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Tag Archives: resilience
Book review: Permaculture by David Holmgren
What would you expect of one of the co-founders of the concept of Permaculture? Would you expect him to write clearly, weaving examples from both the natural and human worlds (as if the two were separate!) to support his arguments? … Continue reading
Posted in activism, apocalypse, book review
Tagged adaptive capacity, adaptive leadership, David Holmgren, Permaculture, resilience
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Typology of resilience
from the excellent Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for decolonisation Deborah Bird Rose UNSW Press 2004 In considering resilience we need to make a crucial set of distinctions between types of human action: anti-resilience, engineered resilience, and facilitated resilience. … Continue reading
Book Review: What Happened to the Corbetts
This book, which has been mentioned in some ‘resilience’ circles as a ‘worth-reading’, is most definitely a book of two halves. Written by Nevil Shute in 1938, and about the impacts of aerial bombardment on an English city, it opens … Continue reading
Risk Analysis? It’s not at your beck and call…
“From the political perspective risk assessment becomes a highly political process of claiming which percentage is associated with which risk, privileging specified over general resilience. The key question we felt should not be what is the proportional risk associated with … Continue reading
What the Vuca’s going on?
I thought I was up to date on my milacs (sorry, “military acronyms”) like SMEAC, OODA, BOHICA, but I had not heard of “VUCA“. VUCA is an acronym used to describe or reflect on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity … Continue reading
Those pesky “cascading ecological crises”
Have just read a really interesting article from the June 2011 issue of the journal “Public Administration.” It’s called Institutional and Political Leadership Dimensions of Cascading Ecological Crises, and it’s by a bunch of scientists/policy wonks at the Stockholm Resilience … Continue reading
Resilience and the golden goose-icide
Don’t over-exploit limited and slow-growing natural resources. Or There Will Be Trouble… (our fairy tales used to tell us this). Here’s a quote from William Gibson’s speculative fiction novel “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” In the passage below the existence of State-sanctioned … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, competence, natural world
Tagged Carl Folke, Fikret Berkes, greed, resilience, stupidity
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Resilience, football teams and fluctations
I’m reading a lot on resilience and the “management” of ecological services. One point that comes up time and again is that efforts to control ‘outputs’ of one particular thing will be successful in the short-term, but then require bigger … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, natural world
Tagged analogies, ecosystems, football teams, resilience
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WW2 again, panarchy and the Tongass National Forest
In a recent(ish) post called the Death of Cod I mused on the changes wrought by World War Two. Does anyone know of a single book that summarises the technological shifts from ’39 to ’45 (jet engines, mass production, atomic … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, death, economics, natural world, politics, science, technoscience
Tagged adaptive cycles, panarchy, resilience
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Adaptive Governance – who? how?
We need, it seems, to teach elephants to tapdance “Adaptive governance is a particular form of governance that emphasizes the capacity to adapt to changing relationships between society and ecosystems in ways that sustain ecosystem services. Characteristics of adaptive governance … Continue reading
Posted in activism, climate, competence
Tagged adaptive governance, elephan, resilience
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