resilience – Four Cultures

What comes after Sustainability? Resilience?

According to Rob Hopkins of the Transition Movement, and following David Holmgren, the co-creator of the permaculture concept, sustainability is not enough and we need to move beyond it. But what comes after sustainability? The answer, it seems, is: resilience.

How successful has the paradigm of sustainability been at achieving its aims? It makes an interesting thought experiment to try to assess what your corner of the world would be like today were it not for all the many initiatives that have taken place over the last twenty or so years under the rubric of ‘sustainability’ and its older sibling ‘sustainable development’.

In spite of some clear differences springing to mind (I’m thinking especially of waste recycling, and maybe the end of lead in motor fuel, and some notable biodiversity/conservation gains to set against all the losses – in fact this deserves an article in its own right…), on the whole it surely wouldn’t be all that different, would it?

Travelling everywhere by car unless a plane will get you there quicker? Check!
Buying huge amounts of stuff then throwing it away? Check!

So much of what we do now, we were going to do anyway, and the concept of sustainability has not been a particularly effective tool at getting us to change direction, or even to slow down.

But is there any alternative? Here is a quote from a relevant article:

‘”Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” – putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.’

What are the key differences between sustainability and resilience?

Whereas sustainability implies a ‘steady state’ conception of the world, living within our means indefinitely, resilience recognises dynamism and volatility. Change, for resilience science, is of the essence. Resilience is not about halting change, but about maintaining those things that really matter to us in the midst of great change.
Sustainability has ostensibly reasonable – but in practice vastly ambitious – aims ‘to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ and it is unclear that this is achievable at any scale on which it has been attempted. In contrast, resilience has more modest aims and can be defined as ‘the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain its functions and controls, and may be measured by the magnitude of disturbance the system can tolerate and still persist’ (Wallington, Hobbes and Moore, 200:4)
Sustainability has a somewhat integrated concept of the way the world works. The three pillars of sustainable development are widely understood to be the social, the ecological and the economic and it is the interactions between these that drive the system. Without denying this, resilience is more integrated because it sees, and tries to study, only one system, the social-ecological, which operates at many different levels of scale so that it makes sense to conceptualise ‘social-ecological systems’. However it does not make sense to split off the social from the ecological. This interaction is the sine qua non of the resilience approach.
From the outset, sustainability was a social-political concept in search of scientific confirmation. It has achieved confirmation spectacularly successfully with the scientific models of anthropogenic climate change, ‘the biggest example of market failure in history’, as Nicholas Stern put it. In contrast, resilience is a scientific approach, specifically an ecological approach, based on the work of ecologists such as Buzz Holling and Lance Gunderson, in search of social-political applications. These distinctions are of course hardly cast in stone, since no science is ‘value neutral’ and ecology certainly isn’t. But resilience arguably carries greater scientific precision that sustainability.
There is a key difference of focus – broad versus narrow – between the two concepts. If you want to improve sustainability there is an almost endless list of actions you could carry out. All of them could be said to make the world more sustainable (since ‘social’, ecological’ and ‘economic’ covers just about anything). Resilience is more narrow. It proposes that a sustainable social-ecological system is simply one that is more resilient rather than less resilient. So by focusing on the resilience of system components rather than other features, the long list of actions that could take priority is somewhat reduced.

There are differences between sustainability and resilience, but is it really as simple as seeing the one replaced by the other? Bossel (1998) sees resilience as only one important aspect of sustainable ecosystems.

I can’t help thinking that the replacement of one worthy concept by another equally worthy concept is a distraction from the main event, which is ongoing, accelerating destruction in the name of progress or of profit. To take just one example of many, I would like to live in a world where koalas weren’t threatened with extinction, but even such a modest aspiration is made to appear unreasonably ambitious. I don’t think either sustainability or resilience will get me there.

What would it be called, then, this deep desire to live with other species without eliminating them? Living within our means? Not exactly. I think part of the problem is that my culture doesn’t really even have the words, much less the possibility of co-habitation in its repertoire.

Sustainability. Resilience.

We’re clutching at straws.

More on resilience:

A Month of Resilience

The feedback loop as a symbol for life in the 21st Century

self-organisation is a high-level property that emerges from the underlying network, not a feature of any of the individual components.

This has interesting consequences. Where any part of the mechanism is sensitive to the environment, the whole self-organising loop can be too.

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-the-symbol-of-life-is-a-loop-not-a-helix/

Here’s an example from the Resilience Alliance – the adaptive cycle – that maps nicely onto the four cultures of cultural theory:

See also: redundancy and resilience

Detroit: a city fit for superheroes?

Chatting with my young son this evening it occured to us that superheroes require certain types of cities, certain kinds of urban form, in order to thrive. Spiderman needs tall buildings closely packed in order to leap between them. The Hulk needs impressive edifices to knock down. Only certain types of urban form are fit for superheroes.

There’s a new documentary about the rise and fall and return of Detroit. The director of Requiem for Detroit? , Julien Temple, was fascinated by the idea that Detroit was at the leading edge of American urban for many years, leading the rest of America into the future. Now Detroit is doing it again, showing us what the first post-American city looks like.

Will it be a city fit for humans?

