Resilience

Resilience is a concept that ecologists began examining in the 1970s. Despite that relative longevity, it has not become as mainstream as they might have expected. Nevertheless, as with many scientific concepts, resilience has expanded and been adopted more widely. I can hardly read a book or listen to a podcast these days concerning either environmental problems or global relations or governance without coming across it. A World of Possibilities recently produced a terrific podcast about the concept.

Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling is perhaps the leading proponent of this idea. The concept is rather simple: resilience is a measure of how well a natural system can respond to some perturbation. If an ecosystem is resilient, it will bounce back--or successfully--adapt to the disturbance. If an ecosystem is not resilient, it will crash. Predictably, one characteristic of resilient ecosystems are intact ecological relationships. Not surprisingly, ecologists
or natural resource managers hope to limit economic and other human activities from severing those relationships so that ecosystems will survive and adapt to change. Too many disturbances can make environments unable to persist.

Unlike most scientists, Holling pushed his ideas beyond his field. Perhaps more accurately, Holling expanded his ecosystem thinking to complex systems more generally. Thus, any complex system--a corporation, a bureaucracy, a government, a society--would behave in some patterned ways. Consequently, human complex systems also needed to be resilient--or adaptive (see previous GreenHumanist post)--to survive in today's modern, technological, complex world. And that requires building and nurturing relationships, local, regional, national, and global. (For links to some of Holling's most influential scientific and theoretical papers, go here.)

Today, the GreenHumanist finished reading Joshua Cooper Ramo's, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It (Little, Brown, 2009).

It's a fascinating book that uses resilience to discuss global crises (and how to ameliorate them), including banking crashes, terrorism, corporate restructuring, disease outbreaks, and more. Ramo calls for "Deep Security" as a way to combat the often terrifying world we inhabit. (This concept builds on a similar concept by Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.) Building resilience into our institutions, Ramo shows, can allow us to adapt and thrive in the face of coming threats. Moreover, he argues passionately that building "Deep Security" will reduce much the terror in the world. I hope he's correct.

So, add "resilience" to your toolbox for changing the world and creating a culture of sustainability.