RESILIENCE ECOLOGISTS LOOK TO NATURE FOR STRATEGIES TO STAY AFLOAT IN TURBULENT TIMES

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Jul 23 2008 (IPS) - Between floods, droughts, epidemics, food shortages and rising prices, the world seems about to spin off its axis. For all the drama of the past half century, historians and natural scientists tell us that the postwar era has actually been something of an anomaly, a period of relative calm in nature and human events in a world that history has shown to be reliably unpredictable. That hiatus may now be ending. Moreover, they say, we are approaching a threshold moment, a change of phase that will throw every long-held habit and assumption into question. War and revolution are just such moments, but never before have we endured simultaneous transformations of politics, culture and nature, writes Mark Sommer, hosts of A World of Possibilities, an award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program ( www.aworldofpossibilities.com). This transformation is driven in large part by nature’s blowback against human misbehavior. And it is to nature that a new school of ecologists say we must now turn for clues about how to survive and thrive in the turbulent times to come. They invoke the term “resilience” to describe the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing our ability to function. We’re used to seeing resilience in nature and healthy human personalities. But can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic transition?

This transformation is driven in large part by nature’s blowback against human misbehavior. And it is to nature that a new school of ecologists say we must now turn for clues about how to survive and thrive in the turbulent times to come. They invoke the term “resilience” to describe the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing our ability to function. We’re used to seeing resilience in nature and healthy human personalities. But can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic transition?

In April 2008, six hundred ecologists, anthropologists and social scientists gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for Resilience 2008, the first global conference applying the principles and processes of nature’s resilience to human societies. It was the culmination of more than thirty years of quiet, patient work by a small group of innovative thinkers calling themselves the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org). In their book, Resilience Thinking, authors Brian Walker and David Salt lay out the core principles of the concept.

The question they pose is whether we are headed straight for the waterfall or if there might be another way to ride the rapids. For Frances Westley the operative metaphor is not a waterfall but an avalanche. Founder of the program in Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo, Canada, she sees human ingenuity guided by humane values as our best chance of surviving and thriving in a world of turbulent change.

The notion of looking to nature’s resilience to inform responses to dramatic disturbances in human affairs began in the 1970’s when C.S. (Buzz) Holling, a pioneering Canadian-American ecologist, observed the “adaptive cycles” of forest succession. A forest grows from an immense initial profusion of diverse flowers and plants into mature stands of dominant tree species, then to over-maturity, rot and insect infestation, and often catastrophic fires that devastate the forest but release seeds to produce a renewed explosion of diversity.

Just so, said Holling, human societies evolve from a diversity of small and relatively simple social structures into ever greater size and complexity. But their very complexity renders them vulnerable to catastrophic, cascading collapse. We see such cascading failures today in the global economy, public health epidemics, wildfires, electrical power outages and the viruses in the virtual world of the Internet. Mercifully, none has yet become unstoppable, but we seem to be coming ever closer to that edge. In pursuit of efficiency, we now operate on perilously narrow “just in time” margins that fail to factor in the unforeseen. Nature knows better and builds in redundancy.

Since resilience theorists look to nature as their guide, one would think they’d recommend a return to nature. But it’s in the world’s great cities, they say, that the principles of resilience thinking most urgently need to be applied. As millions migrate to urban shantytowns in search of a better life, cities become increasingly untenable. Charles Redman, director of the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, believes cities will be the crucible in which our capacity for adaptive change will be tested in the coming decades. Can we reintroduce nature and community to cities through farmers’ markets, urban gardens, mass transit and non-motorized transport, more affordable housing, walkable neighborhoods and more inviting public spaces? Can we create natural amenities that cost little other than cooperative human effort but make cities both more appealing and more livable?

Unlike conventional “homeland” and “national security” strategies that typically resist change as subversion, resilience thinking makes an ally of uncertainty, finding opportunity where defense doctrine sees only threats. It emerges from self-confidence rather than insecurity. Resilience is both a healthy frame of mind and a practical approach to change. It is even capable of turning resistance into fuel for forward movement, much as a sailboat moves in its intended direction by indirection, tacking at oblique angles into a headwind.

We can’t return to a state of pre-modern isolation and simplicity. That is both unrecoverable and in many ways undesirable. We are immensely enriched by having access at the click of a mouse to an immense range of illuminating knowledge, stories and ideas. But our current social and technological structures are so rigidly hierarchical and dangerously co-dependent that a single commercial airliner slamming into the World Trade Center instantly reduced it to rubble. A more resilient approach to reorganizing social and technological complexity would combine the flexible connections of networks for exchange and mutual aid with a capacity for self-reliance when required.

Resilience is reassuring in the most grounded of ways. We’re an often heedless, hidebound, sometimes self-destructive species. Yet our capacity for self-renewal in the face of life’s vicissitudes demonstrates that in the crunch we’re also buoyant and resourceful. But only if we’re able to glimpse those patches of blue among the storm clouds now gathering on the horizon. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)