Adaptive Cycles and Bottom-Up Change

"Understanding global problems through local experience: how experiential leaning teaches resilience." Julia Nerbonne, 9 Dec 2009.

As mentioned in the previous post, I learned about adaptive cycles from Nerbonne’s presentation. Nerbonne is the Environmental Sustainability program director at HECUA (Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs). What I took away from her talk was less what the title suggested and more like this headline she showed from Grist.org: "Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair."

Why don’t US citizens care about environmental issues as strongly as we did about, say, civil rights? We discussed a number of issues: it’s too big to tackle, we don’t experience negative feedback (e.g., subsidies hide true effects), some people are too poor to care, dispassionate scientists are telling the story, etc.

Nerbonne added another point: The cognitive dissonance is too great. It is psychologically challenging to understand the effects of a nation’s driving or meat-eating habits and continue to drive or eat meat. So we choose not to think about it or to downplay its importance.

Yet if I understand correctly, part of Nerbonne’s job is about trying to get people into that challenging state. And another part is to give hope to those challenged people that the issues can be resolved, that the world can be put back on track, even if your city doesn’t currently have public transportation and nobody you know is a vegetarian.

Here’s where adaptive cycles come in again, the framework that is compelling to me because it is broadly applicable and gives me hope in bottom-up change. It’s not just for analyzing ecosystems. You can analyze your life, too. For example, I experienced rapid growth two years ago when I consumed all sort of vegetarian and nutrition literature. I entered the conservation stage when I began taking classes at the U. I reached the release point when the reductionist view of nutrition threw me into a tailspin. And now here I am, reorganizing myself, refocusing my resources.

The adaptive cycle is stackable, too. Individuals’ releases have an effect on their immediate communities. In fact, my transfer to the U was prompted by a classmate’s transfer. And I like to think that some of my excited conversations at family events have had an effect. Who knows what will nudge someone to their release point.

Extend this vertically. Small communities nudge a city to release. States nudge the federal government. So for all the people that are frustrated that change is not coming from the top, find hope in bottom-up change. Struggle through your reorganization, educate yourself, and keep your eye on the prize.

Michelle Obama and local students in the White House kitchen garden.

Images from idrc.ca and picapp.com

Hold your breath for the release

Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, by Brian Walker and David Salt. Island Press, 2006.

Unlike the other books I’ve mentioned, Resilience Thinking was not a random selection. I attended a presentation by Julia Nerbonne at the U on how experiential learning teaches resilience. Nerbonne presented the idea of adaptive cycles, taken from Walker and Salt. I found the idea so compelling that I hunted down the book.

This is the type of nonfiction I appreciate. David Salt is a science writer and Brian Walker is a scientist, so the big, important ideas are presented clearly but without the appeal-to-the masses style that so often irritates me. Chapters about concepts are followed by illustrative case studies. Frameworks for approaching social-ecological issues are translated into policy recommendations. I love the ideas-to-details beat.

Three key ideas are resilience, thresholds, and adaptive cycles. Walker and Salt define resilience as a system’s capacity to absorb disturbances without a regime shift. A disturbance could be fire, drought, flood, pests, etc. A regime is a particular stable state of existence. For example, the Everglades used to be a sawgrass regime. But in response to rising levels of phosphorus, it has shifted to a cattails regime.

A threshold in resilience thinking is a dead end, the critical level of a key variable, like the nitrogen content of soil. Once the level is surpassed, the entire system behaves in a different way, which is usually unpleasant and difficult to reverse. The closer a system is to a threshold, the less resilient it is.

Figure credit: Resilience Science.

And now for the concept that Nerbonne presented that I found so compelling: adaptive cycles. Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, is responsible for the original idea, and Gunderson and Holling have since taken it up. An adaptive cycle is a metaphor to describe change in an ecological system, but it can just as easily be applied to individuals, businesses, and sovereign nations. The cycle has four phases:

1. Rapid growth
2. Conservation
3. Release
4. Reorganization

Briefly, during rapid growth, a species or people “exploit new opportunities and available resources” (76). Think of weeds and dot com companies. During conservation, energy is stored and materials accumulate. Think of tall trees and bandwidth. Also, diversity can be sacrificed for efficiency and connectedness increases. Next is the release phase—the system comes undone. Bound up resources are released, structure breaks down. Think of a forest fire or the dot com bubble burst. Finally comes reorganization. From the chaos of release, options open up. Invention and experimentation attempt to bring order back to the system. Think of all the little plants that can now see the sun or entrepreneurs who turn their hand to something else.

Those are the biggies. Two other concepts that I will explore further: adaptive cycles and bottom-up change and the efficiency trap and the dairy industry.

Updated April 2015.

A pinch of optimism

Recipe for America: Why our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Jill Richardson. Ig Publishing, 2009.

Like Coming Home to Eat, Recipe for America is book that popped up in a search for something to read. I had never heard of it or Jill Richardson before, though the latter’s blog, La Vida Locavore, did ring a bell.

The book is a succinct summary of the major issues facing the U.S. food system. I appreciated Richardson’s attempt to pull together and lay out the social, political, and environmental issues that plague our food system. Out of necessity, she couldn’t go very deeply into any one of them. Most of the points Richardson raised were already familiar to me, so I was able to detect occasional bias or extra emotion.

Richardson mentioned a handful of things that I hadn’t heard before. She spent some time working at a Whole Food bakery, and could describe how the bread slicer, certain spoons and pitchers, and a separate sink were dedicated for organic products, because “accidentally mixing [a customer’s] organic latte with a few drops of conventional dish water would be a violation of trust (and the law)” (68). That’s dedication! On paper, at least. In practice, the employees must actually follow the conventions and stipulations for Whole Food's dedication to be actualized. Richardson did. Other employees didn’t necessarily.

Another example that I was unfamiliar with was the cooperative CSA. Richardson visited a cooperative of several Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Posted by Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative on Thursday, April 9, 2015

Each farm grows several crops rather than all of them to protect against coordination problems with crop variety and quantity. The cooperative model allows farmers to share costs, time, and split up marketing and financial management responsibilities. The model also softens the blow of natural disasters and poor crops that affect one farm. Of course, if the farms are located near one another, a drought in the region could affect them all equally.

I found the last chapter on the Farm Bill to be the most interesting. I don’t know very much about this piece of legislation except that it’s huge and passed about once every five years. Richardson’s brief treatment made me want to learn more.

The Appendix, "How to Cook Up a Recipe," for America is also interesting. It lists five ways to get involved and resources to do it.

1. Sign up to receive action alerts
2. Follow issues on blogs
3. Track legislation
4. Watch congressional hearings
5. Write letters to the editor.

I looked up all of the blogs and added them to my Google Reader. But I haven’t yet looked up the organizations she recommends:

• Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org)
• Food and Water Watch (foodandwaterwatch.org)
• Consumers Union (consumersunion.org)
• Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org)
• The Cornucopia Institute (cornucopia.org)
• Food Democracy Now (fooddemocracynow.org)

Recipe for America pushes me in two directions: to get more involved in changing the food system and to work for a publishing company, copyediting. (This book had several baffling typos, including “stsy” instead of “stay” and random switching between rbGH and rBGH.) I’d be cool with either route.