Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World [Paperback]

Brian Walker PhD (Author), David Salt (Author), Walter Reid (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2006 | ISBN-10: 1597260932 | ISBN-13: 978-1597260930

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Resilience Thinking is an impressive and highly successful effort to explain complex ecological and social interactions and changes in a unified framework and in language accessible to a wide audience. This book should stimulate extensive discussions on these critical issues and innovative ways to approach them." 

(Harold Mooney Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University )

"Resilience Thinking provides a much-needed accessible entrée into a concept that holds the key to our future.... Full of wisdom, sophisticated science, and practical guidance, this book provides profound ideas, insights, and hope to scientists, students, managers, and planners alike."

(Jane Lubchenco Distinguished Professor of Zoology, Oregon State University )

 “Resilience Thinking is an essential guidebook to a powerful new way of understanding our world—and of living resiliently within it—developed in recent decades by an international team of ecologists. With five clear and compelling case studies drawn from regions as diverse as Florida, Sweden, and Australia, this book shows how all highly adaptive systems—from ecologies to economies—go through regular cycles of growth, reorganization, and renewal and how our failures to understand the basic principles of resilience have often led to disaster. Resilience Thinking gives us the conceptual tools to help us cope with the bewildering surprises and challenges of our new century.”

(Thomas Homer-Dixon professor of political science, University of Toronto )

"This is one of those books that barely mentions planning as such, but has lots of implications for it.  It's short but will repay some extra quiet time...Their goal is to get us to look at the world and its systems in a fresh new way."

 

 

(Planning Magazine 20070301)

About the Author

Brian Walker is a Research Fellow in Australia’s CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Visiting Researcher in the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and Chair of the Resilience Alliance. 
 
 David Salt is a science and environment writer at the Australian National University, and has more than two decades experience writing and producing popular science magazines and books. 
 
 Both authors live in Canberra, Australia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Island Press (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597260932
• ISBN-13: 978-1597260930
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > System Theory
  • #45 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Natural Resources
  • #99 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Ecology

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written explanation of complexity in ecosystems July 2, 2007

By A. S. Johnson VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Gem of Useful Education February 24, 2008

By Robert David STEELE Vivas HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Case Studies, poor writing December 11, 2007

By Benjamin Jared Langer

Format:Paperback

This book is Latour's actor network theory in another guise, with the physicalization of Kuhn's paradigm shift thrown in for good measure. It is a very interesting book on an emerging way to look at environmental crises (note, not the environmental crisis. We seriously need local knowledge and local experience to manage each individual ecosystem).

My major issues with this book are twofold. One is that it is not well written, though not altogether poorly written, you can simply tell when the science writer came in to jazz things up. Secondly, the authors spend a little too much time trying to convince the reader that resilience thinking is NEW, DIFFERENT, SUBVERSIVE, and the like. We get, on page 29, something that I just cannot stand: a little briefer than brief history of challenge to dogma. Galileo spoke out about the Copernican model (which was still perfect circles, Kepler had it right but Galileo ignored him) and the church shot him down. Darwin dared to say species change and the world exploded! Now, we, the humble new scientists bring you a new challenge to the dogma of ecology today. Give me a break! I would have thought a science writer on the team would have had the experience to leave out this trite nonsense. Just tell me about your idea and spare me the drama! Sorry, but poor history of science is a real pet peeve. :-)

But either way, this is still an important book that should be read by ecology students, politicians, resource managers, and anyone interested in new ideas. The case studies are really informative and clear, and the message is properly urgent