Comment by makeitdouble
4 years ago
This is the no-brainer choice for anything that can be immediately replaced/ordered. Most of us aren’t keeping a stash of computer monitors in case of failure.
On firefighting…huge swaths of burned down land can’t be reordered on Amazon and delivered next day. People quip “just replant the trees” but of course that doesn’t rebuild an ecosystem, we might not even replant the right trees, and the things that lived there are now dead.
On personal scales, waiting for your car to break to fix it isn’t a good strategy either, nor would you wait for you gas pipes to leak, or see if the thunder actually hits your home before preparing for it.
Basically I feel “don‘t fix until it breaks” is a good strategy for day to day small scale decisions, but problematic for most stuff beyond that.
Sources of resilience operate on three different timescales. The first is foresight. The ability to use feedforward to predict potential problems and avoid them. The second is coping. The ability to stop a bad thing from getting worse. The third is recovery. The ability to recover to a normal state once disaster has struck.
You need all three.
>This is the no-brainer choice for anything that can be immediately replaced/ordered.
Well, at least until C-19 hit then you realize that 'immediate replace/reorder' doesn't actually exist any longer, and now your forklift parts are actually going to take 2 months to show up on a delayed boat and nobody in the US has any replacements.