Local Community Resilience: Braziers Park, Glaister Lecture (2025).

This was an excellent Glaister Lecture at Braziers park, given by Sarah Wood, about the trials and tribulations of running a community, and some of the history there. It is, overall, inspiring, but of course illustrates the complexity of the human being, and how we interact with each other. As many others experienced, the Covid pandemic added its complications and difficulties to life there, and created some divisions, among that culture of fear we all experienced then, while trying to deal with a strange external threat whose outcomes were not entirely clear.

I made a few remarks (about About 2.44.00 in, for a couple of minutes), as I now transcribe, on the importance of local community resilience in adapting away from our present ill-fated course:

“Well, I’m Chris, and yeah, I wonder to what degree actually, your tribulations in Braziers or any other community, becomes a kind of microcosm of how society is going to have to adapt, because there’s the mythology that, oh, it’s sometimes called “carbon tunnel vision”, that so long as we change our energy system away from fossil fuels, we’re using wind and all the rest of it, we’re fine... Ah Ah! ...

No, I think we’re going to have to change a whole lot of things about how we do things, our expectations. Basically we’re going to have to deconsumerise, and so thinking of – um – Donella Meadows, she was one of the co-authors of the Club of Rome paper, wasn’t she, “The Limits of Growth”, back in the early 70s.

And that was saying, right ok, we carry on the way we are, crunch!, it’s not going to get too good by about 2030. All we’ve done since then it follow the standard run, everything is along the lines of that prediction; a new analysis says, yeah it might be 2040, so really the way we are going, we have to get off that, and this is going to take human behavioural change.

And it’s going to take a hell of a lot of cooperation, and I think fundamentally, local community resilience is probably our best anchor, and our best stabilising force.

We’ve got to have that, we’ve got to build that where it doesn’t exist. So, I thought that [talk] was very inspiring, and I’m glad that Braziers is on the up, and going in that direction, and may well serve as a beacon for what other people can do [in their own community].”