Rebuilding a resilient nation.

• Author: Flynn, Stephen E.
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Two days after this summer's rush-hour collapse of the I-35W bridge, I found myself standing along the southern bank of the Mississippi River, looking out on the twisted wreckage of what had been a major transportation lifeline for the Twin Cities. As a homeland security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a recent book on catastrophic disasters, I had been enlisted by CNN to visit the site to help put this tragedy into a wider context. I had made a similar visit six years before to the still smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers. Both experiences were deeply sobering, but what I found particularly painful and unsettling about the I-35W site was that it was a catastrophe of our own making.

If we continue to neglect the aging infrastructure bequeathed to us by earlier generations, tragedies of our own making will become commonplace events in the 21st Century. We also can count on a growing number of natural disasters, particularly those created by wind and water. Aided by climate change, what are now forecast to be 100-year storm events will likely become 10-year storms by 2050. (1) And no matter how badly we wish otherwise, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil will not always be prevented.

These trends suggest that we should make building technical, economic, social, and organizational resilience a top public policy priority at all levels of government. This is not happening for two straightforward reasons. First, the attention of the federal government--and the majority of the resources Washington has available for discretionary spending--have been focused on national security efforts outside our borders. Since 9/11, the war on terrorism has been the Bush administration's top priority. Because the strategy for waging that war has been built upon the premise that "the only defense is a good offense," our domestic vulnerability to man-made and natural disaster has received only sporadic attention, as the response to Hurricane Katrina highlighted. Second, the resiliency agenda requires stepped-up public investments at the state and local levels, but cash-strapped governors and mayors are predictably reluctant to take on a new set of responsibilities when they can barely pay for the ones they already have.

At the heart of the problem is that Americans and their elected leaders have been viewing the resilience imperative the wrong way Some are fatalistic about catastrophic events and dismiss as futile any serious effort to anticipate and cope with disasters. Others see preparing for adversity as a trade off between using limited resources to deal with pressing current needs, on the one hand, and buying down risk on contingencies that may never actually materialize on the other. Then there are those reflexive optimists who are averse to dedicating any time or energy contemplating what can and should be done to prepare for future bumps in the road. Their creed is "Don't Worry Be Happy."

But building a more resilient nation is not about making losing wagers against improbable risks. Instead it is about buying low-cost insurance in advance of foreseeable, inevitable, and consequential events. It is also not about surrendering to pessimism. This is because the process of constructing more resilient communities makes them more productive, more innovative, and more desirable places to live and work.

WHAT IS RESILIENCE?

Yossi Sheffi, a professor of engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invoked the concept of resilience in his path-breaking book, The Resilient Enterprise (MIT Press, 2005). Resilience, he points out, is a concept used in the material sciences and represents "the ability of a material to...