Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

44 Designing ecological Habitats
Fig.2: Schematic of
a Holarchy of nested
Social-Ecological
Systems.
interact at and between various spatial scales. Sustainable
community design has to take place within such a spatially
and temporally scale-linking frame of reference (Wahl, 2007).
Many of the factors that will cause a loss of resilience
at one particular scale, say within a community and its
ecosystem, will also affect resilience at another scale, say at
the national, or planetary level. Localized actions, like the
burning of fossil fuel, can accumulate to have global effects
like climate change, which in turn can affect local conditions
in multiple and unpredictable ways. This is the nature of the
fundamentally interconnected nested system (holarchy) in
which we live. Within emerging field of resilience research
and practice these nested spatial and temporal dynamics have
been explored under the concept of panarchy (see: www.resalliance.org for
more information).
Among the factors that can degrade resilience at multiple scales are:
loss of biodiversity, toxic pollution, interference with the hydrological
cycle, degradation of soils and erosion – but also, inflexible institutions,
perverse subsidies that incentivise unsustainable patterns of consumption,
and inappropriately chosen measures of total value that focus on shortterm
maximization of production and increased efficiencies at the loss of
redundancy and diversity in the system as a whole.
The World System Model of the International Futures Forum (IFF) is
structured around 12 critical aspects or components of a resilient system that
have to be considered in an interconnected way. The model can be applied at
various scales, and has already been used to create more integrated ‘transition
plans’ for community and bioregional resilience (see: www.iffworldmodel.
net).
All the aspects (or nodes) of the World Systems Model have to be
considered in the creation of a viable and resilient system, whether at the
scale of a community, a bioregion, a nation, or the (a) planet. The aim is not
to create isolation or self-sufficiency at every scale, since in an interconnected
and interdependent holarchically structured system complete isolation is
impossible and would lead to the collapse of the system. Rather than selfsufficiency,
what we should aim for is greater self-reliance at each scale: an
increased ability to meet basic human needs as close to home as possible
and within the limits of regional and planetary boundaries. It is time to
create import substitution strategies based on regional production!
An example for systemic re-design of our systems of governance that
would enable transformative resilience responses at the community and
bioregional scale would be the implementation of subsidiarity. The political
principle of subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should have a
subsidiary function, performing only those tasks that cannot be performed
effectively at a more immediate or local level. Such a governance structure
would empower active citizen participation in the transition to a more
resilient society, without doing away with political collaboration at the