Tag Archives: resilience

Who doesn’t like “resilience”? The rich and powerful. Duh.

Posted on May 24, 2014 by dwighttowers

“Even as the ACCCRN attempted to expand and perpetuate actor-networks, it came across a countervailing force in the form of ‘patron-client networks’ that were already in operation in these policy settings. This is a network within which a powerful actor … Continue reading →

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Book review: Permaculture by David Holmgren

Posted on November 3, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

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Typology of resilience

Posted on September 18, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

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Book Review: What Happened to the Corbetts

Posted on August 24, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

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Risk Analysis? It’s not at your beck and call…

Posted on August 3, 2011 by dwighttowers

“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 →

Posted in apocalypse, climate | Tagged , | 1 Comment

What the Vuca’s going on?

Posted on July 31, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

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Those pesky “cascading ecological crises”

Posted on July 22, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

Posted in apocalypse, competence, natural world, politics, science, technoscience | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Resilience and the golden goose-icide

Posted on May 30, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

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Resilience, football teams and fluctations

Posted on May 29, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 , , , | 3 Comments

WW2 again, panarchy and the Tongass National Forest

Posted on May 18, 2011 by dwighttowers

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 →

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