A resilient world is built on humility

By David Salt

What helps keep a system resilient?

Of course, it depends on context, and everyone brings their own definitions to the party when answering this question. Which means you seldom find two people that will give you the same answer.

Yet, obviously, it’s a pretty important question.

Nine attributes

Towards the end of writing the book Resilience Thinking with Brian Walker, we asked many of the world’s most preeminent resilience scholars (including Buzz Holling) what they thought were the key lessons emerging from resilience science. They responded with a wide variety of answers, both in terms of length of response and areas covered. Even resilience experts vary in what they think is most important about the topic.

We didn’t have room in the book to reprint their responses so instead we attempted to distill their thoughts into a list of nine attributes of a resilient world. In summary, those attributes are:

1. Protect diversity: A resilient world promotes and sustains diversity in all forms (biological, landscape, social and economic).

2. Respect ecological variability: Resilience is about embracing and working with ecological variability, rather than attempting to control and reduce it.

3. Manage with modularity: Resilient systems consist of modular components. Failure in one component doesn’t collapse the system.

4. Acknowledge slow variables: There needs to be a focus on the controlling (often slowly changing) variables associated with thresholds.

5. Govern with appropriate feedbacks: A resilient world possesses tight feedbacks (but not too tight). Are the signals from cost/benefit feedbacks loosening?

6. Cultivate social capital: This is about promoting trust, well developed social networks and effective leadership.

7. Promote innovation: Resilience places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change.

8. Govern with overlap: A resilient world would have institutions that include ‘redundancy’ in their governance structures, including a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights.

9. Incorporate ecosystem services: A resilient world includes all the unpriced ecosystem services in development proposals and assessments.

It’s a good list (I’d even suggest a great list) though, of course, each attribute requires a lot of unpacking, explaining and illustration with examples (though, it did appear at the end of our book so readers who got this far were already in the frame).

But why only nine?

This was Brian’s idea: ‘Let’s set out nine attributes, one short of the biblical ten, and invite readers to suggest what attribute they would add to our list to complete it.’

I thought it was a dumb idea because a. I didn’t think we’d get much response (this was a science textbook after all), b. I suspected every reader would have their own idea (‘a resilient world would have lots of cats…’) and we’d just get a long list of pet thoughts with no emergent consistency; and c. what’s the point, how would we provide feedback to readers? This was a book afterall, not a monthly magazine.

The tenth (and 11^th) attribute

As it turned out, I was wrong on all counts (hats off to you, Brian).

We received many hundreds of suggestions; most of them thoughtful, well considered and articulate.

And, while there was an enormous variety in the ideas being put forward (and no suggestion that cats would make for a more resilient world), there were clearly four themes constantly coming to the fore: democratization, fairness, learning and humility.

And, while we hadn’t planned on a follow-up book back when Resilience Thinking came out, it became apparent a few years later that people wanted more information on how resilience thinking can be implemented. Consequently, we wrote Resilience Practice, and included a discussion on the feedback we had received from readers of Resilience Thinking at the end.

Indeed, we added fairness and humility to our list of nine. Actually, we felt that the themes of democratization, fairness, learning and humility were all implicit to varying degrees in our original list of nine attributes. Our readers, however, obviously felt that equity and humility needed to be acknowledged explicitly; so we did. Here are the added two attributes to round off our list:

10. Enshrine fairness & equity: A (desirable) resilient world would acknowledge notions of equality among people, encourage democratization so that everyone has a say, a sense of agency, and promote the notion and practice of ‘fair trade’. These attributes would encourage diversity, innovation, collaboration and effective feedbacks while promoting higher levels of social capital.

11. Exercise humility: A resilient world would acknowledge our dependence on the ecosystems that support us, allow us to appreciate the limits of our mastery, accept we have much to learn, and ensure our people are well educated about resilience and our interconnection with the biosphere.

No panacea

Even if we adopted these 11 attributes as goals (even if we achieved them) there’s no guarantee that we will side step the looming shocks and changes currently facing our planet. However, a resilient world will be better placed come what may.

Which brings me to the end of this series of (relatively) ad hoc reflections on resilience thinking, what it is and why it’s worth knowing about. I’m not suggesting it will save the world; but I am certain it will provide new insights on the nature of the challenges facing us and why the complexity of the world makes these challenges so wicked. And, indeed, if we as a society are not prepared to acknowledge the complexity that lies at the heart of the challenge of sustainability, there is little hope of us meeting that challenge.

