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Chapter 10
Global Environmental Change, Resilience,
and Sustainable Outcomes
Charles L. Redman
Arizona State University
Chapter Abstracts
Resilience of a system is often defined as the system’s ability to maintain its
basic structure and essential functions in the face of a stress or a shock. In many
ways a socio-ecological system’s response to the occurrence of a natural hazard
is an excellent, although often extreme, case study of resilience. In examining
these ecodynamics, we must differentiate between what we expect to be appropriate
behavior based on our own implicitly justified normative views and
what we actually observe in the past to be a sustainable situation. Many basic
principles advocated in ecological versions of resilience theory—such as the
value of redundancy, flexibility, stored capital, investment in mitigation, and
maximum information flow—may in fact conflict with sustainable outcomes
when applied to human-dominated systems. Moreover, a resilience approach
is often predicated on the assumption that current conditions (natural in particular)
are optimal and that change equates with degradation of the system
and hence is negative. However, as we know from social systems, current conditions
may not be desirable and may have feedbacks that strongly resist change
(e.g., the poverty trap). Implementing a sustainability approach requires that
we not only promote a system’s adaptive capacity but also that we evaluate the
desirability of the system as it now operates and develop measurable indicators
that encode desirable, normatively held values. These indicators would include
aspects of the biophysical functioning of the ecosystem but also equity and
access to opportunities in the social system and how the two interact and ramify.
In fact, most practitioners of sustainability find that the systems they study
are not only less than optimal but also do not even meet minimal standards
of sustainability. All of this becomes more complex in the face of potential,
systems-transforming natural hazards.
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