expansions on the previous sampler and recommended reading pages…

Resilience is… the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organise and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning). It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks. As resilience declines the magnitude of a shock from which it cannot recover gets smaller and smaller. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility. Growth and efficiency alone can often lead ecological systems, businesses and societies into fragile rigidities, exposing them to turbulent transformation. Learning, recovery and flexibility open eyes to novelty and new worlds of opportunity. key concepts of resilience http://www.resalliance.org/564.php

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity. A key feature of complex adaptive systems is that they can settle into a number of different equilibria. A lake, for example, will stabilize in either an oxygen-rich, clear state or algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Historically, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change that way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of tipping points. It looks at gradual stresses, such as climate change, as well as chance events—things like storms, fires, even stock market crashes—that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of resilience. The concept of resilience upends old ideas about “sustainability”: Instead of embracing stasis, resilience emphasizes volatility, flexibility, and de-centralization. Change, from a resilience perspective, has the potential to create opportunity for development, novelty, and innovation. As Holling himself once put it, there is “no sacred balance” in nature. “That is a very dangerous idea.” Over the past decade, resilience science has expanded beyond the founding group of ecologists to include economists, political scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and archaeologists. And they have made remarkable progress in studying how habitats—including coral reefs, lakes, wetlands, forests, and irrigation systems, among others—absorb disturbance while continuing to function. New Orleans, however, presents an interesting example to resilience scientists. If a lake can shift from clear to murky, could a city shift to a dramatically different stable state too? If biodiversity in ecosystems makes them resilient to disturbance, could diversity in urban systems serve a similar purpose? “Cities aren’t dominated by nature to the same extent as things like lakes and wetlands and coral reefs,” says Australian ecologist Brian Walker, “But we wondered, could we look at them in the same way?” … In short, cities are the quintessential complex adaptive system. Which makes them, in many ways, the perfect place to explore resilience. “As humans, we should try to understand how to manage systems in order to avoid passing thresholds,” says Elmqvist [lead researcher of the “Urban Network”]. But this is especially difficult in urban contexts, which have already been so transformed by humans that they’ve breached most of the thresholds ecologists are familiar with. When great expanses of concrete and steel now exist where trees and streams once did, new tipping points must be defined for places that are, as Elmqvist puts it, “already tipped.”

A city’s lifeblood is a continuous flow of stuff—fuel, consumer products, people, and services that enter it either actively, through human effort, or passively through natural processes like solar radiation, atmospheric currents, and precipitation. Ecologists often talk about these resource flows in terms of inputs and outputs. They’ve developed several budgetary models of accounting for them, including the well-known “ecological footprint.” The resilience approach, according to ecologist Guy Barnett of the Urban Network’s Canberra research team, focuses less on the resources that cities consume and more on the interdependencies along the chain of supply and demand. Dependence on a single type of fuel as an energy source, for instance, creates a highly vulnerable system—especially if fuel prices are volatile or if the supply is prone to disruption. Consider what happened just outside of Melbourne in 1998. Several explosions at Esso Australia’s natural gas plant there killed two people and halted power supply to the city for nearly two weeks. As a result, the regional dairy industry, which relies on natural gas to power its milk pasteurization, was forced to shut down several of its plants. Some 25 million liters of raw milk went to waste. Take water, an essential resource for every city—and therefore a chronic source of concern for city managers without an ample supply. An efficient way of getting more would be to tap into groundwater; wealthy cities might even import water from afar. The more resilient approach, according to Elmqvist, would be for city managers to consider the dynamics of the larger watershed. They could negotiate agreements with rural landowners, paying them to manage their property in a way that provides the city with a certain amount and certain quality of water.

