Was looking for something to read before going to bed last night. Brian Walker and David Salt’s 2006 Resilience thinking: Sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world, which has been sitting for several months on my shelves, caught my eye and said, “Read me.”
The topic of the book is on the cover, “How can landscapes and communities absorb disturbance and maintain function?” Or, in other works, how can they stay resilient enough to survive and prosper in a changing and chancy world? The big idea announced in the introduction is that planning for increased efficiency leads inevitably to heightened vulnerability to catastrophic failure. Monocropping, agriculture dependent on a single crop, is a classic example. Yes, it may boost yields in the short term; but if the narrow zone of climatic and other conditions on which the single crop or its value depends suddenly changes, the farm is down the tube.
This is, of course, a classic argument for maintaining diversity, in gene-pools, languages, skill sets, all sorts of things. I think of it more selfishly, in terms of the capabilities that I, my wife, my daughter, her husband, and our grandkids will need to survive and prosper in the increasingly crazy world in which we live. These days we are all likely to wind up with what management gurus call “portfolio careers,” building experience in several different domains and maintaining the flexibility that will keep us resilient. But that may not be compatible with other ambitions, achieving the breakthrough performance as artist, entrepreneur, scientist or statesman that seems to require the holy madness of total dedication, something I chide myself that I never had.
reposted from: http://deadvoles.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/resilience-thinking/
"Resilience Thinking is an essential guidebook to a powerful new way of understanding our world-and of living resiliently within it-developed in recent decades by an international team of ecologists. With five clear and compelling case studies drawn from regions as diverse as Florida, Sweden, and Australia, this book shows how all highly adaptive systems-from ecologies to economies-go through regular cycles of growth, reorganization, and renewal and how our failures to understand the basic principles of resilience have often led to disaster. Resilience Thinking gives us the conceptual tools to help us cope with the bewildering surprises and challenges of our new century." (Thomas Homer-Dixon professor of political science, University of Toronto )
"Resilience Thinking is an impressive and highly successful effort to explain complex ecological and social interactions and changes in a unified framework and in language accessible to a wide audience. This book should stimulate extensive discussions on these critical issues and innovative ways to approach them." (Harold Mooney Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University )
"Resilience Thinking is an impressive and highly successful effort to explain complex ecological and social interactions and changes in a unified framework and in language accessible to a wide audience. This book should stimulate extensive discussions on these critical issues and innovative ways to approach them." (Harold Mooney Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University 20070301)
