Kirschenmann: Imagining Resilience

By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

The future in the modern imagination has always stretched out ahead like a broad highway drawing us onward with the promise of tomorrow. Now rather suddenly, as it becomes impossible to ignore dramatic physical changes taking place across the Earth, the future looms like an urgent question. Whatever the coming century brings, it will not unfold smoothly as some improved but largely familiar versions of life as we know it. This is the only thing that seems certain. − Author Dianne Dumanoski, The End of the Long Summer (Three Rivers Press 2009)

Recently the concept of resilience has been creeping into sustainability literature − finally! To many of us, it was long overdue. Sustainability is, after all, about “maintaining something,” “keeping something going” (as most standard dictionaries define sustainability).

The crucial question: How do we maintain enterprises such as agriculture in the face of the inevitable, significant physical changes taking place on our planet? How do we make our food and agriculture systems resilient as we face the end of cheap energy, climate destabilization, depleted fresh water resources, loss of biodiversity and declining soil health? Cheap energy, stable climate, abundant fresh water, diverse seeds and breeds, robust soil and ample sources of phosphorus and potash for fertilizer all have been essential resources used to maintain productivity in modern agriculture. How will we “keep it going” when these resources are no longer available?

In ecological literature the concept of resilience has been interpreted in two different ways (Holling, 1973, 1996). Throughout most of the industrial era, resilience has been achieved through what ecologist C.S. Holling called “engineering resilience.” From this perspective, resilience is the capacity to quickly restore an enterprise to a stable steady state following a disturbance. Achieving this type of resilience assumes a certain degree of predictability, and that innovative technologies can be developed to return a situation to a desired steady state. For example, if increased droughts and floods caused by climate change threaten corn and soybean yields in Iowa, we will be able to come up with innovative technologies to maintain crop yields.

An alternative view of resilience is what Holling called “ecological resilience,” which is the capacity of a system to continue functioning after a disturbance. In fact, from the perspective of ecological resilience, steady state regimes are rare if not impossible to sustain. Since nature is dynamic, replete with emergent properties, natural systems are constantly in a state of change.

As significant uncertainties loom in our future, the need to build resilience into our social, economic and physical enterprises is becoming increasingly apparent. In her recent book, The End of the Long Summer, Dianne Dumanoski outlines the scale and scope of some of the changes we are likely to encounter on our planet in the decades ahead − changes that will profoundly affect our food and agriculture systems.

As we confront our uncertain future, Dumanoski reminds us of another critical issue − the importance of making a significant cultural shift. Given the natural resources that have been available to us throughout the industrial era − cheap energy, surplus fresh water, stable climates − we have come to regard nature as a “predictable, imperturbable machine” that we can control. That world is now “giving way to the very different picture of a dynamic and potentially volatile living system. Domination, it turns out, has not given humans dominion. Immense power has not given us control. To understand this is to recognize that the modern era has ended.”(page 64f)

Of course, this is a lesson that Aldo Leopold also suggested we must learn if we are to live successfully on “the land” – namely, that we are not the “conquerors” of the land community, but simply “plain members and citizens of it.”

Consequently, if we are to be successful in building resilience into our food and agriculture systems of the future, the better option might be “ecological resilience,” which attempts to design systems that enhance the capacity for self-renewal and self-regulation.

Finally, as Leopold also reminded us, to achieve such “land health” we will need to cultivate an “ecological conscience.”

References

C.S. Holling, 1973. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1-23.

C. S. Holling, 1996. “Engineering Resilience Versus Ecological Resilience,” in Engineering Within Ecological Constraints, ed. by P.C. Schulze, Washington DC: National Academy Press 31-43.

Dianne Dumanoski, 2009. The End of the Long Summer, New York: Three Rivers Press.

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Kirschenmann: Imagining Resilience