Home > Annual Conference > Archives > Seventh Annual Conference > Expecting the Unexpected: Why Resilience Matters to People
Previous
Expecting the Unexpected: Why Resilience Matters to People
~Lance Gunderson, Ph.D. - Founding chairman & Associate Professor - Department of Environmental Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Excerpt from Program:
"As we begin the 21st century, we seem to be besieged with disasters. A fatal heat wave blanketed Europe in the summer of 2003, a tsnuami struck portions of southeast Asia in December 2004, hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 severely impacted the Caribbean and Gulf region, and fires burned throughout the western US in 2006 and 2007. While some experts `predicted' these disasters, the impacts and recovery were (and continue to be) for the most part unpredictable in spite of technological and scientific advances. Over time, humans learn how to cope and adapt to these types of disasters and other unexpected events. Part of the process involves theories or models of change--one such model is called resilience.
"Over the past three decades, ecologists have developed and refined the idea of resilience to explain abrupt, unpredictable and deeply systemic ecological changes. We talk about two different definitions. To some, resilience is the time of recovery following a disturbance. We call this "engineering resilience" for example, the amount of time it takes a forest to recover after a fire, or a population to recover after it has been harvested. `Ecological resilience,' on the other hand, is defined as the amount of disturbances needed to create a new system or regime. Examples of the loss of ecological resilience include algal blooms that turn clear water green after a heat wave, coral reefs that become slimy, algal reefs after a hurricane, and grasslands that suddenly are covered with shrubs after a drought or fire.
"Managing ecological resilience (the property that determines transitions among regimes) is a different way of thinking about resource management. Humans prefer certain regimes - healthy corals over slimy reefs, grasslands over shrub lands, for a variety of economic, aesthetic or human health reasons. How we maintain desired regimes or restore from undesired regimes are key challenges for people across the planet."
Excerpt from Program:
"As we begin the 21st century, we seem to be besieged with disasters. A fatal heat wave blanketed Europe in the summer of 2003, a tsnuami struck portions of southeast Asia in December 2004, hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 severely impacted the Caribbean and Gulf region, and fires burned throughout the western US in 2006 and 2007. While some experts `predicted' these disasters, the impacts and recovery were (and continue to be) for the most part unpredictable in spite of technological and scientific advances. Over time, humans learn how to cope and adapt to these types of disasters and other unexpected events. Part of the process involves theories or models of change--one such model is called resilience.
"Over the past three decades, ecologists have developed and refined the idea of resilience to explain abrupt, unpredictable and deeply systemic ecological changes. We talk about two different definitions. To some, resilience is the time of recovery following a disturbance. We call this "engineering resilience" for example, the amount of time it takes a forest to recover after a fire, or a population to recover after it has been harvested. `Ecological resilience,' on the other hand, is defined as the amount of disturbances needed to create a new system or regime. Examples of the loss of ecological resilience include algal blooms that turn clear water green after a heat wave, coral reefs that become slimy, algal reefs after a hurricane, and grasslands that suddenly are covered with shrubs after a drought or fire.
"Managing ecological resilience (the property that determines transitions among regimes) is a different way of thinking about resource management. Humans prefer certain regimes - healthy corals over slimy reefs, grasslands over shrub lands, for a variety of economic, aesthetic or human health reasons. How we maintain desired regimes or restore from undesired regimes are key challenges for people across the planet."
Expecting the Unexpected Presentation pdf size: 1.89mb