3
THINKING “RESILIENCE”
WILLIAM E. REES, FRSC
WILLIAM REES is a professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. He is best known as the co-originator of “ecological footprint analysis,” a quantitative tool that estimates humanity's ecological impact in terms of appropriated ecosystem area. He is a founding Fellow of the One Earth Initiative and a founding member and past president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics. In 2006 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. Rees is a Fellow of Post Carbon Institute.
THE EMERGENCE OF “RESILIENCE” THINKING
During the past two centuries, life was clearly getting easier and better for many people. The Enlightenment had seemingly abolished superstition as a major influence in the affairs of the Western world while its offspring, modern science, gave humans apparent mastery of matter and the ability to shape the material world to their own purposes. Through much of the twentieth century, progress, or at least what some now call “the progress myth,” seemed primed to become a permanent reality. Medicine eliminated many of the scourges that had historically kept humanity's population in check even as industrial agriculture—Malthus notwithstanding—ensured that food production exploded even faster than population. Longevity doubled in many developing countries,1 while rising incomes, shorter workweeks, unprecedented personal mobility (the private automobile), and the accelerating proliferation of laptops, cell phones, iPods, and other electronic gadgetry ensured that increasingly wealthy millions didn't lack options to fill their longer lives, either at work or at play.
Then the warning signs began to accumulate. Various science-based resource-management strategies that initially seemed successful subsequently crashed and burned:
• Agricultural pesticides once promised to eradicate crop-damaging insects, but dozens of crop-damaging insect species have since evolved immunity and crop losses are as great as ever.
• Fire control, once a mainstay of sound forest management, is now known to turn many protected forests into explosive tinderboxes prone to unstoppable wildfire (as any devotee of a burned-out Yellowstone National Park can readily testify).
• Despite the promise that modern fisheries science and economics could deliver “maximum sustainable yield,” we have witnessed the repeated collapse of fisheries around the world, to the despair of both fisheries managers and dependent human communities. Just as worrisome, various management efforts to reverse these negative trends or repair ecosystem damage have failed. For example:
• The North Atlantic cod stocks that collapsed in 1992 have not recovered despite an eighteen-year-and-counting moratorium on fishing. (The cod are not extinct, but their ecosystems have changed in ways that prevent them from reoccupying their former niche.)
• Massive clear-cuts in the Pacific Northwest have not responded to reforestation efforts as expected.
• The south polar ozone hole shows little sign of recovery, despite the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-destroying gases (regarded as the most successful example of international cooperation to solve a global environmental problem).
As if to underscore the increasing scale of the problem, the oil spills, pesticide scares, and other mainly local pollution incidents that grabbed headlines in the 1960s and 1970s have evolved into the ozone depletion, acid rain, climate change, and other global-scale concerns that have dominated the environmental headlines from the 1980s to the present day.
Ecologists have come to believe that the unexpected systems failures illustrated by these examples are not mere aberrations but are actually the norm for ecosystems under steadily increasing exploitation pressure. This implies, for example, that conventional harvesting models based on earlier resource-management concepts are seriously flawed—they do not adequately reflect the functional dynamics of systems under stress. And many critical ecosystems on every continent and in all the world's oceans are under stress. The sheer scale of human demands on nature has pushed many socio-ecosystems into unfamiliar and often unfriendly territory. The transition is often unexpected, rapid, and tragic for dependent human populations.
Just what is going on here? One explanation is that overstressed socio-ecosystems gradually lose their “resilience,” which is defined as the capacity of a system to withstand disturbance while still retaining its fundamental structure, function, and internal feedbacks. Experience shows that, over time, simplified intensively managed systems become more inflexibly “brittle” and thus more prone to erratic behavior (including systems collapse) than they were at earlier stages of “development.” To put it another way, excessive human activity—either resource exploitation or waste production—can erode the functional integrity of the same ecosystems that make these human activities possible. Ironically, there are also cases in which human purposes are frustrated by natural resilience, such as when insect species evolve immunity to pesticides. The adaptive responses of highly resilient ecosystems or components can thus defeat our best management efforts. Since techno-industrial society remains utterly dependent on ecosystems to continue providing life support, learning how best to cultivate systems resilience must become a key element of sustainability thinking.
Getting at the Root of the Problem
We have in our hands now . . . the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.
—JULIAN SIMON
Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?
—ALBERT A. BARTLETT
How is it that our allegedly science-based culture could produce such a conundrum? Part of the problem is that modern industrial society operates from a “normal-science” perspective that takes a narrowly mechanistic approach to the biophysical world. For example, most economic thinking and related resource-management policy assume direct, short-term, reversible cause-effect relationships between human activities and ecosystem responses, and also that the world generally gravitates toward a single equilibrium. Resource management may acknowledge that ecosystems, social systems, and socio-ecosystems are complicated, but it also assumes that, given sufficient data, their “nature” is knowable and predictable. In any case, our models typically assume that any changes in exploited systems will be incremental, obvious, direct, and manageable.
From this perspective, the role of science is to control the natural world for human purposes—there are no limits on growth or constraints on human ingenuity. Standard resource-management models are therefore almost entirely anthropocentric and utilitarian. Traditional management strategies strive to enhance the efficiency of growth by minimizing the annoying variability in natural ecosystems and maximizing the production of systems components and variables of value to people (e.g., food crops, fish catches, GDP per capita). And, of course, once the system has been engineered into some optimally efficient configuration, the focus is on trying to keep it there (invariably at the expense of other variables and system components). The implicit assumption in all this is that “uncertainty in nature [can be] replaced by the certainty of human control.” Little thought is given to the effect of exploitation on non-target systems components or on events and processes at higher and lower scales in the total ecosystem complex (see box 3.1).
Traditional production-oriented approaches to resource management can succeed temporarily—indeed, the North Atlantic cod stocks were fished for several centuries before they collapsed in the early 1990s. However, the record of modern management failures makes clear that the mechanistic thinking upon which management efforts are based does not capture the full structural complexity and behavioral dynamics of real-world socioecological systems. Natural ecosystems do not operate continuously in some optimal state; nature does not set out to maximize specific variables or particular species. Ecosystems are constantly in flux and are normally able to function over a wide range of natural variability. Indeed, the adaptability and tolerance of constituent species have been set by the extremes to which those species and species complexes have been exposed in the course of evolutionary history, not by arbitrary “optimal” conditions.
BOX 3.1 Trade and Globalization
Perhaps the most sweeping example of the “growth-through-efficiency” mode of thinking is the modern preoccupation with “free trade” and globalization. Breaking down the barriers among national economies makes it possible for each country to specialize in those few products or services for which it has a domestic “comparative advantage”—that is, products that it can produce with the fewest inputs—and to trade for all the rest. Since each nation will theoretically be operating at maximum efficiency, global output per unit input will be maximized and everyone should be materially better off.
Importantly, this singular emphasis on maximizing growth through trade assumes a stable world and unchanging market conditions—that is, that there are few risks associated with either specialization or trade dependence. Governments thus willingly sacrifice other values such as national diversity and self-reliance on the altar of efficiency.
But what happens if technology or markets change so that demand for Country A's products disappears? What is Country B