5 Key Concepts of Resilience

1. We are all part of the system. You can’t get off the bus. Resilience thinking integrates social and ecological considerations, and recognizes that our biophysical environment constrains as much as it enables.

2. The systems are complex and adaptive. Social-ecological systems are not like bicycles. Simple mechanical devices involve linear and predictable operations, but complex adaptive systems often feature “emergent properties” that behave in inexplicable ways, changing and adapting to the evolving world around them.

3. Complex adaptive systems are dynamic. Nature is not a museum. Preservation is for canned fruit. Once we acknowledge our real place in the natural world, we must learn how to deal with its ongoing hubbub. Being able to take a punch is advantageous, but not getting hit in the first place is even better. How can extractive economies and rigid institutions learn to bob and weave in this ring?

4. Resilience is a key to sustainability. Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling first described resilience as a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance without shifting to a new “regime.” A fish population can sustain some abuse, but at some point overexploitation can cause the population to collapse. Too much change can force a system to cross a threshold – a point of no return that’s hard to identify in advance. Worse still, the resiliency of the new regime, the system without fish, could make it the “new normal.”

5. Dynamic systems have overlapping cycles. The lives of leaves and trees play out over different timeframes, one inside the other like a set of Russian dolls – same for trees and the forest, forests and the continent, and so it goes. Holling called these cross-scale or cross-system interactions panarchy after Pan, the Greek god of chaos and play.

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