovillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience adaptation and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis.
It is an honor to introduce Allyson Quinlan, Senior Research Fellow at the Resilience Alliance. With a PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies, Allyson has led transformative resilience assessments across the globe, from rural Tajikistan to the coastal fisheries of Western Canada. Her work emphasizes community engagement and stakeholder collaboration in building social ecological resilience. Allyson’s extensive experience and passion for protecting our environment make her an inspiring voice in the field.
Join us as we dive into her insights on fostering resilient communities and sustainable futures.
INTERVIEW
Eva: Welcome, Allyson. It is so lovely to have you here today to speak with us about resilience from your expert position. I would love to start by letting you introduce yourself to our audience. If you could share briefly who you are, what’s brought you here today.
Allyson: Thanks, Eva. My name is Allyson Quinlan. In my professional work, I’m a Senior Research Fellow with the Resilience Alliance, an international research network and organization that brings together researchers to study social ecological systems. Many of our members have developed a lot of the theory underlying resilience concepts that are currently being used in a lot of different ways around the world today. I’m based just outside of Ottawa, Canada, in Chelsea, Quebec, in a forested landscape that means quite a lot to me to be able to live here close to nature. And I think I try to just make the most of enjoying this place and my place in it.
Eva: What led you to focus your work on resilience?
Allyson: That’s a path with many steps along the way. Definitely. My background initially was in environmental science and ecology. That’s what I studied in school. And, you know, in part, that was informed by some work that I did tree planting and just growing up in nature. I mean, I was always interested in the natural environment. I feel a real connection to nature. And so to me, it was very intuitive. And I remember my first ecology class just feeling like this isn’t even like studying this just all makes perfect sense to me. And then in doing that work, one of my early studies that I did was around bison habitat and prescribed fire in northern Canada. And that’s where I really learned that, you know, it’s not just about the ecosystem and the ecosystem dynamics, but it’s about how people interact, how they manage the landscape, how they benefit from different aspects, whether through food or recreation or just, you know, a sense of place, how we interact with our environment influences both ourselves and the environment. And so it was really that connection. And that led me to look more closely at ecosystem governance. And I was working at the time with the Resilience Alliance. They publish a journal, Ecology and Society. And I kind of continued to work with the Resilience Alliance in the journal through my studies. And some of the early work we did in the early 2000s was around sort of bringing all of these theories and ideas, translating them into practical ways to make use of them to sort of better manage how we interact with the environment, how we make decisions to avoid some of these looming thresholds and tipping points that have been talked about already for the last 25 years. Yeah, so it was very natural path, I think, with many steps and stops along the way.
And I’ve, I would say that I’ve always been very much drawn to the applied part of resilience thinking and resilience concepts. The theory interests me. But what really like I feel passionate about is making use of these ideas so that we can do better.
Eva: The project is very lucky to have you to ground some of these practices and ecovillage and ecovillage resilience. Through the lens of working with this project, can you help me define what resilience means in the context of ecovillages? And through your experience, how this differs from resilience and other settings that you’ve worked with?
Allyson: I don’t think it actually differs that much for me from how I conceptualize resilience in other settings. I think my conceptualization of resilience has been informed and honed and developed over the years and is general enough that I can apply it to different, I call them systems, communities within that idea. So I think maybe what I could offer is that for me, resilience, there’s many layers to it. It’s very nuanced concept. It’s actually very rich and it has a lot to offer. And it’s tricky because it also is a commonly used word. And so it’s easy to kind of just think about it in the very general sense. And I know we’ve talked a lot about resilience as being, you know, the ability to cope. And that is part of it. But it’s only one small part of it in my mind. I feel like resilience for me is about everything that goes into making a system more able to adapt and transform in different parts and really looking at it through this sort of complex adaptive system lens. So when we’re thinking about, for example, the resilience of a community, it’s not just its capacity to cope with change, because we can cope with a lot of things. I think people are extremely good at coping and even adapting. But I think there’s more to it than that. I mean, we want to actually think about resilience in terms of enabling the things that we value about the system, the sort of identity or structure and function is sort of theoretical kind of ideas around it. But like, how we interact with that community, what we help the ways in which we benefit from it, all of the things that go into the parts of the system that we value parts of the community that we value. We want that to more than cope, we want that to thrive and persist, and parts of it to be able to adapt and parts of it to be able to like, intentionally change and transform so that it can continue to provide the benefits that people value. So for me, there’s many layers and different ways of thinking about and reflecting about the resilience of a community or a place or a system. And I guess I would just say that I think it’s, it’s very nuanced, and offers a really a lot of space and scope for exploring the different dimensions of resilience and all of the different features of the community that go into that property of the community in the system.
