72 books like The Resilience Dividend

I read this novel when I was about three-quarters finished with my novel, and was just blown away by the attention to detail, possibilities, and hope between the pages.

This is another hopeful near-future novel, in which humanity is trying its best to overcome the worst of climate change. Unlike my novel, however, which is told from the perspective of one family, Ministry for the Future is a truly global story, with dozens and dozens of narrators, many unnamed, who give us snapshots everywhere from the Arizona border to Antarctica to Switzerland to India, all coalescing into what becomes a global movement to try to save the planet.

This novel is a little lighter on plot, but fascinating as a menu of hopeful options and possibilities for what could be done if humanity really got its act together. 

More than any other writer, Flynn explained the value and need for resilient critical infrastructure. He distinguished between foreseeable and unforeseeable threats, and made clear that we can reduce the risk and impact of both. Since 9/11, anything purporting to discuss protection/security and resilience was skewed to terrrorism, giving scant consideration to more fundamental changes in our world. Flynn brought this broader perspective to the fore, and I would like to believe he influenced political and academic thinking. I fear he was the Cassandra to the business community, who are only now starting to understand the risks they face. I made this book core reading for all the infrastructure courses I teach. It is clear, simple, and sets each concept in context with an unambiguous call to action.

There are some excellent books on risk like Bernstein's Against the Gods. The majority are insipid reads and over-simplistic. This little book stands out for its simple, clear, condensed overview of risk in theory and practice. It doesn't try to simplify to the point of complicating the subject; it presents the inherent complexities without drama. I made it required reading for my risk & resilience students and employees. It offers a sense of how risk changes with interpretation and how the perception can itself influence the occurrence and impact. If this idea of risk perceptions and how it influences decision-making strikes a chord with you, you might wish to explore more of Baruch Fischhoff's work—it is utterly fascinating and will forever change how you buy vehicle insurance and salmon.

Not easy reading, it may well slide down your "must read" list. However, resilience is an ecological concept. C.S. Holling, co-author of Panarky, coined the term resilience in a 1973 ecological science paper. The practical application of resilience, specifically operational resilience, and its relationship to adaptation and protection, has evolved greatly over the last 20 years. Nonetheless, Panarchy gets to the raw ingredients of these multi-domain ideas. It remains an invaluable touchstone for those exploring nature-based solutions as tools of protection and resilience planning for disaster risk reduction. It is a fascinating reminder of how quickly the world and emerging practices can change, yet the fundamental concepts endure. It reminds me of the essential value of books and how reading and internalizing an argument is so much more intellectually nourishing than today's tendency to graze information.

This is the obvious recommendation, but a ‘must read’ nonetheless. 

Whereas Cialdini’s text focuses on our response to messaging (on risk or otherwise), Ripley’s book focuses on our response to the incident itself (…and so where the former leaves off, the latter picks up).

The Unthinkable gives readers a deep look into our own psyche to prepare us for how we are likely to response when faced with physical or mortal danger. Nobody knows exactly how they will respond in a high-hazard incident because so many instinctual processes take over.

But as Ripley so effectively explains, it is possible to know what these phenomena look like so that when we are experiencing them we can adjust accordingly to be more effective responders.

Amanda Ripley’s approachable journalistic style effectively turns a collection of meaningful risk management messages into a hard-to-put-down page-turner. 

We can all think of cities that have been hit by some horrible events – envision Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, hit by atomic weapons. Or the Oklahoma City bombing that leveled a whole block. Yet these cities not only survived, but thrived. In chapters written by different experts from around the world this book shows how resilient cities are to shocks and disasters. I especially liked the way that the authors focus on the way that we memorialize and remember the past, trying to learn lessons from shocks and bringing those emotions and learning into the present.

Pynchon’s Against the Day stages a form of pantheism in which everything bears some form of consciousness, which, like nature, has no border. Cyprian considers that “the earth [might be] alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness”; and it is “as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice.” Pynchon’s characters live in a pantheistic universe in which everything is part of nature and alive—where the wind tries to wake them and the world has a consciousness. Pynchon updates Melville in Mardi, in which, e.g., a character asks, “Think you there is no sensation in being a tree? Think you it is nothing to be a world? [The world of] Mardi is alive to its axis.” In ATD, “the steel webwork was a living organism”; even an “egg yolk [can be] perhaps regarded as a conscious entity.” Consciousness can’t be confined to people: all entities have the potential… show more.

Spare, grim, and minimalist. This is the kind of book I really like, a giant middle finger to the nice, safe suburban sensibilities.

With this disease, which kills all grasses and thus the basic food supply, the thin civilisational veneer is smashed to bits quickly and the England of tea, warm beer, and cricket on the village green is replaced with mass starvation, rapists, murderers, jungle law, atom bombs, and a Hobbesian all-against-all.

This is a story and writing gripping and direct that makes you square up to the fact that you would very likely set aside the moral for the necessary. And it forces you to ask the question: would you kill to save your family? 

This classic award-winning book is a must-read for anyone interested in traumatic events. Sociologist Kai Erikson was the first to equate a major disaster with individual and community upheaval, based on the 1976 Buffalo Creek dam flood. He details how this event traumatized individuals and caused a breakdown of community relationships and a rise in crime, unethical behavior, and major out-migration. Many of the emotional and social effects of disasters had not been discussed or treated when this book was written. Much has been learned since. However, Erikson stresses that many of the psychological and sociological problems continue to exist when calamities occur today and must be resolved. 

In Seveneves the crises start coming and never stop coming.

The sudden, inexplicable destruction of the Moon and the resultant catastrophic rain of debris destroys habitability on Earth. A small population of refugees escapes into space to keep the flame of humanity alight.

Naturally, the inhospitality of interplanetary space and conflicting factions of survivors plunges the journey into resource depletion, rampant cancer, attempted coups, and a population bottleneck, but I found that the ending concludes a surprising story of human connection, even when the definition of human has radically changed.