The Adapters: Indigenous architecture provides some important lessons in building with nature rather than against it.

STILT HOUSES Chong Khneas, Cambodia. Nearly all traditional houses in Cambodia are built on stilts, so that they can adapt to the extreme difference in water levels between the dry and rainy seasons. Although they tend to vary according to region and wealth, common building materials include bamboo, straw, tile, and slate. dataichi - Simon Dubreull/Getty Images

Resilience is everywhere. Do we see it? Or do we conceal this essential component of our survival in clever engineering and hidden dynamics out of some cultural embarrassment? Contemporary features of structural resilience are known to builders, but must be taken on faith by citizens who find themselves more concerned with the fresh failures enabled by our digital age. We learn of the unanticipated vulnerability of urban residents who find themselves as alone and imperiled by a wireless network outage as they once were by fire and smoke.

The oldest human structures carry their message of resilience on the outside. Outward fragility guarantees flexibility in the face of the elements. Ease of construction ensures a quicker rebuilding and recovery. The diminutive scale contains the risk at the low end of potential casualties while always retaining the possibility of escape. These are structures built not to a code based on probabilities but dedicated to the certainty that while our earth delivers forces that cannot be withstood, it also always provides us with higher ground. Tides have lines, fires burn themselves out, and the ground eventually stops shaking.

We have serious challenges to our well-developed human resilience in a seven-billion-person world that finds itself concentrated in cities close to the water’s edge. It may require enormous energy and investment to retool our collective sense of resilience, to scale our expectations, and to be more ready than ever in human history to embrace sudden new realities and alternatives. But if we look carefully at the record of human success, it is our adaptations that distinguish us more than our loyalty to ancient traditions and inflexible values. The greatest monuments are the ones that vanished, succumbing to the narrative of erosion and change while humanity moved humbly forward. Despite the challenges of our era and the potentially grim mathematics of changes perhaps already in the cards, resilience, it can be said, is alive and well. Mostly, it is alive.

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