Eva: Do I open Pandora’s box if I ask you to go into these different layers of resilience? Is this something you are able to briefly outline?
Allyson: Yeah, well, I can say that there’s been a lot of research around what is it that makes a system resilient or community resilient. And some of the work that goes back a couple of decades was able to define different properties or features of systems, a book that the Resilience Alliance members contributed to a paper and book on principles of resilience of social ecological systems, some other work that’s been done, distilling some of those nine properties, seven principles, five attributes. I mean, we present them in different ways, but they’re these core features or characteristics that contribute to resilience. So, and we’ve worked with these in the project as well, I should say, we worked with six attributes of resilience in communities. And some of them include things like diversity, many different ways that diversity contributes to the resilience of systems through offering different ways of responding to disturbances, as you can imagine, like seed diversity, crop diversity, many benefits that strengthen resilience of a system through that, livelihood diversity. So, diversity is one of those attributes. Connectivity within the system, that could be connectivity from a sort of physical landscape connectivity, habitat connectivity perspective. It could also be connectivity among people and networks and their ability to share information in a timely manner and effective manner. Other attributes are system feedbacks. Some of the feedbacks that could include something like regenerative agriculture and other sort of reflective practices, including conflict resolution. So, there’s both social and ecological components to these attributes because I’m approaching it as an integrated social ecological system. I should have stepped back and mentioned that the other attributes that we looked at were inclusivity and equity, adaptive learning, and redundancy, which is more backups, system backups. So, those are the sort of high level attributes or principles, features of a social ecological system that we can look at more closely. And within each of those, there’s multiple different things that would fall under those headings that we can start to map out a really rich picture of ways in which we can contribute to resilience of systems and the different things that contribute to that.
Eva: In addition to these attributes, thank you so much for sharing, can you provide a brief overview of other methodologies and tools that you’ve used throughout the project to measure and evaluate resilience within the ecovillages participating?
Allyson: Yeah, I’ll say that it’s not easy. It’s actually a real challenge to work with some of these concepts because as I think about it, it’s sort of asking people to look at something in a totally different way from the way that you’re used to looking at it. And so, it requires kind of, you know, almost breaking down the way in which you’re always, the sort of entry points that you or your go-to entry points and trying to come at the issue or system or community from a different perspective. And it requires some like flexibility in your thinking and just an openness to that. And so, a lot of the activities that we did early on were to help develop and cultivate these sort of system thinking. I know that you’ve heard about the historical timeline exercise, always success and a hit and people really enjoy that. There’s a lot to that as well, including, well, I know that some people have suggested how when they did the timeline, they could see cycles. And that is, you know, that is exactly what I would hope one would arrive at, is seeing some of these cycles over time of how community in this case may have responded to past crises, what sort of adaptations they might have put in place, and then how things played out from them there, the pathways that were taken. And I think that historical timeline exercise also enables one to consider how different events throughout time can interact across scales and sectors. So, something might happen regionally or locally, and that might have influences at a much smaller or larger scale. And similarly, events happen across ecological, economic, social aspects. And so, it’s just a way of starting to think about a community as this complex adaptive system that’s changing, that has these features that cross scales and sectors, and developing that way of thinking about the community. I’ll leave it there for now. That’s one of them. I’ll just mention that was an early step in the process. We also developed some just hand-drawn conceptual models of the system to understand how different parts of the community were linked and interacted. We looked at tipping points and thresholds, both global tipping points, but also local thresholds within the community, and reflected on what sorts of implications those would have for the communities. We explored using Three Horizons methods, future scenarios, and storytelling about futures. And I think a really important part of the project that I’m super happy with, Anna Kovasna and I, in collaboration with the members of the community of practice, developed an indicator, what we call a resilience tracker. And it’s a way of using these six attributes that I mentioned, developing indicators. I think there were 32 in total for each of the attributes. And it’s a monitoring tool going forward to help each community identify their strengths and weaknesses, and to focus their attention on areas where there’s an opportunity to strengthen resilience within the community. So I think that’s a really valuable contribution going forward, and something that I’m looking forward to seeing expanded beyond this first initial group that participated.
Eva: Thank you very much, Allyson. I really hope to link to all of the methodologies you’ve shared, as well as sharing the tracking tool when it’s ready for the wider audience. I think that’s a wonderful resource for both the ecovillages that have participated, and also all of the ecovillages within our network. We have asked a lot of the ecovillages through this podcast to share some of their practices of building resilience. And they have been incredibly diverse in answer, as well as in setting and the type of ecovillages that we’ve been interacting with. And I’m really curious from your perspective, with kind of this overview of the project, did you notice any overarching patterns of how ecovillages were able to respond or are responding to crisis and adversity?
Allyson: Yeah, definitely. There were some, I guess, insights and emerging themes that we’re working on and putting together a report. And they weren’t surprising, necessarily. They reinforce some ideas that are already out there. I think one of them that is important and not to be overlooked is simply that climate change impacts and social ecological resilience generally are really unevenly distributed around the world and within this community of practice. And that, I think, is something that would be really interesting and meaningful to explore more deeply within the network. I know that there were many sessions we had where people were really touched to hear and distressed to hear about the reality of climate change impacts in some parts of the world and the challenges that people are confronted with. And yet, in other places, climate change is still a little bit abstract or can be really buffered in some places. And so just that unevenness, unfairness, inequity was definitely a really strong emergent theme that I think we can approach with the idea that there’s something about the connection, though, that was made that I think was really valuable, really important to have that personal connection, I think, and to cultivate that. And fortunately, something like Zoom and other tools we can use can be really helpful. There’s a place in time. I mean, you can look at someone in the face and they’re on the other side of the world and you can see and hear firsthand what’s happening. So definitely that was important. There’s also another sort of theme or insight I had is that we know a lot. There’s a lot of information about climate change impacts and risks at the community level. A lot of that’s still not being integrated into planning in a very strategic and serious manner. I think it’s still easy to kind of keep things that are a little bit out of sight, out of mind and continue on with the day-to-day busyness that is in all of our lives and just running a community or a household. And it’s really difficult to feel that sense of urgency and to make the change and start the transformation that needs to happen. I have a bunch of them.
Eva: You’re perfect. I have always been very moved by this inequity that you speak to. And it feels inapproachable by how unfair or disproportionate it is and how the top polluters in the world are not the ones being most affected by the impact. And yeah, I’m really, I wouldn’t say happy, but I’m glad that this was given space within the project to really integrate and work with. And also you mentioned the technology tools.
Allyson: Yes, they are so wonderful that we can connect and we can make these cultural bridges. And at the same time, they in themselves are not without heavy footprint. So this is one of the catch-22s of my work.
Eva: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
Allyson:I mean, there’s costs to almost everything. And I suppose we have to be thoughtful in how we make our choices. But I think that in the absence of being able to be there face-to-face in person, making a connection through a screen is still possible, talking to someone directly. I think that’s a really fantastic opportunity within the Global Ecovillage Network is to make the most of that network and the, yeah, the ability to just share information and stories and like at a really human level, connect with people. And some of that I would say definitely came through in our sessions, as well as more specific sharing around seed storage, how to set up a seed bank. One community saying, we’ve experimented with this. It took a while and we figured it out how to do it. And we’re happy to share. And another community was at the point where they were wanting to get started on a seed bank. There’s a fantastic connection made. And I would love to just see that sort of cascade across the whole network because so many of the different communities have something to share with another community.
Eva: Absolutely. And looking also to this as a pattern, communities tend to build really strong common culture. So were there any cultural dynamics or cultural practices that were shared by ecovillages that emerged as a pattern?
