Communicating Resilience: Words, Pictures, Voices

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the words around resilience; now let’s talk about incorporating images. Pictures are powerful tools that could help engage a wider audience in resilience learning and practice.

A picture from The Lexicon of Sustainability
that features one of our partners: Growing Power.

On the Lexicon of Sustainability website words become the building blocks of new sustainable solutions – words such as: back yard pollinators, urban farms, methane digesters, pasture-raised, vermiculture, biodiversity and carbon footprint. These words express choices about how we live, but they’re also answers to specific questions. How is this produced? Where was this made? Who made it?

Can we create a similar lexicon for resilience? Are there words that embody and express specific ideas and values? Can these words be conveyed through images? The Center for Resilient Cities has been working on this. Some of the words we have thought of are familiar – such as diversity, innovation and governance –  but we think they have to be “unpacked.” We have to see how they work in a positive way and how a more resilient community is the outcome.

In the next post, I look at one of these words – diversity. What does it apply to? We ask some community residents for their thoughts.

If you think a lexicon of resilience is useful (and if you don’t, let us know), please send us words and images that you believe can act as building blocks, and which we will credit. Below is our first attempt at turning a principle of resilience into an image.