How the Word [Resilient] Travels

"The goal of Sustainable Ballard is to help prepare ourselves and our community to sustain and thrive in a post-peak-oil future, by supporting and inspiring each other to build a healthy and joyful life that is environmentally, socially and personally sustainable. To achieve this resiliency, we believe some key ingredients are getting connected with our neighbors to strengthen the social fabric of the community, learning new skills, getting educated on sustainability related matters, building a local food supply and a local economy, and sharing resources."

-About Us section of SustainableBallard.org (emphasis mine)

This is just a hunch, but I think the person who wrote this mission statement was familiar with the 2009 book Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer.  Consider that the author hit all the buzz words from the book and even replaced the conventional but problematic 'economically sustainable' with "personally sustainable."  It was this book that was once recommended to me by an internship advisor as an overview of "what we were working on" and since then I've observed it on the desks of a few of my Berkeley professors. 

As the word Sustainable loses its significance due to popularity, Resilient is taking its place as a radical term, and books such as Newman's (et al) are helping it along. Resilient is a call to action that directly responds to fear about our rapidly deteriorating environment and the possibility of human extinction. Even though it was introduced to urban theory in the 70s, it seems to be picking up steam now.  For instance, the "World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change" changed its name to the "Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation" in 2012 and goes by the nickname "Resilient Cities Series."  Coincidence?

To me, the proof that the term Resilient is currently traveling through the common consciousness is that the Wikipedia page 

Resilience (ecology)

has a subsection on

Resilience and sustainable development

that is very well written and ripe to be expanded to its own article. I'll refrain from writing myself it and watch to see how soon it is.