Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems: Volume 60 (Scope Report, 60., Band 60) - Softcover

International Council Of Scientific Unions Scientific Committee On Pro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559639717 ISBN 13: 9781559639712

Verlag: Island Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Scientists and researchers concerned with the behavior of large ecosystems have focused in recent years on the concept of "resilience." Traditional perspectives held that ecological systems exist close to a steady state and resilience is the ability of the system to return rapidly to that state following perturbation. However beginning with the work of C. S. Holling in the early 1970s, researchers began to look at conditions far from the steady state where instabilities can cause a system to shift into an entirely different regime of behavior, and where resilience is measured by the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system is restructured.

Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems examines theories of resilience and change, offering readers a thorough understanding of how the properties of ecological resilience and human adaptability interact in complex, regional-scale systems. The book addresses the theoretical concepts of resilience and stability in large-scale ecosystems as well as the empirical application of those concepts in a diverse set of cases. In addition, it discusses the practical implications of the new theoretical approaches and their role in the sustainability of human-modified ecosystems.

The book begins with a review of key properties of complex adaptive systems that contribute to overall resilience, including multiple equlibria, complexity, self-organization at multiple scales, and order; it also presents a set of mathematical metaphors to describe and deepen the reader's understanding of the ideas being discussed. Following the introduction are case studies that explore the biophysical dimensions of resilience in both terrestrial and aquatic systems and evaluate the propositions presented in the introductory chapters. The book concludes with a synthesis section that revisits propositions in light of the case studies, while an appendix presents a detailed account of the relationship between return times for a disturbed system and its resilienc.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen R. Carpenter, Carl Folke, C. S. Holling, Bengt-Owe Jansson, Donald Ludwig, Ariel Lugo, Tim R. McClanahan, Garry D. Peterson, and Brian H. Walker.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lance H. Gunderson is associate professor and chair, and Lowell Pritchard Jr. is assistant professor, in the Department of Environmental Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems

By Lance H. Gunderson, Lowell Pritchard Jr.

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE)
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55963-971-2

Contents

About Island Press, 
About SCOPE, 
SCOPE Series, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Table of Figures, 
List of Tables, 
Foreword, 
Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
PART I - Understanding Resilience: Theory, Metaphors, and Frameworks, 
1 - Resilience of Large-Scale Resource Systems, 
2 - Models and Metaphors of Sustainability, Stability, and Resilience, 
PART II - Resilience in Large-Scale Systems, 
3 - Resilience and the Restoration of Lakes, 
4 - The Baltic Sea: Reversibly Unstable or Irreversibly Stable?, 
5 - Resilience of Coral Reefs, 
6 - Resilience in Wet Landscapes of Southern Florida, 
7 - Ecological Resilience in Grazed Rangelands: A Generic Case Study, 
8 - Resilience of Tropical Wet and Dry Forests in Puerto Rico, 
9 - Forest Dynamics in the Southeastern United States: Managing Multiple Stable States, 
PART III - Summary, 
10 - A Summary and Synthesis of Resilience in Large-Scale Systems, 
List of Contributors, 
Scope Series List, 
SCOPE Executive Committee 2001–2004, 
Index, 
Island Press Board of Directors, 

CHAPTER 1

Resilience of Large-Scale Resource Systems

Lance H. Gunderson, C. S. Holling, Lowell Pritchard Jr., and Garry D. Peterson

Regional-scale systems of people and nature provide some of the most vexing challenges for attaining social goals of sustainability, biological conservation, or economic development. There are many more examples of failures than successes, as measured by numerous resource systems that exist in a constant or recurring state of crisis (Ludwig et al. 1993). In the Florida Everglades, agricultural interests, environmentalists, and urban residents contest with one another for control over clean water (Light et al. 1995). In the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, various advocates of salmon argue over the appropriate use of the Columbia River with those who prefer cheap hydroelectric power (Lee 1993; Volkman and McConnaha 1993). The nations surrounding the Baltic Sea struggle with issues of governance as the fish populations and water quality of the sea declines (Jansson and Velner 1995). Within Zimbabwe, large-scale land use conversions are testing stabilities of both ecological and political structures. In these cases resource management has taken a pathological form in which the complexity of the issues, institutional inertia, and uncertainty lead to a state of institutional gridlock, when inaction causes ecological issues to be ignored and existing policies and relationships to be continued.