Allyson: Everyone had this element built into their community culture, which really helped them be more resilient. It could also have the adverse effect. This cultural pattern appeared and was detrimental to the resilience of communities. When I look across the results from our resilience attributes tracker, some of the real strengths were the attributes that were really strong, that were ranked quite high across all of the communities, fell under the attribute of inclusivity and equity, for example. And a lot of that was around the participatory practices, the ways in which communities self-organized, trust levels, reciprocity, sharing resources. A lot of that fell under the inclusivity and equity and knowledge integration. That was more around different types of knowledge, not just scientific knowledge, but local knowledge, traditional knowledge and other types of learning and meaning that there was an openness to integrating into practice. And then looking across, again, the attributes, another key social aspect fell under the area of connectivity. And some of that was the modularity and governance, sort of non-hierarchical governance structure that involved a lot of conversation, discussion, and more, I wouldn’t say flat, but that sort of approach. And also, yeah, self-organization, I think I mentioned that, and social networks. So definitely a lot of social practices that were written into the ranking criteria for these indicators to ensure that they were being interpreted in the same way by the different survey people who were participating in that. And yeah, those were definitely strengths within the sort of social system domain across the communities that was a strong signal coming out of the synthesis of the resilience attributes.
Eva: Thank you very much. From this awareness of patterns or also this awareness of inequality, were there any common challenges that you noticed that many of them are learning how to be resilient?
Allyson: I think a common challenge that kept emerging and coming up that people were discussing was just trying to get other people in the community involved and interested and engaged. That was definitely something that was voiced repeatedly. And I think fairly, people were asking for help, could say, I don’t think that’s the area that I could offer the sort of help that’s required. That was a little bit unexpected and surprising. I just assumed people would be really enthusiastic and interested. But again, communities are busy places, people have lives, they have work, they have lots of different groups to help out with and families and time is really valuable. And it’s also super easy, too easy to not engage with thinking about the reality of climate change. We started this project with part of the initial concept for the proposal was considering whether or not ecovillages are resilient to 2.5 degree increase in global temperature scenario. That is confronting to think about. We are on track for 2.5. This is what the research is saying. I still can’t wrap my head around it. I know it will require people to make changes, to do things differently. We cannot continue to do things business as usual. But it’s really a lot of work, heart work, mental work, thinking, having those conversations, going deep, doing the dive as we did as part of the project and thinking about global tipping points and thresholds. It’s really difficult. So I understand why it’s easier to not think about and to not make it a priority. I think that is one of the big challenges. And maybe we need psychologists and others to help us with that. I don’t know. Most probably.
Eva: Yeah, this connectivity challenge, going back to one of the attributes that you mentioned, is something that I see a lot in the movement. And I think it is, as you say, a result of everyone being so busy and really working on overdrive to address a lot of the offshoots of the climate disaster and policy crisis in general, working with the local government, working on a bunch of different projects. And at the same time, there is such an importance to really draw back and reflect and feel. I participated in a climate circle when I was living in Artera, which is an ecovillage in the north of Spain two years ago. And this was very new. This was brought by the younger members. And it’s heavy. So I also understand why, amongst everything that people really believe that they are doing to move the resilience tabs forward, can kind of shy away from the deeper work.
Allyson: Yeah, I think there’s something to that for sure. I also think that it’s not to say that people are not already doing a lot. And I think there is also probably that sense that, especially in ecovillages, there are so many sustainable practices are not necessarily part of other communities. And so people in the communities and in the community of practice, they’re already doing a lot around water management, regenerative agriculture, preparing for overland flow of water, and thinking about wildfire protection plans and stuff like that. So there is that happening. And so maybe sometimes there’s also the feeling that, well, we’re already doing everything we can. And all of those sustainability practices within communities will contribute to and help the resilience of the communities.Whether or not it’s enough. And it’s always you’re not resilient or not resilient. I don’t think it’s a binary thing. I think it’s resilience fluctuates, you have more or less, which may or not be enough, depending on the sort of disruption and disturbance that the system has to deal with.
Eva: Absolutely. Do you feel you have an opinion about the ecovillages that participated? Are they prepared to work through the challenges that you see coming?
