Resilience and duck tape are not the same thing

Robin McAlpine

Here's a depressing study (don't go!, this isn't going to be all that depressing...). It shows that the impact of near misses on human psychology is nearly the opposite of what it should be. It turns out that rather than the result of a near miss being to alert us to be more careful in future, psychologically we instead think that this proves that if it happens again we'll be OK again. It doesn't.

I was a victim of this exact phenomenon last week. Our camping gas had run out and it was an expensive refill. We weathered the last two major storms not too bad here and lost power neither time. Any time our power was lost (quite often actually) it came back within 12 hours, and there is always take away food four miles away.

Well not if there are trees down over all the roads in every direction there isn't. Hence on Friday night we were scavenging what we could find that might somehow cook successfully inside a log stove. Potatoes mostly. For five days we had no power and no way to cook (though the roads did reopen and to be fair ScottishPower paid for our dinner at the pub on Monday night).

One last depressing reality; left to its own devices our contemporary democracy will never change anything. Politics demands more of things or less of things or slightly different flavours of things, but it seldom actively wants different things. It wants 'more resilience', which therefore means 'more fixing things, and faster'. It doesn't want to do things in a way that are less prone to damage in the first place because that would be change.

My slightly cocky assumption that 'it would be fine' was true, but I hadn't priced in how miserable being 'fine' might be. The public authorities will think things are basically back to normal now and the crisis has been dealt with. No need for change.

I disagree, I really, really do. When the wind died down a bit and having not much else to do, we all went out for a walk, clambering over giant fallen trees to see what the view down into the glen looked like from the road at the top of the hill. Wild it turned out. 

Then I looked up, and what I saw was some decrepit-looking wooden polls sticking out the ground at various angles with precariously-dangling cables attached to the top, the ones that weren't already down were thrashing about in the wind like a mouse caught by a cat. A strange realisation hit me; If I photographed this scene and time-travelled to show it to someone in the 1950s they would assume it was a contemporary photograph. 

I wrote about this a few weeks ago, about the merits of future-proofing. I thought about that article as I looked at the flimsy wires being tossed around and ripped from their equally feeble moorings. I'd seen these cables down four or five times and I've only lived up that road for about 12 years. I asked myself again if this is how you would do it if you were starting again.

Well, if Scotland's plans for a magical sea wall tell us anything it tells us yes, we would do exactly the same again. Do you know about our magical sea wall? This wall concept is about protecting oil multinationals from rising sea levels (Grangemouth is doomed) and is entirely experimental. I'm calling this magical for a reason.

Let's be realistic; neither ferries nor the dualling of the A9 are technological challenges. Both are bog-standard engineering. If Scotland is incapable of getting the basics right, what chance do you think we have of successfully building a pioneering sea wall? It's 'supposed' to cost half a billion pounds (nice round number plucked out the air there...). You think that is going to happen?

And why are we proposing to build a sea wall? Lots of places people currently live will be under water soon and they're not getting a sea wall. But then they don't have lobbyists like the oil companies. The vision for adaptation in Scotland is that nothing will change because wherever there is a problem, magic will let us keep going like nothing happened.

If Scotland was more a democracy and less a plutocracy we'd be having a different conversation. St Andrews is a crucial historic site of global significance and it too faces a life with much of it under water. If we're building sea walls, we should be protecting irreplaceable cultural landmarks, not here-today, gone-tomorrow (and frankly hideously ugly) industrial sites.

The reality is that in 100 years, what we think of as Grangemouth, and Renfrew and a substantial chunk of Leith will no longer exist. No-one will live there. They will become part of our marine territory at some point over the next 80 years, and potentially much sooner than that. I heard lots of people say 'those daft so-and-sos in California building houses in the middle of a firestorm canyon'.

Aye, well we're still building on flood plains we know won't exist soon. We're building essential energy infrastructure in ways that are extremely vulnerable to extreme weather. We're taking no meaningful steps to ensure food security. We don't have a national supply chain strategy. 

When now-former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said that Britain was wholly reliant on the 'kindness of strangers', he meant for financial investment to save us from a balance of trade deficit. But that's also just a way of saying 'take away foreign supply chains for a few weeks and everyone starts dying'. 

The problem with all of this is the thing that takes us right back to the beginning – our failure to plan to avoid future near misses after surviving each preceding near miss. People who warn about a future different from the present and the risks it poses us are dismissed as fear-mongers and Cassandras. No-one wants to do anything differently, not house builders, not electricity companies, not the oil industry, not the mass retailers, not the politicians.

Britain never does anything different. We seem to be always the last to innovate. We almost literally expect others to do innovation and send us it. Our industrial research and development spend is pitiful and we don't make anything anyway. 

Scotland, once the primary driver of western innovation full stop, doesn't have much to innovate with. We have great universities, even if they really have lost their way. But anyone who has done innovation theory will tell you that it only happens in an innovative ecosystem. When a Scottish university makes a breakthrough it is rapidly exporter abroad.

We are as stuck in our ways as it is possible to be. We have lost our self-confidence and believe that saving the world is for the big boys, and that saving Scotland is something we'll import from the big boys when the time is right. We are passively staring into a future no-one is preparing for.

Let me tell you what resilience looks like. It looks like your essentials are protected from the harm to come from ever-more violent weather. Your essentials are shelter, food, clothing, energy, communications and public services (policing, justice, health and so on). A resilient nation would build strong, windproof housing. It would cease building in any place vulnerable to flooding or other catastrophic weather events, even if those places are highly profitable.

It would have large indoor growing capacity producing a wide range of food reliably, irrespective of rainfall or storms. Our energy system would be weatherproof, which means it wouldn't be hanging off poles in the sky. Our communications could not be cut off completely if a subsea cable is severed, some technology goes down and we lose power.

Clothing is seldom a short-term problem (at a national level) but any circumstance in which we were cut off from import markets for a long period of time would be an issue. We should be moving to domestic organic fibres anyway. Same with construction materials. And our core public services must run and they must keep running no matter what. In truth, at times they're barely running now.

Plus hidden beneath all of this is that waste is very, very anti-resilient. A nation that was serious about being resilient would take repair and maintenance seriously and make sure that Scotland's human capacity for repair and maintenance was fit for purpose.

I could paint you a picture of what all this looks like. I amn't always the world's best sleeper and to help me sleep I invent utopias in my head. One I have been imagining more and more often is a bulletproof utopia where a plunge into subzero for decades or a substantial reduction in Scotland's rainfall or complete severing of international links for a decade does not plunge us into real suffering.

But I'd imagine people would just laugh at me if I describe that. After all, six years ago when I told a food policy expert that food supply chains were very vulnerable and Scotland was hopelessly exposed to the risk of food shortages if there was an emergency, he dismissed me ruthlessly. Three years later, post-pandemic and in the middle of the supply chain crisis, I heard him make the same point I had made.

Unless we get some leadership on this and our debate moves past both 'it'll be alright somehow – pass the duck tape!' and 'we only talk about resilience if big business wants us to', we'll keep skating by, hoping this one isn't the big one. But one day it will be the big one. We're not ready, not nearly.

You need to spend some time with no electricity, not access to hot food, no means of communication of any sort, no transport access and no chance of public services helping you in any way at all to get a sense of how bad it could be. We had roads open again after 24 hours and it was still cold and miserable. Certainly we now have a properly-stocked power cut box with most of what we need to survive.

Scotland does not, and it needs one.