On the coral reefs around Jamaica, a variety of fish once helped keep algae firmly in check. When intensive harvesting eliminated many of these algae-grazers, long-spined sea urchins took over that niche—and the urchins’ numbers exploded with less competition for food. But then a one-two punch of a bacterial pathogen and a hurricane devastated the urchin population, and algae growth surged, strangling the coral. A coral-dominated system abruptly shifted into a state of algal-dominance. Abundant biodiversity is critical, as most people know, because it means being able to fill the numerous niches of a healthy ecosystem. But it also increases the odds that some of those species, like fish and urchins, will share niches and have overlapping roles in the ecosystem. This redundancy can help a system absorb disturbance—or when it’s lost, make it vulnerable to attack. In the case of the Jamaican reefs, an infection or storm that might once have been easily surmountable suddenly become lethal. When it comes to human populations, ecologists are hesitant to stretch metaphors too far—a biodiverse ecosystem is not the same as a diverse population. (After all, says Elmqvist, a very heterogeneous society can also mean a lot of conflict). On the other hand, he says, a good analogy can be drawn to ecosystem redundancy. … When a mysterious ailment known as Colony Collapse Disorder decimated honeybee populations across the US in 2007, threatening a $14 billion fruit and nut industry, it became painfully apparent just how valuable the pollination services of this single winged species are. Similarly, the large-scale destruction of tropical rain forests has called attention to their invaluable role as living carbon sinks. Urban resilience calls attention to the ecosystem services within cities themselves, to the medley of blue and green spaces, both natural and man-made, that can buffer a city against change. Things like urban parks, green roofs, community gardens, and coastal wetlands perform numerous functions, from cooling the city’s microclimate to purifying its rainwater to serving as built-in flood control. In New Orleans, for example, more than 60 percent of wetlands have been lost in the last 60 years, due partly to oil and natural gas exploration and partly to the levies that were built to keep the Mississippi from flooding the city. Ironically, the loss of these wetlands contributed very directly to the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina. Researchers have since calculated that restoring 1 kilometer of wetland would reduce the wave height by one meter, and now efforts are underway to begin rebuilding the southern Louisiana coastline. … No city today could survive on its own resources. This goes for energy, water, food, information, and various other inputs that fuel urban activity. But it also holds true for governance, as evidenced by the network of cities that is becoming increasingly prominent in the global policy arena. As urban areas grow in size and complexity, they are catalyzing a shift in power: Increasingly, it is cities—financial centers, hubs of innovation and human capital—that are driving the agenda. This has happened in the US, for example, as cities that took the lead in instituting climate policies after the Bush Administration showed no initiative in doing so. At last year’s annual conference of Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)—the world’s principle legally binding international treaty to protect biodiversity—more than 50 cities said that they wanted to be a part of implementing its agenda. … “We are going into a very interesting new era when it comes to global governance,” says Elmqvist. “We will have nation states, but we will also have very powerful cities raising their voices about the future and the nature of sustainable development.” … At the outset of 2010, volatility is the watchword of the day. Some things are certain: economies will grow, greenhouse gases will accumulate, more people will be born than will die across the planet. But how exactly consumption, climate, population, and other factors will interact is anyone’s guess. In that context, when risk and uncertainty are inevitable, providing the capacity to absorb change—building for resilience—is the only rational response. Urban Resilience Frontier / by Maywa Montenegro / February 16, 2010, Seed Magazine http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/urban_resilience/

“The greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Confucius

The problem is we are not ever going to return to our original shape or position. There are philosophical reasons for this: you can’t step in the same river twice. There are practical reasons for this: technology and politics are constant change, and technology produces all kinds of acceleration. But, simply, the future, whatever it is, good or bad, is not going to look like the past.

Resilience is a comforting concept. It says “you can take a licking and keep on ticking.” It says “you will recover and restore your original shape after a crisis.” It’s fundamentally nostalgic. You wish for the way things were, and you put things back that way after the storm has passed.

My friends, the storm is not going to pass. The storm is called life. We want systems which do not suffer from cascading failures. We want systems which keep working through trouble. We want systems which are easy to fix when they break.

But we want systems that aggressively and relentlessly adapt to their environments – good and bad – and any opportunity to prosper therein, not just systems that can recover from being whacked. Resilience is passive. We need to move beyond it before the concept gets too dug in. http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/why-its-not-resilience-1366

Herman Koëter the former chairman of the EU agency for food-safety EFSA and the OESO says in a Dutch Newspaper today that Europe is still dumping low quality food and still exports insecticides like DDT to Africa. For instance: fish with too much dioxin or mercury is regularly exported. The Brussels based non-profit Orange House Partnership attempts to train regulators in Afrika, China and other non-western countries, in knowledge about foodsafety issues and about chemicals in food-chains. This should allow them to be less vulnerable to the sales-pitches delivered by Western companies and to improve the quality of their own produce. article in dutch: http://tinyurl.com/2anotlf

“The problem is, the children of 2050 will look at that future world, with all its problems, and see home: and they'll look at the choices they have in front of them, and see the future. And since the choices we make in the next forty years will decide what choices our descendants are left with – a thriving society engaged in centuries of restoration and planetary repair, or a gradual desperate retreat towards the poles – giving up now because we don't like the choice set we face is pathetic cowardice.”

