Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

transformative resilience 41
or a community critically depends on this scale-linking pattern of health that
connects individual health to community health, ecosystem health, the health
of bioregions and nations, and in due course planetary health.
Ultimately, when we talk about sustainability from a whole systems design
perspective, what we are trying to sustain is not just the future of the human
species but also the pattern of ecological interdependencies and planetary
health upon which the fate of our own and so many other species depends.
It is this pattern of health that allows us to stay responsive, adaptable and
resilient in the face of change. Improving community resilience and paying
close attention to the effect of our actions on multiple, interconnected scales
lies at the heart of creating thriving communities and a sustainable culture.
So What Exactly is ‘Resilience?’
Almost 40 years ago, Buzz Holling (1973) published research on the
complex dynamics of change within ecosystems. He looked at how a mature
forest ecosystem can get drastically disturbed by a fire, to the point where
it reverts back to grassland and then, via ecological succession, transforms
first into shrubland then a young forest and finally much later into a
mature forest again. Holling saw that ecosystems could exist in a variety
of dynamically stable (dynamic equilibrium) conditions, and that after
disturbance ecosystems could either bounce back to their initial state before
the disturbance or they could degenerate to less diverse and less vibrant
new equilibrium conditions. In some cases, disturbance could also lead to
a transformation of the ecosystem into a more diverse and more vibrant
dynamic equilibrium condition. These insights led Holling to formulate the
foundations of Resilience Theory:
Resilience is structured around the acceptance of disturbance, even the
generation of disturbance, and the production of variability. The whole history
of life on this planet has been one of dynamic change and it occurred long
before humans appeared, but humans did add something more...by exploiting
resources and reducing diversity and in so doing reducing the resilience of
these systems. The fluctuations that are normal still occur, but they are more
limited. So you can get situations because of human intervention where the
diversity has been so compromised that the fluctuation rather than operating
within a persistent region flips the system somewhere else.
holling, 1973
Over the last decade it has become evident that understanding ecosystem
and community health and resilience lies at the heart of sustainability
as a community-based process of learning how to integrate our social
systems into unique conditions of local and regional ecosystems, as well
as how to stay within safe planetary boundaries. The Resilience Alliance,
an international network of researchers and practitioners focussed on
understanding the complex dynamics of social-ecological systems, defines