Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

In the past several years, the term ‘Resilience’ has surged into the lexicon of sustainable
community designers as being a goal of the utmost importance; yet not until I read this
exposition by Daniel Wahl did I fully grasp what it meant. Daniel does an excellent job
explaining not only the essence but the context of this rapidly spreading meme. In wellversed
systems languaging, the author draws on numerous recent studies to make the
case that not only is resilience an important goal, it is the way of Nature herself.
Dr. Wahl makes accessible these recent scientific findings to our global readership.
Transformative Resilience
Daniel Christian Wahl, Ph.D. – Son Rullan on Mallorca, Spain
Living beyond Planetary Boundaries
We are living in a more and more brittle world. The most pervasive effect of
the modern industrial growth society and its expansion via colonialism and
later the neo-colonialism of economic globalization has been to erode away
the intricate pattern that connected humanity to the unique conditions of the
particular places in which communities found themselves. We have severed
the hidden connections that were the lifelines of people who lived in intimate
reciprocity with the places they called ‘home’ for thousands of years.
By and large, humanity lived in a locally and bioregionally adapted way
until the burning of fossil fuels – first coal, and then oil and gas – made a
massive expansion of global trade volume, human population, and overconsumption
possible. This is not say that human history is not full of
examples of regionalized civilizations overexploiting their available natural
resources and eroding resilience to a point that either triggered the collapse
of those civilizations or forced them into aggressive expansion and war with
their neighbours.
We are living in the age of Resource Wars over access to oil and water.
Soon, the localized and dwindling reserves of elements that are critical to the
production of information technologies, batteries and catalytic converters,
such as iridium, palladium, lithium and platinum, will lead to more power
differentials and conflict. The pace and scope of overconsumption is pushing
resource availability and ecosystem resilience to a limit. We are beginning to
exceed planetary boundaries.
Humanity’s collective actions have now reached a scale that we are eroding
the health, vitality, and resiliency of biological processes and ecosystems to
such an extent that we are interfering with the planetary life-support system
itself.The Gaian process of creating conditions conducive to life is the basis
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