Resilience Metrics

Dr. Joseph Fiksel, co-director of the Center for Resilience at Ohio State University:

For utility, measure not only usability, usefulness, affordability, accuracy, quality, and reliability, but also versatility.

For life cycle, measure not only feasibility, testability, scalability, serviceability, and disassembly, but also renewability.

For environmental impact, measure not only waste and toxics avoidance, recyclability, and eco-efficiency, but also eco-intensity (the consumption of resources per dollar).

For continuity, measure not only safety, security, redundancy, flexibility, and recoverability, but also adaptability.

For social responsibility, measure not only equity, accessibility, sensitivity, integrity, dignity, but also diversity.

Worldchanging

Take the above with a grain of salt:

One of his side-points was that environmentalists' frequent denial of growth and advocation of steady-state systems is wrong. It's natural for organisms to need to grow.

Organisms grow to compete for resources in an ecological niche. They are competeing within nature. It's all very well to compare economic resilience to natural, but when it comes to growth, this notion of economic growth into perpetuity competes directly with natural ecology. You can't have both.