Image Credits: Daquella manera/Flickr; laughlin/Flickr; walid.hassanein/Flickr

Climate, Cultural Theory and the Myths of Nature

A nice article by Howard Silverman of People & Place on the links between climate change, cultural theory and the myths of nature identified by the Resilience Alliance.

http://bit.ly/959Dmp

Fresh Thinking on Systemic Risk

Fresh thinking on systemic risk:

Levin and Sugihara on the ecology of finance

George Sugihara at the Resilience Alliance

complex systems: ecology for bankers

New dimensions for understanding systemic risk

extending non-linear analysis to short ecological time series

Image credit: Flickr/Katz2110

How to deviate from climate change destruction – the case of the Great Barrier Reef

A confession: I visited the Great Barrier Reef a couple of years ago and it was the most stunning experience of my life. The beauty, intricacy, diversity, were amazing. The experience of immersion in this underwater world was and is vivid – literally alive. But I felt profoundly uneasy participating iin the industrial system that got me there – plane flight, chain hotel, large, fast motor boat. In order to appreciate the beauty of what we’re destroying we need to destroy it a little bit more, it seems.
Environmental writer Chris Turner addresses this dilemma head on in a marvellous piece for Canada’s Walrus Magazine, The Age of Breathing Underwater.

Justice cannot be done to the piece here – you need to read it for yourself. He focuses on the work of Australian coral expert Dr Charlie Veron, author of A Reef in Time, who, as Turner tells it, fights to save the Reef, even as he affirms it cannot now be saved. Ocean acidification has gone too far already. What lies in the human heart on the far side of hope is the subject, then, of Turner’s article.
If you’ve read more than one post on this website you’ll be expecting an anaylsis of the social structures that condition such thinking in terms of a model of society called Grid-Group Cultural theory. It’s true there is ample scope for this. For example, when Veron likens ocean acidification to a loaded gun with ‘a hair trigger and devastating firepower’, he’s indulging in classic Egalitarian-speak which ought to call into question his construction of the facts (by etymology if not by modern definition facts are always constructions: facere = to make). This is not at all to deny that acidification is taking place, but to scrutinise the human meanings we assign to it. But this time I want to do something a little different. This time I want to write in terms of deviance Continue reading How to deviate from climate change destruction – the case of the Great Barrier Reef

Normal service is about to be resumed

Thanks for staying put while my computer had a very big melt down, while I reset my system with Ubuntu, and while floods and storms meant my broadband connection was down for several days. It’s enough to make me embarrassed to be mentioning the phrase ‘resilient systems’. But fear not, Fourcultures is back online and what passes for normal service will continue very soon….

On the relationship between behaviour and context in Cultural Theory

In reply to Matthew Taylor’s question over at his RSA blog:

“how can it be true both that there are some social environments which encourage particular attitudes and behaviours (which could be said broadly to fit an egalitarian outlook) while, at the same time, in relation to any specific problem or decision, a set of conflicting responses (of which egalitarianism is only one) will emerge?”

1) Scale is crucial. Just as there isn’t a single rationality but four, neither is there a single scale. At one scale of operation, one of the four cultures may be dominant, and may seem to be a good fit with the landscape, but at other scales other cultural biases may be a better fit. See the work of ecologist Buzz Holling on this.

2) Similarly, time is also crucial. The social-ecological model of Holling and others in the Resilience Alliance suggests that ecological succession has a social counterpart. What appears optimal at one moment will become less optimal as time changes the environment, so that alternative problems arise, leading to alternative solutions and alternative institutions.

3) The ability to defect is also crucial. I have been quite taken with a cellular automata problem called the density classification problem. In short this seems to suggest that even in simple mechanistic systems, total knowledge is impossible. This means there is always room for the dominant answers to be wrong and for defectors from the main view to get it more nearly correct. Given that a) social-ecological systems are far more complex than cellular automata and b) evolution has fine-tuned human responses to problem solving, it seems possible that human society is an environment which rewards a dominant viewpoint without punishing too severely a minority of dissidents.

A Month of Resilience

This month Four Cultures is going to be considering Resilience and its connection with Grid-group Cultural Theory.

By Resilience I mean the cross-disciplinary scientific approach inspired by the work of Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling, and promoted in a number of places, especially through the Resilience Alliance and through the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

There’s a video of him from his award of the Volvo Environment Prize in November 2008.

What the world needs now is… efficiency plus resilience

Economist Bernard Lietaer has an interesting paper on handling the current financial crisis. It’s based on the interplay between efficiency and resilience.

http://www.lietaer.com/images/White_Paper_on_Systemic_Bank_Crises_December.pdf

Lietaer’s main point is that in going all out for efficiency, economic managers have failed to pay attention to the importance of resilience, which requires such seemingly ‘inefficient’ features such as redundancy.

He is also concerned with the very idea of a general equilibrium theory in economics, when financial systems are, for him, better seen as being in dynamic disequilibrium.

As Lietaer notes,

“The misclassification of economics as a system in equilibrium is brilliantly explained in chapters 2 and 3 of Beinhocker, Eric The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 2006)” (Lietaer 2008:15)

Competely independently of this, but on a related topic, the Association of American Geographers has a session at its Annual conference in March entitled:

From Growth to Resilience – Changing Perspectives on Regional Development.