The World Wide Panorama

Introduction

The World Wide Panorama event of the first quarter of 2025 is a collection of panoramas with the common theme of “Resilience"

Theme Essay: Resilience

The essay conveys the team’s idea of the event. It is usually published together with the Theme announcement and offers a starting point for the contributing photographers.

Resilience

by Erik Krause and Carsten Rees

When this topic won the election, I was initially shocked at its difficulty. But on closer inspection, I realized the potential, as it is undoubtedly an important issue of our time.

The origin of the term goes back to the 15th century, where it was used in a legal context, referring to contract termination and restoration of the original legal state. Later it described the ability of a system to withstand certain disturbances, to adapt and recover from adversity.

Resilience is used in numerous areas, such as ecology, society, politics, urban systems, technology, material science, IT, but also psychology, medicine, health and art, to name but a few. You can find out more on wikipedia.

Especially in today's world, resilience to climate change and politics has become enormously important. How resilient is democracy to anti-democratic tendencies, how resilient is agriculture, ecology, society to climate change? But also, how resilient are we as humans to the bad news we suffer every day. Can we maintain our optimism?

One further question comes to mind: How resilient is mother earth, how resilient is nature against all the atrocities humankind is committing against them? Regarding all the irrationability and stupidity of humankind, this resilience might be our strongest hope.

How resilient are projects like the WWP to changes, in this case, in the panoramic community? In answer to the last question: you, the contributors to this wonderful project, are the key. Your creativity is required to submit many beautiful panoramas and to encourage others to join in. This project was founded more than 20 years ago. One of the fathers of this project – Don Bain – has started it with some resilience in its genes. And so this project was resilient to some disturbances during the last 20 years and with your help it will survive in the future. (Memo to myself: How about “Hope” as the next theme?)

The panorama for the banner for “Resilience” is a WWP panorama by Don Bain – taken in October 2008 – “Dead for a Thousand Years”.