Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
But it was clear to many participants that one path to better outcomes lies in building and sustaining forums and networks through which best practices and painful lessons are shared across all sectors of society, and from one society to others. The logic in pursuing a borderless approach to fostering resilience in the face of inevitable disasters is a matter of both ethics and economics. The disruptions to global supply chains following the Bangkok floods and, of course, Japan's extraordinary triple shock from a major earthquake, tsunami, and radiation release reveal the interconnectedness that can quickly make a major regional catastrophe into a global event. Within the United States and each of its cities, great and small, there is a similar imperative to plan and invest for the worst, and to reserve yet more attention and investment for increasing the capacity to respond to, and recover from, unforeseeable hazards as well. One critical pathway for facilitating fruitful exchanges is the explosively expanding global network of computer, telecommunications and social networks. It is not by chance that Margareta Wahlström and the United Nations office of disaster risk reduction maintain energetic presence on Twitter (via @WahlstromM and @unisdr and the "hashtag" #iddr). While some still see Twitter as yet another Web distraction, she and her staff (as with officials at United States agencies dealing with various disaster risks) see it as a vital two-way sensory apparatus for sharing ideas and information before, during, and after an emergency. Only through sustained engagement, from the scale of face-to-face campus forums to global Internet connectedness, can disaster planners, elected officials, citizens, and companies hope to keep pace with the scope of risks, both to lives and wealth, attending the next phase of humanity's extraordinary growth spurt. A core theme at the meeting was that a boosted capacity to withstand and recover from disasters will not come by establishing some set menu of protocols and responsibilities. Ivan Seidenberg, who as chairman of the board of Verizon Communications Inc., deals continually with managing resilient responses to emergencies, went so far as to challenge, playfully, Albert Einstein's menu for saving the world. While Einstein said that if given an hour, he would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and the final minute designing a solution, Seidenberg noted that in a fast-changing world, the rules and stakes—the very nature of the question—are in constant flux. That kind of situation requires a commitment to constant reevaluation, to learning and adjusting, to knowing resilience building is not accomplished from the top down, and is not a task, but a trait. Former Governor Tom Ridge, in his keynote talk, echoed this line of thinking. In a single line, he distilled the importance of creating a national culture attuned to the importance of resilience, from family homes to college campuses to corporate boardrooms and beyond. "Homeland security isn't an agency," he said. "It's a national mission." 22