Allyson: I’m sure they’re prepared to work through them. If I go back to my definition of resilience, the community or the system is resilient in the sense that it would be able to retain the sort of things that, you know, give it its identity, parts of the community that people benefit from and value. I’m not sure. I don’t think many places in the world are resilient to the 2.5 degree pathway, actually. And again, it will depend on the community and where it is and the type of impact that it’s confronted with. Maybe I could say I think that some of the ecovillages in the community are more resilient than others. And some are more resilient than other places. But across the board, I don’t think I would say that they’re resilient to the scenario. I want to look a little deeper into that, into these external factors that might be outside of the control of an ecovillage that established themselves 50 years ago and wasn’t necessarily thinking about the water area or the different ecological resilience factors. On that point, that was, you’re reminding me, that was something that came up. And I think some of the ecovillages that were established more recently had the opportunity to take into consideration in their design. how to build buildings that are better able to moderate the climate and deal with severe storms and that sort of thing. So yeah, there was a little bit of a difference in terms of when the community was established, but it’s still variable. Some communities that have been established for a long time have had more time to put into place a lot of practices. So there is definitely a lot of variability across the communities, which I think is also a strength if we’re thinking about sharing practices and knowledge among the wider network.
Eva: Hoping to dig a bit into your research and your experience, what external factors, ecologic, economic, political, really impact the resilience? And how have you seen the ecovillages in the project been able to kind of mitigate these external pressures?
Allyson: Well, that’s a difficult question. Again, it depends on, you know, where we are. But I know there have been some severe heat waves that some people who were participating in the project were having to get through and drought conditions, some flooding, some of the more immediate shocks to the system, those sorts of things. I know here in Canada, we talked quite a bit about the fires, the wildfires that were happening out west last summer, and that are already happening again now when we’re just in mid-May. So definitely there’s a lot of discussion around these more immediate shocks and disturbances, as well as the sort of looming potential for more global tipping points and thresholds, like changing in the ocean, Atlantic Ocean currents and implications that might have for rainfall patterns in different parts of the world and agriculture. So we had both discussions around impacts that are real and happening now and how people are coping with them, and also forecasting and thinking about potential future impacts when and if tipping points are crossed. Not sure if that answers your question. It does good enough for now.
Eva: Yeah. And I guess one more thing that I would really also like to say and make sure that I share in this conversation was, and something that emerged from our project and the community of practice discussions, was the need to sort of think beyond the boundaries of the community and recognize that the resilience of the community also is linked to the resilience of the surrounding community and broader region, and to really take whatever opportunity there is to make those connections and to think both how to strengthen resilience within the community and share some of that beyond the boundaries of the community. This is also one of the questions I was hoping to bring, so maybe we can go into that a bit deeper. Do you have any suggestions for how ecovillages can better engage with their neighbouring communities, local government entities, and really strengthen resilience within their region, their bioregion?
Allyson: Yeah. I mean, it depends, but I think there’s always opportunities for collaborating, collaborating on some of these challenges that are not going to neatly stay within boundaries and maybe that’s through food networks and supporting multiple alternative sources of food, agricultural CSIs and other models for having different sources of food. Also, around wildfire planning and emergency preparedness, there’s lots of opportunities to collaborate at a broader scale, I would say, and that can be a way of working on a project and in so doing, building trust and sharing knowledge and all the other aspects that go into strengthening resilience across those boundaries.
Eva: I’m very curious. A lot of the ecovillages within our network are bound together by a shared decision-making process, some sort of horizontal leadership structure. I’m curious if you’ve noticed that this has an impact on the way that they’re able to respond or build resilience, either within their own community and engaging with the other communities of this project, or even looking to that lens of connecting with the wider region.
Allyson: Honestly, I think that’s something that I would love to know more about and think more about, because from my sort of outsider perspective on that, I feel like, well, it’s time-consuming, one thing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is time-consuming, and I guess that can be acknowledged. But then, when a decision is made, it’s probably much more fully thought through, talked through. People understand the process and thinking that went into the decision, which is very different from, say, municipal decision-making, where it’s easy. You elect your council, and they make the decisions, and then you deal with them, and a lot of people might not be happy about that. I feel like the sort of alternative governance structures that I was learning about in the different communities have a lot to offer. And I guess, in this sense, maybe diversity is also a strength here, and lots of experiments of different ways of governing. I mean, we could argue that it’s definitely not going well in a lot of places. So, having those experiments, having those alternative, well-worked-through, thought-through, successful ways of doing things is really valuable.
