Saturday, September 26, 2009

Key Concept: Resilience

Brian Walker explains resilience:

5 comments:

  1. Very interesting. It points out the dilemma or paradox of "resilience". From this idea, you could almost say that the way to establish climate resilience is to purposely subject the ecosystem to extreme warming, thus "exploring its limits," discover the feedback systems that control warming/cooling, and then pull it back into equilibrium using those feedback models. I'm not sure this is such a good idea. And how many species and people are we going to sacrifice in the hopes of finding those limits and those feedback loops?

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  2. That's not how I understood it. Your parallel would imply the surgeon intentionally put the people into car crashes that nearly killed them so that he could observe the reaction.

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  3. This is the best explanation of resilience I have seen yet. The idea of the forest fire as necessary to essentially reset the growth cycle is intriguing. The death of the trees provides carbon rich soil for new growth and removes scrag/shrubbery blocking the sunlight. In this way, I understand the trees as just one part of the system we call forest.

    If I understand correctly, a system will always seek equilibrium. This is done through tolerance thresholds and feedback nodes. If a threshold is irreparably breached, another system takes over.

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  4. Damn, I had it happen again. Attempted to post a long reply only to have it disappear into thin air. Note to self, write them in word first!

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  5. Anyway, the point was that current thinking doesn't really talk about systems 'seeking equilibrum' or another system 'taking over'. Rather the change results from a shift in the factors controlling the operation of the system -- sort of like a meteor that is in orbit around the sun but comes close to the earth and gets sucked into earth's atmosphere and crashes here. The 'system' -- i.e., the meteor -- didn't change, just the factors controlling it's movement.

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