Resilience

Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its original structure  and function.  The idea can be applied to all sorts of systems – from simple physical things like springs, which behave linearly within certain limits, to human relationships (for example marriage) and complex ecosystems. In the case of simple physical systems the response to disturbance (e.g. stretching the spring) is completely predictable unless the disturbance is too great and catastrophic distortion results. The responses of complex systems, where there are interacting processes, can generally be predicted with far less accuracy.  Complex systems are all, to some extent, adaptive; there are a number of processes and pathways which influence their resilience – their capacity to tolerate disturbance and to recover. However, severe disturbance may cause them to settle into stable states that are not the same as their initial state.

Without getting too deeply into all this, I thought it might be interesting to toss around a few ideas about resilience and its implications at (what scientists call) three organizational levels: people in partnerships; regional ecosystems, and the whole world. (If you want a clear and interesting treatment of the subject read the little book  ‘Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world’ by Brian Walker and David Salt (2006); Island Press – you can get it on Amazon.com).

 

If we consider people in partnerships – whether married or not – we see that, at any given time, the situation (their interpersonal system) can be in any of a number of states. They might be having a good spell, happy together, no strains in the household – at least none that can’t be solved amicably. But that situation can be disrupted by any of a number of disturbances: financial problems, stress brought on by children to which the partners may react differently, work-related problems that translate into tension and arguments at home, and so on. Everyone knows all this and, if they think about it, is aware of the virtually infinite number of possible problems that might beset human relationships. The resilience of any particular relationship – the capacity of the partners to absorb stress and bounce back to a happy and stable state  clearly depends not only on their own emotional maturity and willingness to work at it, but also on their age, cultural expectations, support system, and on the state of the relationship at any particular time.  If a relationship is strong and healthy, it may be able to withstand quite massive stress and without catastrophic  disintegration. But if things are bad, and the relationship is in a steadily deteriorating state – going downhill in colloquial terms – relatively minor disturbance may cause it to collapse abruptly into a different, possibly stable but also possibly unpleasant physical and psychological state.  Things may stabilise in states that are sub-optimal, but not disastrous, and there may be resilience within those states.

So what’s the point of all that? It’s just a restatement of things that are the stuff of everyday life, of books and films and TV drama, stuff that we all know, isn’t it? Well, yes, but it seems worth looking at it from a point of view that is a bit different from the usual emotional, subjective, often dramatized approach.  Obviously, the sketchy remarks in the previous paragraph can be developed and elaborated as far as you like; the value in doing so can be expected to lie in the insights that can be gained from an analytical approach to what makes partnerships hold together, how resilient they are and what disturbances are likely to be disastrous.

The Darling River near Louth in the Murray-Darling Basin

Denuded rangeland near the Darling

Lets look at something completely different: say a river system. At time of writing there is, in Australia, an unedifying, vehement and unconstructive argument going on about how to manage the Murray-Darling Basin. This is by far our biggest river system – it has tiny flows in comparison to the great rivers of the world like the Amazon, Mississippi, Ganges, Yellow River, Congo, Mekong… - but it’s very important to Australia. The rivers are long and flow through large areas of flat, dry country, but there are important wetland areas in various parts.  Ecologically the  region consists of complex ecosystems that supported a wide range of vegetation and wildlife. European development has brought massive changes: vegetation has been cleared or denuded by grazing and crops, grown in monoculture, have replaced the natural plant communities over significant areas. Biodiversity has been lost. Barrages and dams have changed the flow of the rivers and large amounts of water (generally far too much) are extracted for irrigation. Overall, the character and hydrology of the catchments has been radically altered and their resilience greatly reduced. In large sections of the irrigated areas soil salinity, the creeping, lethal scourge that has destroyed numerous civilizations throughout history, is developing rapidly, reducing the productivity of the land and, in some parts, taking it out of production. Throughout the Basin soil health and fertility are declining.

