My big worry about 'resilience' is that it will become another way of blaming the victim. Government will implement rotten policies and then 'assist' groups or individuals to be resilient to cope with their bad decisions.

If we are to have a truly resilient society, we need individuals, families and local communities that are much more responsible for their own well being than is the case at present. Local energy and water harvesting, food production etc will be vital in the years ahead.

Localisation will put us in a much better position to absorb and recover from external shocks, whether they be climate, political or economic in nature and reduce the burden on governments which seem increasingly incapable of dealing with the major challenges of our age.

I too think we need much more local sufficiency. Lots of questions about the right scale and so on. But I think it is clear the direction we need to move.

'Resilience' is certainly the new buzz word - I've already been to one conference on it, one that might have been called 'Sustainability' a decade ago. Let's hope the new buzz word doesn't get abused though because it's a good word and we'll need a lot of resilience to survive an increasingly uncertain future. Localisation will go a long way to enhancing resilience but a lot of other things are needed as well. Mitigating climate change and moving to a low carbon economy lie at the very heart of resilince. Add to that an end to the growth economy and, as part of that, stabilising population.

My concern is with the promotion of persistence. Sometimes, changing is way harder than battling on. It can be similarly difficult to cut one's losses and walk away from a failed project, particularly if one has invested in it.

Resilience is a relative term - it always has conditions attached.

Nature is resilient in the sense that the laws of physics will continue to operate no matter what. The only condition there, is that the laws of physics do not change (what if they did?). If water is blocked, it will rise and find a different direction to flow, or perhaps even evaporate - water molecules don't care, they impose no conditions, but we do!

So the question comes down to "how to preserve our interests despite changing conditions", but our interests are of course different.

"Society" is as poor and unsubstantiated abstraction as all the other big words. The "interests of society" are no different than the interests of a water molecule, e.g. none but a projection that exists only in the minds of certain individuals, while at the same time other individuals may project completely different "interests".