Sometimes friends ask me for summer book suggestions. If you’re up for some big picture thinking, I can recommend The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon. I admit, with “Catastrophe” in the sub-title, it’s not exactly escapist froth for the beach. But having read it a few years ago, I find my thoughts coming back to some of the core ideas. Among other things, Homer-Dixon offers a great introduction to the concept of resilience, and what it takes for ecosystems and societies to maintain resilience.
As complexity increases in systems, resilience tends to decline. Predictability also is lost as complexity rises and feedback loops emerge. This was a theme I also focused on in my 2008/2009 Annual Report, “The one thing you can expect from complex systems is the unexpected.” Once you’re attuned to the resilience concept, you begin to see the implications everywhere, from the cyclical burning and regrowth of fire-adapted northern forests to periodic financial bubbles and collapses, to this past spring’s social upheavals and democratic renewals in a string of Arab nations.
Building Resilience where I observed that I returned to the resilience theme this past spring in my annual Greenhouse Gas Report Meeting Responsibilities – Creating Opportunities, noting the risk of a climatic tipping point in the nearterm.Even in southern Ontario we are seeing cities like Peterborough battered by repeated extreme storms, supposedly rare, one-in-100-year events, as I described in my 2009/2010 Annual Report.
We face a great challenge: to de-carbonize our global economy in the next 40 years in order to avoid this tipping point. This is a challenge that will require humanity’s full scope of creativity and exuberant experimentation. It will also require resilience at every level of social organization.
Summer can be a good time for quiet reflection – preferably by a cool lake, a hammock slung under some big old trees. That may be the very best place for us to re-imagine ourselves in a resilient future.
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Thank you for your post and suggestion to read The Upside of Down.
Part of what I focus on is the resilience of individuals.
In order for individuals to begin to even contemplate issues like the ‘tipping point’ you refer they need to become aware of their own individual ‘tipping point’ when it comes to interacting with others and the world at large.
Today I watched as someone ‘lost it’ because someone took 5 seconds instead of 2 to move on a filtered green light. The driver’s reactions was so aggressive that they attempted to run the other driver off the road. The tipping point for the stress response to what they saw as adverse conditions I would think is quite low.
For us to begin to think about how we contribute to the resilience of the environment we need to come to terms with our own knee-jerk reactions when something doesn’t go they way we’d like.
Some of may need to sit beside that lake, as you suggested, and reflect on what is truly important to sustaining not only our resilient relationship to ourselves, others and the planet.
Thanks for giving me pause to reflect on my own relationship to others and the planet.
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