From the European point of view the original state of the Basin was not useful – we (Europeans) demand that the system must be economically productive, within the parameters of our economic system and life-style expectations. (Whether those expectations are justifiable is another question but, for this discussion, we’ll dodge that one.) It is arguable that the human socio-economic systems in the irrigation towns, complex in themselves, are stable, and it is clear that those communities have no intention of changing and adapting, if they can avoid it. But the Basin’s ecosystems are not stable:  they have lost resilience and been pushed over their recovery thresholds so that they could not  return to their original, natural state, even if human activity stopped. They are maintained in their present condition by the constant input of energy from fossil fuels harnessed by human effort but, at present levels of exploitation, there is continued degradation so that, in the near future, there will be negative feed-backs to the human economy. These will cause deterioration in the socio-economic system. The problem, therefore, is to identify an overall stable state that halts land degradation and allows the wetlands to survive and the river system to function as a stable ecological entity, while still supporting the present populations and their economy.

The debate is well under way and, as I said, much of it is unedifying and unconstructive because people insist on ignoring facts and resorting to emotional polemic. It is generally agreed that the Basin must not be allowed to degenerate any further, but there’s not much agreement on how to satisfy people and maintain the health of the natural ecosystems. The adaptability of the ecosystems is fairly well understood but, so far, there is not much sign that the people of the Basin are prepared to be adaptable.  If they could be persuaded to think in terms of their own resilience and the way it is linked to the natural system on which they depend it may be possible to move more rapidly ( and less rancorously) towards solutions. These must involve action at  a range of levels (scales) from farms and small businesses, to catchments, townships and the region as a whole.  There are no guarantees, but ‘resilience thinking’ (as Brian Walker calls it) would almost certainly help move the Murray-Darling Basin towards a viable, stable ecological and economic state and help avert catastrophic collapse – like so many of the irrigation-dependent cultures in human history – into a degenerate system of little value to humans, supporting far less life than it can.

Turning to the whole world, the obvious and much-discussed interactions are those between humans and climate. I’m not going to discuss the likelihood of significant, human-induced climate change, caused mainly by burning fossil fuels and emitting the resulting gases into the atmosphere. Let’s just say, in modern jargon, that it’s a ‘no brainer’; if you are seriously biased, or have no interest in looking objectively at the scientific evidence, you might cling to the argument that the evidence is not conclusive enough to cause us to take preventive or adaptive action. But if that’s your position you’re out on a limb; the only serious debate is how much global temperatures will rise, what the impact of the rises will be, and what we are going to do about it.

The interesting question, for the purposes of the present discussion, is how much resilience can we hope for from global climate and ecosystems? Where are the thresholds between stable states and catastrophic decline. The interacting factors are obvious enough: the ‘greenhouse effect’, exacerbated by emissions from fossil fuel combustion; deforestation, with the changes that causes in the energy balance of the land; the ‘heat island’ effect of the world’s burgeoning cities, and the feed-backs from darkening Arctic oceans and advancing deserts in various regions. It probably isn’t possible to calculate when thresholds will be reached, and what collapse might look like. My own view (for what it’s worth) is that regional collapse is already happening, and this will continue. We could, in theory, stop the process of climate change and global ecosystem degradation – we  know what needs to be done – but there is no indication from history, and certainly none in the attitudes of modern humans, that we will. The human species, in evolving to its present position as the dominant global organism, has arrived at a level of hubris, combined with aggressive selfishness, that seems to virtually preclude mass action involving reducing the consumption of the earth’s resources and standards of living. The Americans lead the way!

I did say ‘mass action’. There are (probably) millions of people who are concerned about the future of the planet as a system that can support humans living decent, comfortable lives that do not demand extravagant consumption. But they are not in the majority. There are also billions of people who are only concerned to increase their consumption and standard of living – and they have a case. Taken overall, things don’t look good. The resilience of our earth has been overwhelmed, the feed-backs are negative and we have pushed the system into an unstable state. Parts of it retain resilience; all we can do is try to use that capacity and maintain enough livable regions to support a reasonable population of humans who may have recognised the need to live in balance with the natural systems they have managed to preserve.