Bob Russell's Reading List
As one of his final gifts to the community, Bob Russell offers a recommended reading list for understanding the concept of community resilience. Traverse City and the surrounding areas owe much to his civic engagement and leadership over more than 30 years, including one of the cleanest sewage disposal plants on the Great Lakes, preserving of the Barns and surrounding property for the public's use and management, and prevention of a shopping mall where today's Sara Hardy Farmer's Market enjoys such huge success. Much of Bob Russel's recent work has focused on creating the discussions needed to push resilience planning to the forefront here in the Traverse City region. Bob's battle with cancer has taken him away from public leadership. It is a big loss to our community.
Resilience, as applied to human communities, comes to us from an understanding of the fundamentals of the resilience we see in natural sytems all around us. Resilience thinking starts with a deep recognition that man-made communities are intimately connected to the eco-system, to Nature. Nature provides for us in the form of eco-system services: clean air, water, healthy soil and other resources of many kinds. Healthy eco-system services are the source of all wealth and sustainability for human communities. Yet, resilience is really about adaptability, not sustainability. We must plant the seeds of resilient strength in our communities, ready to adapt to a future of change that we cannot forecast but which promises to be far different from the past. Pick out a book and get started.
Watch one of Bob's speeches here!
2018 Bob Russell Read
This is perhaps the most important and easily read book about economics one can choose. Modern day economic theory misses the eternal connection that bonds real wealth to the economic system services provided to us by our planet. Money is not wealth.
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How do we make the future that will hapen be the future that needs to happen, if human societies are going to survive? What must we grasp first, in order to change our behavor and consume less?
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From this book on the Authors series on food, our own health, and the health of our food system depends on this #1 rule: cook your own food!
A must read and local favorite. The single biggest export that leaves every local community is the sum of its citizens' investment dollars. They are exported into a worldwide financial system which we all know is frail. Shuman tells us how we must learn to invest in Main St. and not Wall St.
Our society has swung too far towards individualism, dismantling our sense of community membership. Only recognition of the common good can save us.
Energy is the common factor in all we accomplish in life. Lokked at this simply, there are real, earth-bound limits to the supply of easy energy in the future. Our future will be characterized by constrained energy supply with unavoidable limits to growth.
Also a book about governance: how do we make governance decisions; how can we make it better; how do we engage effectivel
Another powerful book from one of the most cogent thinkers of our time. The message might be scary: the geopolitics of our food supply makes it even more frail.
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rebuilding
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This is a fascinating read that simply extrapolates developements already taking place across the far northern hemisphere into the year 2050. What will we look like?