Ride the Talk: Resiliency, The Essence of Sustainability
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2.5 Weeks + 1000 Miles + 4 States + Countless Encounters. Follow Cindy Gilbert, program director for the Sustainable Design program at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, as she bikes from Montana to Minneapolis to raise awareness about sustainability challenges and opportunities in the region while raising need-based scholarship money for students.
What is left after you’ve peeled off the eco-groovy labels and unwrapped the post-consumer recycled-content packaging? Will the product underneath stand the test of time? Will the business you run survive the next recession? In a word, are they resilient?
Resiliency is all about being able to take the heat, stress, impact, pressure, market changes, etc., and be able to return to business as usual or else leverage what has been learned and adapt. Resiliency leads to quality, timeless products and long-term businesses. [Ed Note: For more on resiliency, read Michael Sammet’s feature on “Building Adaptive Capacity”]
If there is one thing that I have learned on this Ride the Talk cycling trip is that resiliency is at the heart of sustainability. On those days when the sun doesn’t come out from beneath the clouds, when the wind refuses to shift to a tailwind from a headwind, when the road shoulder only gets narrower and more shrapnel-ridden, when the hills get more abundant and steeper: these are the times I dig deep and rely on my resiliency.
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