If you enjoyed this blog and would like to read any of my earlier pieces on resilience thinking, here’s a list of topics with links:

Why can’t we fix this? Because it’s complex
Introducing the notion that ‘complexity’ lies at the heart of our big challenges

Solving sustainability – It’s complicated AND complex. Do you know the difference?
‘Complexity 101’, complex is different to being complicated but most people mix them up

Thinking resilience – navigating a complex world
Ideas about resilience comes from many areas, most them are about working with complexity

The myth of the optimal state: adaptive cycles and the birth of resilience thinking
Buzz Holling and collapsing spruce forests. More control just made it worse

The perils of command and control and the pathology of Natural Resource Management
How the belief of mastery, blind application of efficiency and vested interests leads to a decline in a system’s resilience

On identity, complexity and a ‘little’ fossil fuel project off the West Australian coast
The identity of a system drives decision making above and beyond rationality

Death of the Queen, identity and a sustainable world
Thinking of ‘the Crown’ as a complex adaptive system (RIP Queen Elizabeth II)

Losing it – the consequences of stepping over the threshold
When a system crosses a threshold, it loses its identity

To be or not to be? It’s really a question about whether we adapt or transform
Adaptation and transformation, two important concepts in resilience thinking that most people use interchangeably without much thought

Resilience – the good, the bad and the ugly
Resilience thinking is almost always inspirational, but it’s also ambiguous and politicians love hiding behind it

Banner image: Maybe if Moses had shown a little more humility, the 10 Commandments might have been a tad more resilient. (Image by Jeff Jacobs from Pixabay)

Losing it – the consequences of stepping over the threshold

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By David Salt

In Australia, we called the horrible summer of 2019/20 the Black Summer. Unprecedented heat waves and drought led to the biggest, most ferocious, most extensive wildfires this nation had ever known.

I wonder what the world will call 2022? Once again that word ‘unprecedented’ gets rolled out to describe a series of heatwaves, extreme storms, massive floods and record-breaking droughts. This year these events were happening all over the world (and especially across Europe, Asia and America during the northern hemisphere summer). Will it be the ‘Angry Summer’ or the ‘Season of our Great Discontent’ or maybe just the year of ‘Climate Breakdown’. (At what point do we know it’s broken?)

Or maybe the climate disruption will just continue and even grow worse, as many climate scientists are predicting, and 2022 will be wilfully forgotten as we struggle to deal with each new emerging weather crisis.

The idea of normal

When describing abnormal events, unprecedented episodes or historic happenings, you need to have some idea about what ‘normal’ actually means. In some cases this is relatively straightforward.

We have temperature records, for example, that go back for at least a century so it’s easy to define ‘normal’ with statistical precision. Our temperature has ranged between X and Y, and there is a different average max and minimum value for each month of the year. This August was particularly hot for many regions in the northern hemisphere, so when you hear on the news that temperatures broke records, or were above average, you can appreciate just what is meant.

The more variables you bring in (precipitation, wind speed, humidity, wild storms etc), the harder it is to characterise what is normal. Of course, these variables are what add up to weather, and long-term average weather is what we call climate.

If the weather gets ugly, we normally console ourselves that we just need to survive this rough patch and at some point the weather will ‘return to normal’ – the rains will replenish the dams after the drought or calm will follow the big storm.

‘Return to normal’ is a form of equilibrium thinking. Your world gets rocked by some disturbance, your equilibrium is thrown out, but you do everything you can to bounce back, to return to normal.

Of course, I’m talking about the notion of resilience – the capacity to cope with disturbance and bounce back (the word ‘resilience’ derives from the Latin ‘resilire’, meaning ‘to jump back’ or ‘to recoil’).

What’s normal for a complex system

‘Resilience thinking’ is all about how this idea of ‘recovery’ applies to complex adaptive systems. Complex systems have the capacity to self-organise. Resilience is the amount of disturbance a system can absorb and still retain its identity, still continue to function in much the same kind of way.

In recent blogs I’ve attempted explain what complexity means, and how complex systems change over time, how they go through a pattern known as an adaptive cycle. The concept of adaptive cycles is one important building block of resilience thinking, the other is the idea of ‘thresholds’.

There are limits to how much a complex system can be changed and still recover. Beyond those limits the system functions differently because some critical feedback process has changed. These limits are known as thresholds.

When a complex system crosses a threshold it is said to have crossed into another ‘regime’ of the system (also called a ‘stability domain’ or ‘basin of attraction’). It now behaves in a different way – it has a different identity (or you might say it has lost its original identity).

In coral reefs there’s a threshold on the variable of the level of nutrients in the surrounding water. If nutrients become too high, the coral will be displaced by algae. The coral reef identity is lost, replaced by the identity of an algal reef.

On many rangelands there is a threshold on the amount of grass present. If the grass level falls below a certain level (because of too many grazing animals or a prolonged drought), shrubs begin to take over. The grassy rangeland identity is lost, replaced by a shrubland.

Sometimes it’s easy to cross back over to the identity you want, sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes it’s impossible.

Tipping points

In a recent blog I discussed how fossil fuel corporations are complex systems. The identity of this system is heavily influenced by quarterly profit statements; more so than any concern they might hold for longer term climate disruption. The levels of the profits in those quarterly statements likely has a threshold point, below which the fossil fuel corporation will likely change its business (eg, take on the identity of a renewables company, maybe) or shut down. Either way, crossing this threshold leads to a change of identity in this system. (Of course, what might put downward pressure on their profits is stronger government regulation or broader community rejection of the cost being imposed on society by the fossil fuel company.)

In my last blog I also said you could view the British Monarchy as being a complex system. Its identity hinges on public acceptance and support over time, something the late Queen Elizabeth II understood and worked with like a pro. Again, its likely a threshold point exists on this variable of public support, below which the Monarchy becomes vulnerable. QEII represented integrity, authenticity, stability and certainty. She had very high levels of social approval (social capital) that has ensured that the system of the Monarchy had resilience, even to the disturbance of her own death, and the Crown passed seamlessly to her son, now King Charles III. But imagine what might have happened if the Queen didn’t have that level of social capital. Or what happens if King Charles squanders that social capital? Smooth successions aren’t always the rule in the UK (or elsewhere), and many countries don’t need Queens (or Kings) to function.

Thresholds occur in many complex systems however they are often described as ‘tipping points’ where they occur in the social domain. In addition to the two examples I just discussed (profit levels and levels of public approval), tipping points might manifest as changes in fashion, voting patterns, riot behaviour, or markets.

Defining a safe operating space

So here is useful way of defining a system. Every system can be described in a variety of ways using a number of variables. The identity of the system can be characterised by an average range of those values. While kept in that range, the system will behave as you expect, be it a business, a monarchy, a coral reef or a rangeland. However, when the system passes a certain level on one of a number of key variables (eg, profit, popularity, nutrients, grass cover) – a threshold or tipping point – the system changes its identity and begins to behave differently (often in strange or undesirable ways).

Or, in other words, you can understand a system’s identity by knowing how much change it can take before that identity is lost, replaced by a different identity.

Not only are thresholds critical to understanding the behaviour of complex systems, they are the basic limits to whatever enterprise you’re responsible for or have an interest in. To use the phrase in a prominent analysis of global-scale thresholds (Rockstrom et al 2009), thresholds define the safe operating space of your system.

And how are we going in keeping our society in a safe operating space? Well, considering our experiences with the Black Summer of 2019 or the Angry Summer of 2022, not so well.

Climate and weather systems are complex systems too. Their current behaviour suggests they have been pushed over critical thresholds and their emerging identity is something quite new, quite destructive and terrible. Allowing the Earth system to cross these thresholds comes with an enormous cost to society, and will sorely test our own resilience as we cruise into an increasingly uncertain future.

Banner image: How much disturbance can your ‘system’ take before it loses its identity? It’s not just the intensity of a specific event (a single hurricane for example) that’s important, it’s also the frequency of such disturbances. The Great Barrier Reef can survive mass bleaching events if they only occur once every 20 years but it loses its ‘identity’ if they occur every few years (which is now what’s happening). (Image by David Mark from Pixabay)

The perils of command and control and the pathology of Natural Resource Management

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By David Salt

As a younger man I honestly believed that sustainability was a tractable problem; a difficult challenge no doubt but one that was solvable with hard work coupled with science and technology. And, as a confident young thing, I thought I could contribute to this outcome by serving in the area of science communication and education; get more talented young people into science, and increase community acceptance of emerging technological solutions so they can be effectively implemented.

How might science and technology save us? By providing us with insights on the many problems being faced by humanity and the environment, and by helping humanity lighten its footprint on Planet Earth. Well, science has definitely provided ample insights on the plight of our planet, and technology has given us so many ways to be more efficient in how we do things.

For all that, however, we are moving away from being sustainable; indeed, we seem to be accelerating away from it. In the last half century, humanity has pushed the Earth system over several planetary boundaries, unleashed a sixth extinction event, and seems unable as a global community to do anything about greenhouse gas emissions which are remorselessly on the increase (as a by-product of our addiction to economic growth).

Science and technology has underpinned so much of our wealth creation and economic activity, and many techno-boosters are fervent in their belief that science and technology is the solution to the many problems facing our environment (indeed, I heard Australia’s Chief Scientist say this exact thing on the radio this morning, as I write.)

As I grew older and watched the natural world decline around me (on a number of scales; think of weed infestation in your local bush reserve, glacial retreat or the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef), my enthusiasm for (and faith in) science and technology also declined. I could see the potential of all these new discoveries (think renewable energy, nanotech and biotech as examples) but could never see where the outcomes were creating a more sustainable future. For example, for every 10% improvement in efficiency in process X, we seemed to see 100% increase in people using that process resulting in more waste, more consumption and more damage (albeit less impact per capita, see the Rebound Effect for a discussion on this).

The dangers of partial solutions

It’s not that I’m anti science and technology and I do believe increasing efficiency is important. However, by themselves they are not enough.

Then I was asked to write a couple of books on resilience science (Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice) and my doubts on the belief that ‘science and technology is the solution’ crystallised into a new way of looking at the world. The experience of writing about resilience opened my eyes to ideas of complexity, and the capacity of a complex systems to absorb disturbance and retain their identity (the definition of resilience). The consequences of these ideas are deep and far reaching. In a range of different ways, I’ve been attempting to articulate them in my stories for Sustainability Bites.

One major consequence of acknowledging the complexity around us is to be aware of the cost of partial solutions sold to us as complete answers. Science and technology (and endlessly increasing efficiency) are not only not enough to move us to being sustainable, an exclusive reliance on them (and belief in them, think ‘technology not taxes’) will actually reduce resilience in the systems we depend upon and make us more vulnerable to disturbance.

There are many lines of evidence supporting this contention (see Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice) but in the space I have here I’d like to discuss how natural resource management agencies decline over time. Improving science and technology (and efficiency) is often touted as the solution but only fuels this decline. This discussion is based on a landmark paper by CS Holling (one of the founding fathers of resilience thinking) and Gary Meffe, written a quarter of a century ago: Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management.

The command-and-control pathology

Holling and Meffe point out that when command and control is applied in natural resource management, the initial phase is nearly always quite successful. Insect pests are reduced by pesticide use; fishing and hunting are enhanced by stocking or predator removal; forest fires are suppressed for years; floods are minimized by levees and dams.

But what follows on these initial successes is rarely acknowledged. The agencies responsible for management shift their attention from the original social or economic purpose towards increasing efficiency and a reduction in costs. (Of course, all agencies/companies do this over time not just NRN agencies. It’s a pattern well described in the idea of ‘adaptive cycles’ first proposed by Holling.)

NRM agencies search for better and more efficient ways to kill insects, eliminate wolves, rear hatchery fish, detect and extinguish fires, or control flows. Priorities thus shift from research and monitoring (why ‘waste’ money studying and monitoring apparent success?) to internal agency goals of cost efficiency and institutional survival.

Holling and Meffe contend that as this happens, there is a growing isolation of agency personnel from the systems being managed and insensitivity to public signals of concern. They describe this as institutional myopia and increased rigidity (again, something well described by the theory of adaptive cycles).

At the same time, economic activities exploiting the resource benefit from success (of more fish, or water or whatever) and expand in the short term. We see greater capital investment in activities such as agricultural production, pulp mills, suburban development, and fishing and hunting. There’s nothing wrong with this, they say, within limits.

But the result is increasing dependency on continued success in controlling nature while, unknown to most, nature itself is losing resilience and increasing the likelihood of unexpected events and eventual system failure. When natural systems are ‘controlled’ they invariably lose their natural diversity and processes, which leads to a declining ability to absorb disturbance (while maintaining its identity).

With dependency comes denial and demands by economic interests to keep and expand subsidies, and pressure for further command and control.

So, the initial successes of command and control come with a costs that are usually never acknowledged. Command and control reduces natural variation and erodes resilience, environmental managers aim for efficiency rather than connection with the system they are managing, and economic interests that benefit from original command and control distort the system to maintain it. The composite result is increasingly less resilient and more vulnerable ecosystems, more myopic and rigid institutions, and more dependent and selfish economic interests all attempting to maintain short-term success.

Holling and Meffe point out that solutions to this pathology cannot come from further command and control (for example, stronger regulations) but must come from innovative approaches involving incentives leading to more resilient ecosystems, more flexible agencies, more self-reliant industries, and a more knowledgeable citizenry.

Back in the ‘real world’, you’ll largely hear our political leaders deny the complexity of this and simply say science and technology will save us. Unfortunately, in a complex world, simple solutions have a habit of only making the situation worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love science and technology. However, by themselves, they are not the solution. To contribute to a sustainable world, they need to work with complexity, not subjugate it.

Banner image: Dams are an important piece of human infrastructure offering many valuable short-term benefits by controlling our rivers. In the longer term they come with a range of often unacknowledged costs. They reduce the natural variability of the river; they encourage human settlement in areas subject to flooding; and allow food production in areas that normally wouldn’t support agriculture. Over time, the agencies managing the dam become myopic and rigid, the economic sectors depending on the dam become increasingly reliant and selfish, and the river system becomes increasingly vulnerable to disturbances. (Image by David Salt)

The myth of the optimal state: adaptive cycles and the birth of resilience thinking

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By David Salt

Being sustainable, is tough. So far, we (as in humanity) are failing at the task miserably. My contention is that a big part of the problem is our inability to deal with the complexity of the systems around us, that we are a part of. Rather than acknowledging this complexity, we impose framings on these systems treating them as simple. (I discussed these ideas in complicated vs complex.)

