Resilience Science – This changes everything

On Resilience  

Resilience science is the latest, and greatest in telling us how the social-ecological system (humans in nature) works, and how humans need to operate to be consistent with the laws of natural systems.  There is an urgency since our science shows ecosystems are so stressed, they are in the process of exceeding their limits and flipping, system by system, into new arrangements that are not particularly helpful, attractive, beneficial, profitable, or even life-sustaining for the humans that depend on them. For example, lakes that once provided clean drinking water now fill with toxic blue-green algae.  

A few challenging fundamental assumptions of resilience science include: systems are interdependent and function at several connected levels; complex systems can’t be fully predicted (uncertainty); systems are constantly undergoing change and adaptation rather than staying in one constant stable state; systems have limits or thresholds that when exceeded by stressors (think pollution, hyper-extraction of resources, and climate disruption) can cause the system to rapidly flip into a completely new arrangement. 

Building community resilience in the face of climate change requires more than just tweaking around the edges; it requires a completely different way to understand the human-nature-other human relationship, it will require a pretty significant change in our stories/culture/institutions and will require change in human behavior, especially in the land-ocean interactions of coastal communities where many impacts of climate change are unfolding first with the greatest impacts.   

 To live consistently with what we now know from resilience science means we will need to reimagine what it means to be human, what it means to be a human society/civilization living within ecosystems and a planetary biosphere with clear limits, and accepting that humans have cognitive, behavioral, institutional and societal limitations that severely limit our attempts to “control” or manage ever-changing nature.