Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

203 in the United States for each generation to conserve some land from development, and pass this legacy on to future generations as a form of inter-generational inheritance; a legacy of natural resources that are represented by the proxy of geographic space (see for example, the dedication of a very large marine reserve by President Obama off the coastline of the US State of Hawai’i in September of 2016 [Hirschfeld Davis, 2016]). This act of reserving large areas of land has been the primary way in which American environmental planners fulfill their perceived obligations to future generations. For example, a renowned American biologist has recently called to set aside half of the earth to sustain biodiversity (Wilson, 2016). Other forms of contemporary resource use, such as fossil fuel use, have received less attention in an inter-generational context because the assumption is that technology will change and allow future humans to use other energy sources (Nicholson, 2015). But climate change is forcing new, uncomfortable reflections on the scale and cost burden of the structural adaptation projects current generations should assume (Moellendorf, 2009; Moellendorf & Schaffer, 2016). Should the generations that enjoyed the use of fossil fuels invest more of their resources to prepare for the future dynamics of flooding, drought, and fire that are the consequences of their unrestricted use of carbonbased fuels? In other words, should we build big adaptation projects now, before the seas rise much more rapidly, or should we defer that cost to future generations who will do it when it is needed (Grasso, 2010)? Most planners, scientists and geographers who reflect on the onset of an Anthropocene era focus on defining the threshold at which that new era has begun or will begin (Braje, 2016; Waters et al., 2016). But from an ethical reasoning perspective, we could also interpret our current era as the last few stable decades of an 8,000–10,000 year period (the Holocene). What is an ethically appropriate use of the last few decades of a long, stable period? Should we continue to optimize our investments to a lowest-cost, least-disruption adaptation pathway in the near future (Reeder & Ranger, 2011) or are we ethically bound to do all we can for future generations, given that they will bear most of the costs of our past use of cheap fossil fuels (Grasso, 2010)? Seen in that light, the transition to the Anthropocene creates an urgent need to re-evaluate the goals of urban environmental planning projects, even if the effects of trends such as sea level rise may not be acute until after 2050. As a result, a wide range of new ethical questions are starting to be asked during discussions of appropriate goals and methods of planning for the Anthropocene (Graham & Roelvink, 2010). In summary, my argument in this section has been that three key philosophical assumptions are changing that underlie urban environmental planning: the epistemological assumption that the past is the key to knowledge about the future, the ontological assumption that regions can choose to become more independent from global systems; and the ethical assumption that we can defer the costs of urban adaptation to a changed climate to future generations. 6. CONCLUSIONS The examples presented here provide evidence that pressures are mounting to drive a genuine shift in the concepts, methods and underlying assumptions of urban environmental planning in the United States, and more broadly in North America. Table 1 summarizes the examples presented under each category of praxis. This summary demonstrates that a series of changes have occurred in the concepts and goals of environmental planning over the last 30 years. My argument is that it is the rapid turnover from sustainability to resilience to adaptation during the last 25 years, coupled with changes in methods and philosophical assumptions, which provides the evidence for a genuine paradigm shift. Perhaps the greatest change as a result of climate trends is occurring in the rationale for urban environmental planning itself. The need to make strategic plans immediately to guide the interactions of communities with their environments—in the context of ethical arguments, contested financial investments, and predicted environmental changes—ismore urgent than ever. If we accept the scientific evidence that we are currently enjoying the last stable decades of an 8,000–10,000 year period, 20–30 years from now we can expect to be in a state of perpetually responding to extreme conditions. Urban environmental planning has never been more urgently needed as a strategic planning approach, anticipating future change, rather than as a rear-guard effort to protect resources from development. We urgently need to expand and strengthen the concepts, methods and assumptions of urban environmental planning to incorporate predictions of rapid, permanent environmental change and prepare cities for the immediate future.