Eva: I just noticed that it is a criticized practice by a lot of mainstream society, and even in the process of creating community, I find a lot of resistance within the group for not being able to make quick decisions. And yet, I noticed that there’s a lot of the attributes that you started with kind of embedded in this. So, the diversity, the connectivity, the different layers of resilience, it’s just something I wanted to bring in and see if you had a personal opinion.
Allyson:I think you’re absolutely right. I think what I can’t figure out for myself, and I’m sure there are examples and I’m just not aware of them, but is how you scale that up to larger communities. I can see this working really well with a couple hundred, a few hundred people. When you move into the thousands and tens of thousands or millions, how does that work? How does it work at bigger scales? I’m often going back to that point, and even with this project, with the Ecovillage Resilience Project, how do we scale up? How do we scale it out? How do we spread these ways of doing things? They are like seeds, and I feel like we just kind of have to find a way to sort of tap into scaling things up, and that will be really helpful.
Eva: I’m curious if, in your research, you have explored the tool of sociocracy at all, because this is one kind of pathway that I can start to imagine for how to scale it up, when you can break down this horizontal leadership into smaller decision-making circles that have then consulted, in the end, the group as a whole. This could be a tangent that we don’t have to go deep down there, if you don’t have a strong anything to add.
Allyson: I would be listening, and I would be happily listening and learning. I don’t have much to contribute. I haven’t. I’ve been hearing about and maybe learning a little bit about sociocracy, but I don’t know enough to speak to it. I would say I’m very intrigued, and especially with your comments about it being a way forward in terms of scaling up. Definitely worth thinking about and looking into.
Eva: Maybe it’s not too late to pull a sociocratic expert into the podcast. Yeah, definitely. But for now, really focusing on your strength and your research, I’m curious if there were any unexpected lessons or insights about resilience that you learned from working and studying with ecovillages.
Allyson: I don’t think I learned anything unexpected. I definitely learned a lot, which is great. I want to be in a learning position, not just in a, I hold the knowledge and here’s what I have to offer. I feel like maybe one insight I could offer here that I think is really valuable and a little bit untapped in the broader community is just this really creative experimental mindset. And I think that this is something that is worth nurturing because there’s an openness that comes with having that creative mindset. And I feel like we need that to be able to both imagine multiple future trajectories or pathways and scenarios of what the future could be, good and bad and everything in between. We need to have the sort of ability to think loosely and creatively to be able to even imagine what’s possible. And if we can’t imagine it, it’s really difficult, I think, to actively move toward and make things happen. And I also, at the same time, if we can’t imagine it, I think that we’re in trouble in terms of failing to react in time. And also it’s fun. I mean, we should have fun. This is something that I learned through the Resilience Alliance research, surprisingly enough. I mean, you think it’s a bunch of scientists kind of getting together, but one of the things that was very different about that research network, especially initially, was just having fun and approaching ideas playfully and enjoying what you do. And I think that just to tie it back into that creative mindset idea, I think that’s something that I felt emerged from some of the discussions and feedback and reporting from the different communities, the ways in which creativity has informed practices within the community and brought joy to people. Yeah, I think that is something that would be really worth kind of digging into more and cultivating, nurturing.
Eva: Thank you. Dragon Dreaming is kind of a beloved practice by the Ecovillage Network, and this really puts a lot of emphasis on the celebration phase. And it’s interesting to hear you tie that to creativity and creative thinking, because I agree, I think being able to creatively problem solve and approach a problem with a creative hat on really helps us be resilient. And it’s nice to see that direct connection to play and to celebration. And so just thank you.
Allyson: Absolutely. And I know others have brought up Dragon Dreaming, and I have to find out more about it.
Eva: I’ll put it in the show notes as well. I can send you a link after this. Okay, so one of the goals that you’ve been working on throughout this project, you’ve already mentioned a little bit, but creating resources to support the wider Ecovillage Network to become more resilient. You talked about the project tracker, and I’m wondering if you can share some of the key principles or practices that other communities can apply just from listening to this podcast to help build more resilience within their community.
