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.

Coming Home to Eat

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Ph.D. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002)

I do the bulk of my reading on the bus. I have a half-hour commute to school, which often translates to an hour of dedicated reading time per day. Sometimes when I don’t have something to read, I get anxious.

Coming Home to Eat is a result of that anxiety. I was searching through McGrath Library’s collection at the U of M, looking for something relevant to keep me going while I waited politely for my requested library books to show up. Gary Paul Nabhan’s book describing his year-long experiment in eating locally and related events during that year was an unexpected gem.

If this sounds like a knockoff of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, be assured that Coming Home to Eat came first. Also, it is undeniably different. There’s no reason to not read them back-to-back. If you do, you are in for 600+ pages of delicious prose.

Now, Nabhan is an bone fide ecologist and ethnobotanist, to be sure, but he is also a “rural lifeways folklorist,” and his list of credits includes a book of poetry. It shows. Here’s a passage wherein he describes eating freshly foraged greens.

Quelite. Photo credit: juanvc.

Tonight I entered quelite heaven, enjoying the freshest greens I could imagine. I grilled some scallions and poblano chiles, then added a mound of hand washed greens to the saucepan. … Their flavors were so fresh, so buzzed with their recent photosynthetic surge that my meal sizzled with sunshine. (142)

Coming Home to Eat is also fascinating because of the subject. If you raised an eyebrow at Barbara Kingsolver’s quest to eat locally in Virginia, raise two at Nabhan’s quest to eat within 250 miles of his home in desert-y southern Arizona.

Many of the foods he eats are totally unfamiliar to me—thank goodness for Hannah Hinchman’s pen and ink illustrations—mesquite tortillas and roasted mescal, dried tepary beans and cholla cactus buds.

And that’s one of the two things I like about this book. Nabhan introduced me to the food resources of the southwestern deserts, something I know nothing about, and something I don't necessarily need know about. I live in Minnesota, I want to eat things grown in Midwestern soil.

I'm appropriately astonished at the variety that desert soil produces and heartened that some people still know how to find and prepare it. What I can take inspiration from is Nabhan's creation of access points to alternate food resources, his purchases of mesquite tortillas from Esperanza and duck eggs from Ms. Soto.

I was mightily refreshed by the narrative style of Coming Home to Eat. I read a lot of nonfiction nowadays and there's often a stark difference between these nonfiction texts and novels. Nabhan blurred the line between these two forms, including touches like dialogues with his sweetheart Laurie, mulling over the death of his stepfather, and describing a meeting with the EPA over Bt corn. Illustrative facts and figures, important names and dates are all there, as is a comprehensive index.

The blend of professional and personal, presented with polished prose stirs a deeper, more holistic reaction to the message I've heard so many times.

Updated April 2015.