Human beings make the future every day. Making the future – setting in motion future events – might almost be considered part of the definition of humanity. The problem is that today, when powerful men sit down and make decisions, they generally make those decisions as if the future didn't exist, as if the consequences of their actions were beyond anticipation, as if they bore no responsibility for foresight. The future's not welcome in the room.

We need millions of people ready to put the future back in the room. We need millions of people ready to demand that their governments, their companies, their communities and their cultural institutions confront the reality of the futures they make every day. Alex Steffen, http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/011102.html

Purple Pokeberries and Fiber Could Provide Low-Cost Solar for Developing Nations Civil War soldiers used the dye from purple pokeberries to write letters home. Now, the bright-colored weeds are being used for a far more modern purpose. Researchers at Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials created low-cost, fiber-based solar cells that work more efficiently when coated with a layer of pokeberry dye. Scientists hope the cheap solar cells combined with a common plant will help provide inexpensive electricity to developing nations.“ http://inhabitat.com/2010/04/30/purple-pokeberries-could-help-provide-low-cost-solar-for-developing-nations/

“A dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC, DSC or DYSC[1]) is a relatively new class of low-cost solar cell, that belong to the group of thin film solar cells.[2] It is based on a semiconductor formed between a photo-sensitized anode and an electrolyte, a photoelectrochemical system. This cell was invented by Michael Grätzel and Brian O'Regan at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 1991[3] and are also known as Grätzel cells.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sensitized_solar_cell

Change in Numbers [anfischer.com] is an informative extension of an existing public display that features the actual ambient temperature in the city. The additional display calculates and shows the difference in temperature to historical statistical weather data of the past. In this case, the display calculated the difference of the month February to the same month about 50 years ago. By doing this, it aims to raise the public awareness of anthropomorphic global warming. http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/03/change_in_numbers_global_warming_warning_display.html

Mowing with goats 5/01/2009 09:32:00 AM At our Mountain View headquarters, we have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard. This spring we decided to take a low-carbon approach: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we've rented some goats from California Grazing to do the job for us (we're not “kidding”). A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time. The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/mowing-with-goats.html

From the Fields is a periodic Wired Science op-ed series presenting leading scientists’ reflections on their work, society and culture. Erle Ellis has written a response to Wired Science commenters, “Save the planet? From who?“

Nature is gone. It was gone before you were born, before your parents were born, before the pilgrims arrived, before the pyramids were built. You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene ― a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ftf-ellis-1/#more-3996#ixzz0uDUF41HX

“The term Anthropocene is used by some scientists to describe the most recent period in the Earth's history. It has no precise start date, but may be considered to start in the late 18th century when the activities of humans first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth's climate and ecosystems.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene

Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar

According to the US Department of Energy (Energy Information Administration), the world consumption of energy in all of its forms (barrels of petroleum, cubic meters of natural gas, watts of hydro power, etc.) is projected to reach 678 quadrillion Btu (or 7.15 exajoules) by 2030 – a 44% increase over 2008 levels (levels for 1980 were 283 quadrillion Btu and we stand at around 500 quadrillion Btu today). I wonder what surface area would be required and what type of infrastructural investment would be required to supply that amount of power by using only solar panels. … According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years. There are 1.2 million square kilometers of farmland in China. This is 2 1/2 times the area of solar farm required to power the world in 2030. The Saharan Desert is 9,064,958 square kilometers, or 18 times the total required area to fuel the world. The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there. http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

via: http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02009/oct/09/rethinking-green/ Globalizing Green Stewart Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that most people still don't take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now).

He noted that history has always been driven by the world's largest cities, and these years they are places like Mumbai, Lagos, Dhaka, São Paulo, Karachi, and Mexico City, which are growing 3 times faster and 9 times bigger than cities in the currently developed world ever did. The people in those cities are unstoppably moving up the “energy ladder” to high quality grid electricity and up the “food ladder” toward better nutrition, including meat. As soon as they can afford it, everyone in the global South is going to get air conditioning. The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid melting of Arctic ice. Warming causes droughts, which lowers carrying capacity for humans, and they fight over the diminishing resources, as in Darfur. It also is melting the glaciers of the Himalayan plateau, which feed the rivers on which 40% of humanity depends for water in the dry season—the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Yangtze, and Yellow. … Green aversion to technologies such as nuclear and genetic engineering resulted from a mistaken notion that they are somehow “unnatural.” “What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable,” Brand concluded. “We live one life.”

