Societal collapse or transformation, and resilience

Leonie J. Pearson; Craig J. Pearson

doi:10.1073/pnas.1207552109

Societal collapse or transformation, and resilience

Leonie J. Pearson
, Craig J. Pearson

Research output: Contribution to journal › Letter › peer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The recent article by Butzer (1) illustrated, through historical analysis, that resilience is not enough: many societies have collapsed irrespective of their resilience capacity. We argue that it might be because of their preoccupation with resilience. What they needed, and what Butzer also writes, is transformability: “…after overcoming initial, ideological dissonance, people can indeed come together to support change” (1). This is truly a message for our times as governments struggle with transforming to low-carbon societies.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	2030-2031
Number of pages	2
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume	109
Issue number	30
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1207552109
Publication status	Published - 24 Jul 2012
Externally published	Yes

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10.1073/pnas.1207552109

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Societal collapse or transformation, and resilience

Abstract

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