Comparing Panarchy and Pace Layering

On the EcoTrust web magazine People and Place Howard Silverman compares Stewart Brand‘s concept of Pace Layering with Panarchy in Panarchy and Pace in the Big Back Loop: “The back loop is the time of the Long Now,” writes Resilience Alliance founder Buzz Holling. It is a time “when each of us must become aware […]

Testing Panarchy : Reflections Pt 8

The third paper of my papers that the students asked me about was: Holling, C.S. 1992. Cross-scale morphology, geometry and dynamics of ecosystems. Ecological Monographs. 62(4):447-502. That paper was inspired by my 1986 chapter The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change, which I reviewed earlier. I designed the paper to be a […]

Critically reflecting on social-ecological systems research

Guest post from Simon West, Diego Galafassi, Jamila Haider, Andres Marin, Andrew Merrie, Daniel Ospina-Medina, Caroline Schill Critical reflection is a core competence for sustainability researchers and a crucial mechanism through which research evolves and breaks new ground. For instance, Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling stress in the canonical social-ecological systems (SES) book Panarchy that SES […]

Classics of Social Science 1: Karl Marx the first ecological sociologist?

Guest post by Simon West: Reflections on Week Two of the Resilience Research School PhD course, ‘Why Bother with Durkheim? Using (classical) social science to understand the social dynamics of social-ecological systems.  (previously Week One – why study classics). There is almost certainly no social scientist whose reputation precedes them as much as Karl Marx. […]

Connecting the Instability of Markets and Ecosystems – C.S. Holling and Hyman Minsky

Both markets and ecosystems can, and have, been viewed as being shaped by feedback processes that push them towards a steady state – in markets this is the “invisible hand” – in ecology it is “succession.”  However, what has been appreciated in ecology, and has been reluctantly included in economics is that these invisible hands […]

Resilience and Life in the Arctic

On Thursday, March 10, 2011, the Resilience Alliance Board voted to accept Eddy Carmack as the new Program Research Director. Eddy is a climate oceanographer studying water and people from oceans to estuaries as scientific lead for the Canada’s Three Oceans monitoring program in the Arctic and Subarctic; he is retiring in 2011.  He invented […]

Visualising sustainability

Computing for Sustainability has a fascinating collection of conceptual diagrams of sustainability.  The collection includes over 250 images. Its a diverse set including everything from Herman Daly’s vision of the economy (#1), the MA’s ecosystem service framework (#168), panarchy (#175), and Heman Daly’s steady state economy (#177).  But it could use some editing and organization […]