PS. Long Now likes to include a pointer to related reading. As it happens, the whole “Recommended Reading” section of my book Whole Earth Discipline is online, with 50 recommendations for books, magazines, and websites, with live links. It's at: http://www.sbnotes.com

Three reasons for hope: energy, fuel and food I was recently asked if I had hope for the world. I do. There are lots of reasons why, but the three biggest areas are breakthroughs in energy, fuel and food production. These are not all technologies, but they are often technologies. Have a read and see what you think. Energy Nanosolar (http://Nanosolar.com/) The pitch: thin film solar panels with a production cost of $0.30 per watt (vs. $2.30 per watt for normal panels). Now here’s the interesting part. Their machinery costs 160 million dollars for a machine which can make a gigawatt of panels per year. Capital cost for a 1 watt of panels printed each year is $0.16 in other words. Sale price for a panel is said to be around $1 for their tech. That leaves an _enormous_ amount of money available to scale with – they’ve got fifty cents on each watt of panels sold to be used for either scaling capacity (tripling it) or as profit. The possibility of very, very fast growth clearly exists here, limited by indium mining capacity probably, but it’s 1/3 as common as silver and has few other industrial uses so it’s likely a soluble problem.

Fuel On the transportation fuels front there’s two hot tips. Walter Adey and the Algal Turf Scrubber (http://www.algalturfscrubber.com/) Dr. Adey was the coral guy at the Smithsonian. He started growing algae to clean water, so his algae growing technology is always cast as being about clean water, which confuses the picture. Here’s the clear version: he’s fixed biodiesel. How? You know the thick, hairy stuff that grows on stones in rivers? That’s an algal turf. They grow in seawater too. And most of the complexity of harvesting algae is separating single cell critters from the water that surrounds them, where as turfs you harvest with a snowplough type blade. It gets better. Turfs are multi-species, and include multicellular critters – they’re a complete ecosystem. Bonuses are two: firstly, you can grow them open tank and anything that drifts in becomes part of the mix. This means no evil pesticides or “monsanto-style” genetic engineering of algae for pesticide resistance. Second the lipid content of the turfs goes up with time as you get more and more little predators and such like which are just made of lovely, crunchy oils. You just wait until enough oil has buit up for your purposes. Biobutanol (http://www.biobutanol.com/) This is a bit more complicated. Nutshell version: ethanol is horrible for engines, pipelines and so on. Butanol is vastly better behaved. Note the possibility of running 100% butanol in an unmodified or slightly tweaked gasoline engine. Now that is still being worked on, but the energy density and lack of corrosion problems seen with ethanol are *very* promising.

Food Ivette Perfecto (great name) and her big organic food metanalysis. (http://www.mosesorganic.org/attachments/research/07orgfeedworld.pdf) Ivette Perfecto of the University of Michigan in the US and her colleagues found that, in developed countries, organic systems on average produce 92% of the yield produced by conventional agriculture. In developing countries, however, organic systems produce 80% more than conventional farms. ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12245-organic-farming-could-feed-the-world.html) Basically, global food yields could go up 80% if we went organic. Seems moderately solid. One Acre Fund (http://oneacrefund.org/) 12,000 farms in Africa. One year training program, kind of like health visitors but for farming. For a year they come to your farm, visit, and teach you things. Cost per farm $100 or so, taken as a loan by the farmers. Average results… wait for it… Small Farm Multiplier “In all cases, relatively smaller farm sizes are much more productive per unit area — 200 to 1,000 percent more productive — than are larger ones. In the United States the smallest farms, those of 27 acres or less, have more than ten times greater dollar output per acre than larger farms.” http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/policybs/pb4.html#productivity Basically big farms are more profitable (lower labor costs) but small farms are more productive, per acre. Food prices rise, small farms become more economic, people produce a hell of a lot more food per acre. Excerpts from: http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/three-reasons-for-hope-energy-fuel-and-food-1797

In the Lancet, Dr Terry Hartig, from the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University:

“This study offers valuable evidence that green space does more than 'pretty up' the neighbourhood - it appears to have real effects on health inequality, of a kind that politicians and health authorities should take seriously.”

When the records of more than 366,000 people who died between 2001 and 2005 were analysed, it revealed that even tiny green spaces in the areas in which they lived made a big difference to their risk of fatal diseases.

Even small parks in the heart of our cities can protect us from strokes and heart disease, perhaps by cutting stress or boosting exercise. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7714950.stm

http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index-2009-09-24.html Podcast on planetary boundaries