Allyson: I mean, I think that’s difficult, because it’s going to vary from community to community. So speaking at a very general level, I think a lot of the practices are already underway in a lot of communities in terms of regenerative agriculture. And going back to those resilience attributes can be helpful in thinking about the second one was redundancy or having backup systems for things. And that was an area that many of the communities gave themselves low scores on across those areas. And so putting into practice energy backup systems, freshwater backup systems. But I mean, it’s difficult to think of specific practices, I guess, because it will vary. But I think there’s a lot of general level looking into particular areas for resilience, if that makes sense.
Eva: Yes, and I think going through the attributes is, as you say, a good step, just starting by looking at the problem, or at the conundrum, we are in track for 2.5. How can we begin to wrap our heads around this?
Allyson: Yeah, and now that you mentioned that, another one that I was really surprised, it didn’t show up as a strength was having reflexive practices, which I thought would have scored more, and it may have been well, the way in which we described the criteria for ranking, but it just the idea of having a process within the community, a practice of coming together and reflecting on decisions that have been made to inform how they’re made going forward. I understand from the resilience tracker that that is not a practice that many of the communities had in place, but are looking at how that might be worth investing in.
Eva: Absolutely. Looking ahead, and with the hat of resilience researcher on, what do you see as the most pressing research needs or areas for further exploration regarding resilience, and particularly resilience in ecovillages?
Allyson: There’s so many. I’m trying to, I think, honestly, it comes to this as we spoke about it scaling up, because how many ecovillages are there in the network? A few thousand, maybe, and we worked with 20. How can we bring this perspective and this way of looking through a systems lens and considering the different attributes and features that go into strengthening, enhancing resilience in your community? How can we bring that to a broader community? I do think that is a research question, and it’s also a tangible project and something that would have a lot of value going forward in terms of bringing more people into the conversation around what it is that we’re trying to do, which is to strengthen our resilience, both within the community and beyond. Working together, we can have a better chance at actually navigating our way through some of these challenges and building the futures that we want to have for ourselves and our communities and our families and everyone, really.
Eva: After witnessing the journeys of each of these projects, as you say, these 20,000 ecovillages over the past years, what has given you or continues to give you hope when you envision the future of ecovillages and the ecovillage movement?
Allyson: I’m really hopeful in the sense that in reading through the comments and the reports that the people that were participating in this project did a lot of work. They not only came to the sessions that we held every three weeks or a couple of hours at a time and then took the information back to their community and held workshops and then uploaded, wrote reports and stories and outputs, photos, models, et cetera, and uploaded it all, and they all have their reports. That was a huge investment in their time, and that gives me hope. That’s the work that needs to be done. We’re only going to get to where we want to go by putting in the time and effort and making it happen. It gives me hope that people stayed with the project, reflected on it, and have already been commenting about changes that they’re making within their community. Maybe it’s not all 20 of them, but it’s more than half. That gives me a lot of hope. Again, scale it up.
Eva: Can you share one or two of these changes as little seeds of hope for the listeners?
Allyson: I know many of the communities did not have monitoring systems and early warning systems in place, and many of them are planning on putting those in place. That’s one example.
Eva: Thank you very much. Before we close, I always like to give those that I’m interviewing just an open space. Is there any question that I didn’t ask or anything you would really like to share before we end for the day?
Allyson: I think your questions were fantastic. They gave a good picture of the work that we’ve done and what I could bring to it. Maybe the only thing I would like to leave with is acknowledging that this was very much a core team effort. There were several of us involved in planning how this project would happen. Trudy, Anna, Lueya, and all of the people who showed up in the community of practice and came to those sessions and participated and offered so much. I feel like that is an enormous strength. Nothing fizzled out or faded away. It stayed strong the whole way through. I’m really grateful for that.
Eva: Thank you. I think ending in gratitude is a wonderful step towards resilience and a great way to end our conversation today. It’s been an honour talking with you.
Allyson: It’s been a pleasure, Eva. Thank you.
OUTRODUCTION
Join us again next week as we continue the conversation over what it means to be resilient in our time of deepening polycrisis. While you wait for the next episode of Community Resilience, we invite you to explore more about the Ecovillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project by visiting us online at ecovillage.org/resilience.
GEN Staff
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