Command and control

Simple systems can be managed and controlled, and held in an optimal state for as long as needed. Complex systems, on the other hand, self-organise around our efforts to control them. They can’t be held in an optimal state.

The notion of an ‘optimal sustainable yield’ was a widespread idea in natural resource management last century. The belief was that if you knew a little about what drives a natural resource (say reproductive capacity in fish stocks or forest trees), you could harvest that system removing an optimal amount of that resource forever as it would always replace itself. It’s a command-and-control approach that left countless collapsed fisheries and degraded landscapes in its wake.

‘Command and control’ involves controlling aspects of a system to derive an optimized return. The belief is that it’s possible to hold a system in a ‘sustainable optimal state’.

However, it’s not how the world actually works. Yes, we can regulate portions of the system, and in so doing increase the return from that portion over a short time frame, but we can’t do this in isolation of the rest of the system. If we hold some part of the system constant, the system adapts around our changes, and frequently loses resilience in the process (ie, loses the capacity to recover from a disturbance).

While we can hold parts of the system in a certain condition, the broader system is beyond our command. Indeed, no one is in control; this is a key aspect of complex adaptive systems.

Resilience thinking is an alternate approach to working with these systems, an approach that places their complexity front and centre. And the origins of this approach are entwined with an early realisation that a command-and-control approach to harvesting natural systems will always strike problems eventually. (The following example is based on a discussion that appears in the book Resilience Thinking.)

Of budworms and social-ecological systems

Spruce fir forests grow across large areas of North America, from Manitoba to Nova Scotia and into northern New England. They are the base of a highly valuable forestry industry.

Among the forests’ many inhabitants is the spruce budworm, a moth whose larvae eat the new green needles on coniferous trees. Every 40 to 120 years, populations of spruce budworm explode, killing off up to 80% of the spruce firs.

Following World War II, a campaign to control spruce budworm became one of the first huge efforts to regulate a natural resource using pesticide spraying (thanks in part to new technologies emerging from the war).

Initially, the pest control proved a very effective strategy, but like so many efforts in natural resource management that are based on optimizing production, it soon ran into problems.

In a young forest, leaf/needle density is low, and though budworms are eating leaves and growing in numbers, their predators (birds and other insects) are easily able to find them and keep them in check. As the forest matures and leaf density increases the budworms are harder to find and the predators’ search efficiency drops until it eventually passes a threshold where the budworms break free of predator control, and an outbreak occurs.

While the moderate spraying regime avoided outbreaks of budworms, it allowed the whole forest (as distinct from individual patches) to mature until all of it was in an outbreak mode. Outbreaks over a much greater area were only held in check by constant spraying (which was both expensive and spread the problem).

The early success of this approach increased the industry’s dependence on the spraying program, intensified logging and spawned the growth of more pulp mills.

Now there was a critical mass of tree foliage and budworms. The whole system was primed for a catastrophic explosion in pest numbers. The managers in this system were becoming locked into using ever increasing amounts of pesticide because the industry wouldn’t be able to cope with the shock of a massive pest outbreak. The industry had little resilience, and yet the continued use of chemicals was only making the problem worse. They had created a resource-management pathology.

Adaptive cycles

The industry acknowledged the looming crisis and engaged ecologists (including CS ‘Buzz’ Holling) to see how they might tackle the problem from a systems perspective. In 1973, Holling proposed a new analysis of the dynamics of the fir forests, one based on what he described as ‘adaptive cycles’.

Forest regions exist as a patchwork of various stages of development. The cycle for any one patch begins in the rapid growth phase, when the forest is young. The patch then proceeds through to maturity, and eventually, following some 40 to 120 years of stable and predictable growth (referred to as the ‘conservation phase’), the cycle tips into the release phase. The larvae outstrip the ability of the birds to control them, larvae numbers explode, and the majority of forest trees in that patch are killed. Their rapid demise opens up new opportunities for plants to grow, and during the reorganization phase the forest ecosystem begins to re-establish itself. The cycle then repeats.

With this understanding of the cycle and the key changing variables that drive the system, the forest managers were able to fundamentally modify the manner of their pest control. Rather than continually using low doses of pesticide over wide areas they switched to larger doses applied less frequently at strategic times over smaller areas. They re-established a patchy pattern of forest areas in various stages of growth and development rather than keeping wide areas of forest primed for a pest outbreak.

The forest industry also changed through the process, moving to regional leadership with a greater awareness of the ecological cycles that underpinned the forest’s productivity.

From budworms to resilience thinking

The case study of the spruce budworm and the fir forest is important on many levels as it was in part the genesis of what has become resilience thinking. During his investigations, Holling proposed that the key to sustainability was an ecosystem’s capacity to recover after a disturbance, not the ability to hold it in a notional optimal state.

He also recognized that the ecosystem and the social system had to be viewed together rather than analyzed independently, and that both went through cycles of adaptation to their changing environments. Adaptive cycles don’t just happen in nature, they happen in communities, businesses and nations, it’s feature of complex adaptive systems.

His proposal catalyzed the thinking of ecologists and researchers (with an interest in systems) all over the world because similar patterns were being identified everywhere social-ecological systems were being studied.

One key insight that grew out of an understanding of adaptive cycles is that bringing about change/reform in a social-ecological system is always difficult. However, windows of opportunity do open when a system goes into a release phase, although the window doesn’t open for long. You need to be prepared to seize the opportunity while it’s there.

A basic lesson I draw from the notion of adaptive cycles is that systems get locked into themselves over time and become rigid. There’s no such thing as a sustainable optimal state because even if the system is managed into a condition deemed desirable, it then progressively loses its capacity to learn, innovate or keep its flexibility (often in the name of efficiency). Efficiency is important but is never the complete answer. Efficiency is not the key to sustainability.

Over the decades since Holling first described adaptive cycles, the models and the thinking associated with managing for resilience has gone through much refinement but the two core ideas remain at its heart: the fact that social-ecological systems constantly move through adaptive cycles over many linked scales, and that they can exist in different stable states. I’ll discuss this second building block in my next blog.

Banner image: Spruce fir forests provide valuable timber. However, efforts to optimise these systems last century with the widespread application of pesticide almost destroyed the industry. Uncovering what was going wrong became the origins of resilience thinking. (Image by Reijo Telaranta from Pixabay.)

In the war of the colour chart, where lies the colour of resilience?

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By David Salt

If you were trying to explain Australian politics to an outsider (an alien or an American, for example), you could do worse than falling back on a colour chart synthesis.

Australia has two major political sides, a red team and a blue team.

The red team is called Labor and supposedly places priority on workers and organisations that represent workers. Red might represent the colour of the blood that flows through the veins of the good honest wage earner.

The owners of the businesses that benefits from the toil of these honest workers believe the blood that flows in their veins is blue. Their political allegiance is to the idea of freedom and letting businesses and markets decide on priorities and that government should be kept small. They call themselves Liberals and their colour is blue.

But there are a couple of other teams we need to mention up front.

There’s also a party that claims its mandate is based on standing up for the people of regional Australia – farmers and miners on the whole – these are honest hard-working folk with strong roots in the soil. They’re a little red because they expect government to support them in the regions but more blue because they don’t like being told what to do. They call themselves the National Party, and I’m naming them ‘team brown’ after the dirt they toil over (even though their official colours are green and yellow).

Then there are the greens. No prizes for guessing what they stand for – it’s the environment. They want strong government regulation (or, as the blues and browns say, ‘pesky government interference’) on climate change, pollution and conservation. They are more aligned with the reds than the blues, and the browns largely hate them because they represent ‘government telling them what to do’.

Every three years Australians vote for someone in their region to represent them in our national government. These candidates largely come from the red or the blue team (though the blues have been in coalition with the browns for as long as anyone can remember) and Australia has always been ruled by the red team or the blue/brown team.

What else do you need to know? Well, you should be aware that all adult Australians have to vote (no discretion there) and that we have an independent organization that oversees the electoral process (the Australian Electoral Commission). This is important because Australians trust our electoral process and always accept the people’s verdict (I’m looking at you Mr Trump). Whenever the people choose the other side to govern, there is always a smooth transition of power. This is something the nation is very proud of.

Business as usual

Why am I telling you all this? Well, if you’re from another planet (or the US) you might be a little confused at how we’re responding to multiple environmental crises engulfing Australia (and the world).

Our coral reefs are bleaching, forest biomes are burning and low land communities are flooding. Climate change is exacting a horrible and growing toll on our nation (and the poor are copping it the worst), we have a very strong scientific consensus on what we need to do to address the problem (ie, reduce greenhouse emissions) yet our national government (which until last week was blue/brown) has been steadfast in its opposition to do anything about climate change. Many of its members are in strong denial that climate change is even real.

Whenever a proposal comes up to make a change to our economy to reduce greenhouse emissions, the government scares people about the cost of that change (without reflecting on the larger cost of not changing). This is exactly what happened at our last national election (in 2019, the same year of the Black Summer that scorched Australia’s eastern seaboard).

Over the last three years since then, our blue/brown government has done little about climate change while at the same time ignoring growing calls for an independent commission on integrity, turning its back on the pleas of our First Nations people for voice in our constitution, and largely ignoring cries from women everywhere for respect and agency.

Over the past six weeks the country has been dragged through an election campaign in which the blue/brown party claimed they should be re elected because the world was becoming too dangerous to trust anyone but them to lead us forward. It’s a powerful message that always favours the incumbent. They said they had a plan though few people knew what it was beyond keeping things the same.

The red party also they said they had a plan – a plan for change. But because they got beaten up at the last election over the cost of change, at this election the change they detailed was very small (a small-target campaign).

This left many people very depressed because both parties were saying the world was increasingly dangerous and that they had a plan, but both plans didn’t involve much change.

A new colour?

In many cities around Australia there were many people who normally voted blue who no longer trusted the blue party because they seemed to be ignoring growing calls for action on climate change and greater integrity in government. It seemed the blues were hostage to the demands of the right-wing conservative browns (the junior partners in government).

These disenchanted blue voters were reluctant to vote red but even more loathe to support the greens (often portrayed as fanatical and uncompromising in their zeal for environmental reform). However, they were damned if they were going to support the blues anymore.

Independent candidates (people with no specific colour preference) have long been a component of Australia’s political scene but they appear spasmodically and normally campaign on a limited range of issues in specific regions. They occasionally exert considerable influence when they hold the balance of power but they usually disappear after one or two terms. They normally get in because they have good grass-root connections with the communities they seek to represent.

In the lead up to our most recent election, however, something unprecedented occurred. High profile community-based independents stood for office in a range of blue seats in cities across Australia. They were almost all women with strong professional backgrounds, and would likely have been blue supporters in the past.

They became known as the teal independents, teal* being a shade lying between blue and green. And they proved phenomenally successful at the weekend’s elections knocking off some of the blue’s most high-profile candidates including the former treasurer (who had been touted as the next blue leader).

The colour of resilience is teal

Indeed, the ‘teal revolution’, as some have dubbed it, may go down in Australian political history as the day our political leaders finally heard the message resonating through the broader community: we want real action on climate change, and we want integrity in our political leadership. No more lies, denial and corruption; no more kow-towing to the fossil-fuel industry (listening to political donors rather than electors).

Though the counting still continues, it looks like Labor (the reds) will have a workable majority and can form government in its own right. However, they know they can’t ignore the broader community’s wishes on environmental reform and integrity. If they do they risk a similar revolt as with the teals (maybe a rufous rebellion). The Australian electorate now knows it can’t be ignored.

The blues, being overly influenced by the browns, thought they could ignore the wishes of electorate. They thought they could trounce the reds while laughing at the greens because they believed a sufficiently frightened public would shy away from change, stick with a status quo no matter how inadequate. The teals appeared as if from nowhere and proved them dead wrong.

Our now defeated former Prime Minister, a man without a moral compass and a prolific liar (according to his own party colleagues), often spoke about making Australia more resilient. By bowing to the browns he prevented meaningful change, and actually helped make the country less resilient. Perversely in terms of what he intended, his actions directly contributed to the rise of the teals and the destruction of his own party.

Resilience is all about changing as the world changes.

If resilience has a colour then it has to be teal.

*Teal is a cyan-green color. Its name comes from that of a bird — the Eurasian teal (Anas crecca) — which presents a similarly colored stripe on its head.

Banner image: The Eurasian teal (Anas crecca) from Mangaon, Raigad, Maharashtra, India. (Photograph by Shantanu Kuveskar. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

On ‘resilience’ as a panacea for disaster

When the going gets tough, the government hides behind resilience

By David Salt

Have you noticed that when the chips are down, and I mean really down, our political leaders frequently invoke ‘resilience’ as the thing that’s most important? We’ve seen it following massive floods, devastating cyclones and, most recently, in response to the bushfire catastrophe (that continues to unfold as I write).

What’s this about?

In my time I’ve written a bit on resilience. While I think resilience science can offer many insights on the challenges that currently beset us, I don’t see its current deployment as anything more than a strategy of obfuscation and displacement, the strategy you roll out when you don’t actually have a plan.

When a massive disturbance overwhelms a country’s capacity to continue with ‘business as usual’, governments do their best to reassure the community that everything will be alright, even though they are often impotent in the face of that crisis.

When that flood wipes out critical infrastructure, for example, it’s often apparent that despite the government’s grand claims, it can’t make the rain stop or move people and emergency services to where they are needed. And when that happens, they often fall back by saying: ‘we’ll get over this, we are resilient.’

Or when the fires are so extensive, as we are witnessing now, and whole communication networks and the road system goes down (and everyone is on edge while choking on endless smoke), we know there is only so much the government can do, but we want reassurance that it’ll all be right. And what is the Prime Minister telling us our priorities should be? “That resilience and adaptation need an even greater focus,” he said.

We are resilient

What’s the attraction in invoking resilience? From a political point of view, I think it’s twofold.

The first relates to our belief of the ‘rightness’ of the system we are in. Yes a fire/drought/flood might knock us down but we are ‘good, hard working people that care for each other’. We may be knocked down but our inherent qualities will help us triumph over adversity, get us back on our feet and prosper.

You’ll hear this refrain time and again following disasters from political leaders at every level, from the town mayor to the prime minister, each crafting their message of resilience to their own group of people, reassuring them that they are ‘right’, they are ‘good’ and ‘they’ll get over it’.

Consider Premier Anna Bligh’s now famous statement following the unprecedented Queensland floods in 2011: “We are Queenslanders,” she told the public. “We’re the people that they breed tough north of the border. We’re the ones that they knock down and we get up again.”

That’s the basic definition of ‘resilience’, it’s all about how we cope with disturbance, and we like to think there’s something inherently right and good about our system (municipality/state/country) that will enable us to triumph. ‘We are Queenslanders/Victorians/south coasters/insert place name here, and we are tough…’

Politically speaking that’s exactly the ‘we-are-righteous-and-shall-overcome’ message that a government wants to convey to the electorate so invoking ‘resilience’ is an attractive notion; especially when it’s clear there’s not much they can actually do.

The second attraction for invoking ‘resilience’ is that everyone has their own idea of what it means and it’s impossible to measure in a precise manner. Consequently, it’s an ambiguous goal that is easy to hide behind while avoiding accountability.

So far, our Prime Minister’s invocation of resilience seems more about avoiding talk on emissions targets and climate change policy than any genuine engagement with the idea.

The new ‘sustainability’?

The idea of ‘sustainability’ has similar weaknesses (or strengths, depending on your perspective and degree of cynicism) to resilience but sustainability (and sustainable development) have been around for longer as a policy goal. Having been seriously worked on for at least the past 40 years, sustainability has had a lot of time and energy spent on working out how it might be operationalised.

‘Sustainability’ was also a ‘made up’ word to embody efforts to respond to the damaging effects of unbounded economic growth. In this way, sustainability had meanings loaded into it. ‘Resilience’, on the other hand, is a real word that now labels many different approaches to managing systems (people, families, communities, cities, nations and ecosystems to name a few) to help them overcome disturbance. People have their own idea what it is to be resilient.

All models (or framings) are wrong but some are useful (to paraphrase George Box). Sustainability, with all of its shortcomings, enabled national and international conversations to take place around the connections between the economy, society and the environment. It also allowed notions of equity and justice to be incorporated into our thinking. And, while it’s still a work in progress, the sustainability project is still an important and potentially critical element of our species ongoing survival.

Many faces of resilience

Resilience too has many weaknesses as a strategy and policy goal. For starters, what resilience approach are you talking about? It has separate origins and applications from many disciplinary areas with the disciplines of psychology, emergency relief, engineering and ecology being the main four fields from which it has emerged. Each considers resilience at a different scale and with a different purpose though all are concerned with how the systems we are interested in cope with disturbance.

The value of resilience is that it is a systems approach that engages with the complexity of the system of our interest (for example, in psychology that’s individual people, for ecology that’s social-ecological systems).

When I use the term resilience science I’m talking about ecological resilience, the topic I have helped write two text books on. It’s a rich body of research and academic discussion that has revealed much about how linked systems of nature and people endure over time coping with a range of disturbances. It’s all about thresholds and tipping points, linked scales, adaptive cycles and transformation.

To really make a difference with resilience science you need to honestly engage with the complexity of the system of your interest. You need to respect those people with expert knowledge on how it functions, maintain healthy buffers of economic, environmental and social capital, and work within the limits of your system rather than ignoring them. (These are themes I will explore in future blogs.)

Unfortunately, when governments invoke resilience they use it as cover to continue doing whatever it is their vested interests dictate (which seems in Australia at the moment the continued support for more coal mining). They usually spin resilience as a magic bullet that solves a multitude of problems without ever being accountable for what it is they are specifically attempting to achieve.

And isn’t that the perfect escape for a government – ‘because of this fire/flood/drought we are down but we are not out. We are resilient and we shall triumph come what may.’

Image: Epicormic regrowth from bark of Eucalypt, four months after Black Saturday bushfires, Strathewen, Victoria, in 2009. (Photo by Robert Kerton, CSIRO. Creative Commons 3.0.)