Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World |  | Authors: Brian Walker PhD, David Salt
Creator: Walter Reid
Publisher: Island Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 74100
Media: Paperback
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.4
ISBN: 1597260932
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.7
EAN: 9781597260930
ASIN: 1597260932
Publication Date: August 22, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency.
"Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down.
In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
Well written explanation of complexity in ecosystems July 2, 2007
A. S. Johnson (Anchorage, AK)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
This is a great book. I've read several books on this topic, and so far, they have all had a similar issue: They are written by people who are scientists first, writers second. This book has two authors. One is a scientist and the other is a science writer. This made for a well put-together, understandable explanation of complex adaptive systems, which are what ecosystems are currently understood to be.
The authors have done a few things to make the book great. First, they have broken the topic down into a set of subtopics, with one chapter explaining each subtopic. At the end of each chapter is a summary of important points so it's clear what the authors are hoping you get out of the chapter. Each chapter is then followed by a case study that is used to illustrate the ideas just covered.
If you are looking for an introductory book on ecosystems and how humans affect their ability to maintain themselves, this is the book to read. The authors also provide several good resources at the end of the book if you would like to expand your knowledge further.
Gem of Useful Education February 25, 2008
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
This is a gem of an educational book. Mixing case studies with elaborating chapters on key concepts, it's as a good a volume as I have found for teaching undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners (farmers, factory managers, investors) the core ideas needed to restore a sustainable social-ecological system.
Highlights for me:
+ Optemization is a false premise, simplifies complex systems we do not understand, with the result that we end up causing long-term damage.
+ Resilience thinking is systems thinking. I cannot help but think back to all of the excellent work in the 1970's and 1980's--the authors were simply a quarter century ahead of their time.
+ In a nut-shell, resilient system can absorb severe disturbance.
+ System resilience is affected by context, connections across scales of time and space, and current system state in relations to threshholds.
+ Fresh water, fisheries, and topsoil depletion are major failures.
+ Drivers of environmental degradation are poverty, willful excessive consumption, and lack of knowledge (from another book, I recall that changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three, one reason we need real-time science).
+ Key concepts are threshholds and adaptive cycles. Adaptive cycles have four phases: Rapid Growth; Conservation; Release; and Reorganization.
+ Redundancy is NOT a dirty word (just as intelligence--decision support--should not be a dirty word within the United Nations)
+ Ecological networks cannot be understood nor nurtured with a tight linking and understanding of the social networks that interact with the ecological networks.
+ Subsidies are a form of social denial, as they subsidize unsustainable practices and prevent adaptation and change.
+ Lovely--absolutely lovely--chart on page 89 about time-scales of climate and natural disasters like major fires.
+ One size does not fit all--solutions for one social-ecological network, e.g. in the USA, will not be the same as for another, e.g. in Norway.
+ Diversity is the key to regeneration.
+ Governances must be able to see and act upon key intervention points.
+ A Resilient world would be characterized by:
1. Diversity
2. Ecological variables
3. Modularity
4. Acknowledgement of slow variables
5. Tight feedbacks
6. Social capital
7. Innovation
8. Overlap in governance
9. Ecosystem services
Within this small and very easy to absorb book one finds a great annotated bibliography of recommended readings, a fine reference section, and a very solid index.
Other books that come to mind as complements to this one (limited to ten links by Amazon):
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
A Pathway to Our New Future July 4, 2007
Larry Quick (Providence, Rhode Island, USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
A MUST read for environmentalists. And for business, community and anyone willing to adapt the thinking to their situation. Brian and David have done a superb job in translating resilience theory and its close ties to complex adaptive systems. I have been looking for a book to recommend to my clients and students and this is it. I would also strongly recommend that the 'old guard' sustainability brigade have a look at this. The strategies that sustainability largely pursues are unsustainable. Resilience thinking is a more accurate path for us to head toward something that resembles sustainability. Well done.
Resilience in a nutshell and put simply April 5, 2008
B. Farrell (Lake Arrowhead CA USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Brian Walker, Program Director Resilience Alliance and a scientist with the CSIRO. Canberra Australia, has, with the assistance of science writer David Salt, written the best and most straightforward work on ecological resilience entirely suitable for a wide audience of readers; activists, teachers, scientists from any number of disciplines, interested in gaining a familiarity with a study area that is of critical importance in this present world of catastrophe, forever changing with the calamitous onset of climate change and where stategies of adaptation are quite indequate mechanisms for survival in the white-water world we will have to navigate.
It is not a scientific treatise but a work from which all interested readers will benefit substantially no matter what their background or credentials. This is a twentyfirst century production coauthored with a skilled science writer and a model for any NGO or scientific group who wish to influence and inform policy makers with something they can readiliy understand.. Resilience capability and building such capacity is perhaps the best, but still uncertain, way to buffer social-ecological systems--your everyday environment--from unpredictable, disastrous events and accompanying change. Adaptation and models based on orthodox science are unfortunately inadequate to meet such crises. I recommend this book to any concerned person no matter their level of understanding. They will find something new and enlightening here.
A Resilient Introduction August 16, 2010
Steven Forth (Cambridge MA)
This short book is an excellent introduction to resilience thinking. The core texts in this field tend to be rather daunting compendiums (see Gunderson and Holling's Panarchy) that only the already committed will read. This is a light introduction to the basic ideas and has lovely and useful case studies woven in. The core ideas of resilience thinking come from work in ecological systems theory over the past thirty years or so and are an application of work on complex adaptive systems. A key point is that natural and economic systems can only be understood and managed if their codependence is made explicit. Basic concepts such as regime (a set of connected stable states), threshold (boundaries between regimes) and the adaptation cycle (growth -> accumulation -> release -> reorganization) are well explained. The case studies cover The Florida Everglades, The Goulburn-Broken Catchment area in Australia, Coral Reefs in the Caribbean, the Northern Highland Lake District in Wisconsin and the Kristianstads Vattenrike Wetlands in Sweden. All of these cases come up frequently in conversations on resilience and are good touch points.
I expect to see applications of resilience thinking to many areas beyond ecology and resource management over the next decade: it is widely relevant to organizational theory and urban planning. It will be one input to a new syntheses that replaces our current and obsolete economic theory.
One small caveat, the book has some well done illustrations but the quality of the photos is dreadful.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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