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.