Great program. I've been looking for people taking this approach to responding to unexpected events.

Please forward this note to the FEMA teams your report covers. Someone needs to teach this emergency planning "practice for improvisation" technique to a whole army of economists and investment advisers who give businesses advice on sustainable business planning.

I've studied this as a systems ecologist for close to 40 years. The problem with the economies continuing to deplete their non-renewable resources at accelerating rates is not hypothetical. It's life threatening. It's being done by businesses trying to sustain their profitability.

People have spent the last 40 years looking far and wide for alternative sources of resources we could switch to. For a great many critical resources now under pressure no substitutes were. Today their prices are already starting to irreversibly escalate due to increasing demand causing their increasing scarcity.

So it's quite likely that the long predicted downsizing of the world economy that would naturally cause has already begun, or will begin in the relatively near foreseeable future. We seem to be living out the "business as usual" assumptions of the models that have been predicting severe downsizing, and seeing their predictions being confirmed by events.

The big hazard is that the economy may not successfully downsize, and won't be able to evolve in reverse. For example, they might not be able to maintain "economies of scale" at a smaller scale, and essential commodities and technologies might become unprofitable and unsustainable. It's one of many ways a breakdown in the economy's basic self-reproduction process could occur. Avoiding such dilemmas may depend on people being able to "think on their feet", to make emergency responses successful.

From a systems ecology view a cascade of contractions could occur from which the economy would not recover, for lack of the cheap resources we've already consumed. That would make it impossible for us to rebuild a complex society using low technology.

see:
-2012 World Commodities price index - http://synapse9.com/issues/images/Commodities2012Muni.jpg from http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/

-A real "world sustainability report" for our present moment - http://www.synapse9.com/pub/ASustInvestMoment-PH.pdf

-Comparing recent data with the 1972 "business as usual" model published in The Limits to Growth - http://dieoff.org/Yourhere.gif

- www.synapse9.com/signals

America as a whole is neither prepared nor ready for any catastrophe that may come our way, man made or otherwise! I believe that Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, Lee, and 9/11/2001 have proven that! For each of those incidents, America has been caught with their preverbial pants down on all points! And recovery efforts were severely lacking in all efforts, except maybe the twin towers and 9/11.

Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Lee, have definitely left very visible scars on this country's abilities to respond to emergencies. When the entire Coastal Area of the South was effected by Hurricane Katrina, the one area that got all of the notoriety was the crooked city of New Orleans and their Nineth Ward! Did anyone even try to help the most devestated area where the most damage really was? The Gulf Coast of Mississippi? No! You never saw any pictures of Waveland and Bay St. Louis (before or after) what they looked like before the storm, and what was left after the 30 foot storm surge washed those two towns away, along with most of the rest of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Cities, Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, Edgewater Beach, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, and Gautier. What happened there?

Then there was Tropical Storm Irene and Lee that struck the Eastern Seaboard in 2011. Parts of interior New York State, are still trying to recover from those storms, where people have lost everything! Homes, belongings, livestock, crops, and their entire livlihoods due to the flooding that came with the rains and high winds. Again, FEMA has fallen down on their job! Sure they brought in trailers for people to live in until they could rebuild their homes, but then told them they could not set their trailers on their land because they lived in a flood plain! Flood Plain! The last flood that was measurable in that area was in 1996, and that was no where near as devestating as was experienced with Irene and Lee!

So what do you think?