Resilience is a capital item.

When Ernst Schumacher wrote "Small is Beautiful" fifty years ago, he identified three essential capitals we were not paying attention to; fossil fuel, Nature’s Margins of tolerance and Human Substance. His concern at that point was for fossil fuel running out, rather than our concern now for the damage it is causing before it does, but in every way he was prescient.

I think his identification of “Nature’s Margins” and “Human Substance” was a profound observation. His concern was that we were treating capital items as income; that we regarded our access to finite resources as infinite, and that we were not concerned with how we conserved, substituted or replaced them. He seemed to view resilience as a capital item – something we need to keep in stock to be available when we need it, and to ensure we do not run out. We can be as efficient as we like at production, but without material to feed the process, it counts for nothing.

I wonder what he would make of it now? We have exhausted natu…