Paradoxically, this failure often arises from the success of initial management actions. Managers of natural resource systems are often successful at rapidly achieving a set of narrowly defined goals. Unfortunately, this success encourages people to build up a dependence upon its continuation while simultaneously eroding away the ecological support that it requires. This leads to a state in which ecological change is increasingly undesirable to the people dependent upon the natural resource and simultaneously more difficult to avoid. This management pathology leads to unwanted changes in nature, a loss of ecological resilience, conservative management policies, and loss of trust in management agencies.

Recent work reveals a way out of this pathology in large, regional-scale systems. These systems move through periods of surprise, crisis, and reformation (Gunderson et al. 1995). Managers are surprised when the inadequacies of many, if not most, management policies are revealed by ecosystem dynamics. A crisis occurs when it is becomes unambiguously clear that existing policies caused this surprise. The crisis is followed by periods of denial, resistance, and often, finally, by a period of reformation during which new policies are developed and implemented. It is during these periods of crisis that institutions and the connections between them are most open to dramatic transformation. This ability to transform and survive requires that the resource system have sufficient resilience to permit the experimental development of new management policies.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience has been defined in two different ways in the ecological literature, each reflecting different aspects of stability. One definition focuses on efficiency and depends on constancy and predictability—all attributes of engineers' desire for fail-safe design. The other focuses on persistence, despite change and unpredictability—all attributes embraced and celebrated by evolutionary biologists and by resource managers who search for safe-fail designs. Holling (1973) first emphasized these contrasting aspects of stability to draw attention to the tensions between efficiency and persistence, between constancy and change, and between predictability and unpredictability.

The more common definition, which we term engineering resilience (Holling 1996), conceives ecological systems to exist close to a stable steady state. Engineering resilience, then, is the speed of return to the steady state following a perturbation (Pimm 1984; O'Neill et al. 1986; Tilman and Downing 1994). This idea of disturbance away from and return to a stable state is also at the center of twentieth-century economic theory (Varian 1992; Kamien and Schwartz 1991).

The second definition, which we term ecological resilience (Walker et al. 1981; Holling 1996), emphasizes conditions far from any stable steady state, where instabilities can shift or flip a system into another regime of behavior—in other words, to another stability domain (Holling 1973). In this case, resilience is measured by the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system is restructured with different controlling variables and processes.

The differences between these two aspects of stability—essentially between a focus on maintaining efficiency of function (engineering resilience) and a focus on maintaining existence of function (ecological resilience)—are so fundamental that they can become alternative paradigms in which subscribers dwell on received wisdom rather than the reality of nature. Those using the concept of engineering resilience tend to explore system behavior near a known stable state, while those examining ecological resilience tend to search for alternative stable states and the properties of the boundaries between states.

Those who explore engineering resilience and the near-equilibrium behavior of ecosystems operate in the primarily deductive tradition of mathematical theory (e.g., Pimm 1984) that imagines simplified, untouched ecological systems; or they draw upon the traditions of engineering, which are motivated by the need to design systems with a single operating objective (Waide and Webster 1976; DeAngelis 1980; O'Neill et al. 1986). These approaches simplify the mathematics and accommodate the engineer's drive to develop optimal designs. However, there is an implicit assumption that ecosystems exhibit only one equilibrium steady state or, if other operating states exist, that those states should be avoided (figure 1.1).

On the other hand, those who emphasize ecological resilience come from traditions of applied mathematics and applied resource ecology at the scale of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1559639717
• ISBN 13: 9781559639712
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Herausgeber: Gunderson Lance H., Pritchard Lowell Jr.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar