Dr. Oran Young of UCSB and chair of the scientific committee of the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme gave a very interesting talk entitled ‘Resilience, Vulnerability, and Change in Environmental Governance Systems’.
A recording of this talk can be found at http://www.ihdp.org/ .
Kevin Kelly, author and former editor of Whole Earth Review and co-founder of Wired as well as board member of Long Now Foundation, has a website Street Use that “features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology”, or examples of what William Gibson described as “The street finds its own uses for things.” Examples include community payphones, Prison Knives, Soviet household innovation, and IEDs.
Similarly, Jan Chipchase blogs on Future Perfect about how people adapt technology, based upon his user research for Nokia.
Other writing on grimmer technological adaptations are:
In two recent articles the New York Times has written about different faces of India: environmental crisis and environmental innovation both driven by failures to effectively govern energy and water systems.India’s water management crisis is described in the article In Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge. The article focuses on New Delhi and how India’s inequality limits its ability to govern public goods, such as aquifiers, rivers, and even its water system.
The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.
The combination has left water all too scarce in some places, contaminated in others and in cursed surfeit for millions who are flooded each year. Today the problems threaten India’s ability to fortify its sagging farms, sustain its economic growth and make its cities healthy and habitable. At stake is not only India’s economic ambition but its very image as the world’s largest democracy.
…New Delhi’s water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities. Nationwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day.
An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can neither quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system.
Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.
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[New Delhi’s] pipe network remains a punctured mess. That means, like most everything else in this country, some people have more than enough, and others too little.
The slums built higgledy-piggledy behind Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood have no public pipes at all. The Jal Board sends tankers instead. The women here waste their days waiting for water, and its arrival sets off desperate wrestling in the streets.
Kamal Krishnan quit her job for the sake of securing her share. Five days a week, she would clean offices in the next neighborhood. Five nights a week, she would go home to find no water at home. The buckets would stand empty. Finally, her husband ordered her to quit. And wait.
“I want to work, but I can’t,” she said glumly. “I go mad waiting for water.”
Elsewhere, in the central city, where the nation’s top politicians have their official homes, the average daily water supply is three times what finally arrives even in Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood.
The same public failings have also lead to an unexpected wind power boom in India. This boom, lead by Suzlon Energy, is described in The Ascent of Wind Power.
Not even on the list of the world’s top 10 wind-turbine manufacturers as recently as 2002, Suzlon passed Siemens of Germany last year to become the fifth-largest producer by installed megawatts of capacity. It still trails the market leader, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark, as well as General Electric, Enercon of Germany and Gamesa Tecnológica of Spain.
Suzlon’s past shows how a company can prosper by tackling the special needs of a developing country. Its present suggests a way of serving expanding energy needs without relying quite so much on coal, the fastest-growth fossil fuel now but also the most polluting.
…Roughly 70 percent of the demand for wind turbines in India comes from industrial users seeking alternatives to relying on the grid, said Tulsi R. Tanti, Suzlon’s managing director. The rest of the purchases are made by a small group of wealthy families in India, for whom the tax breaks for wind turbines are attractive.
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The demand for wind turbines has particularly accelerated in India, where installations rose nearly 48 percent last year, and in China, where they rose 65 percent, although from a lower base. Wind farms are starting to dot the coastline of east-central China and the southern tip of India, as well as scattered mesas and hills across central India and even Inner Mongolia.
WorldChanging also comments on wind power in India.
Marco Janssen writes:
New Scientist of September 23 contains an interesting perspective on increasing the resilience to water shortages:
Draining reservoirs may not sound like the best solution to water shortages, but in parts of the US it may be the only answer. Overuse of underground water in states such as Kansas and New Mexico is causing aquifers to empty at alarming rates. Similar overuse of reservoirs combined with the earlier springtime melting of snow packs, caused by global warming, is shrinking them too.
So how best to make use of the dwindling supplies? Refilling the aquifers may provide a solution by avoiding the evaporation that takes place from reservoirs, according to Tom Brikowski of the University of Texas at Dallas. He told delegates at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Longmont, Colorado, on Monday that slowly releasing some reservoir water can allow it to soak into the river bed downstream, refilling the aquifers beneath.
Brikowski studied the town of Hays, Kansas, which loses 75 per cent of its water supply, stored in the nearby Grand Bluffs reservoir, to evaporation. Using a computer model of the subsurface sand and gravel, he showed that releasing reservoir water would recharge the local aquifer and ensure that the town would have enough water to survive any repeat of past droughts. “This is a radical new way of thinking about how we manage our water, but we have no choice,” Brikowski says. “Kansas is at the forefront of this problem. As climate change continues, the rest of the West will experience it as well.”
Elena Bennett writes:
If, as Alex Steffen argued recently on World Changing, increasing neighborhood resilience is important, how can we go about ensuring that our communities are resilient as possible? Steffen writes, for example that, “Communities which have been designed to be walked and biked rather than driven can better withstand a disruption in the supply of gas.”
The Orion Grassroots Network has a new member, an informal organization that could increase neighborly communication, effectively making communities more resilient. The organization is called the Professional Porch Sitters.
The group was started by Claude Stephens (a.k.a. Crow Hollister) in Louisville, KY, who writes:
“There are no dues, no membership requirements, no mailings, no agenda, no committees, no worries. PPS believes that the radical act of sitting around sharing stories with no specific agenda is critical to building sustainable communities….To become a member you simply need to say you are a member and agree to sit around with friends and neighbors shooting the breeze as often as possible or practical. Preferably on a porch but that’s not critical…
Television and air-conditioning have moved far too many people off their porches and into their homes where they quickly become isolated from their communities. We believe that sometimes the most effective course of action is to sit down and relax while sipping lemonade and sharing stories.”
National Public Radio’s show All Things Considered recently had a story on the merits of porches which mentioned the Professional Porch Sitters in which they write:
“Porches, debate and democracy go together.”
You can find out more about starting your own chapter of the Professional Porch Sitters at the Orion Grassroots Network
At the core of this potential future shift in biological sciences is the recognition that all biological systems are what have come to be known as complex adaptive systems, in which macroscopic patterns reflect the collective dynamics of individual units at lower levels of organization and feed back to affect those more microscopic dynamics. Evolutionary changes operate on multiple levels and multiple scales: from cells, to organisms, to populations, to communities and the biosphere. As my Princeton colleague, Philip Anderson, wrote years ago, “more is different.” Although the details at lower levels govern the behavior at higher levels, understanding those details is not sufficient for understanding how macroscopic patterns emerge or how natural selection operates at lower levels to lead to those patterns. Where those patterns refer to properties of the organism, natural selection operates to modify the details, such as the rules that govern organismal development due to feedbacks from fitness differences among organisms. On the other hand, where those properties refer to those of the biosphere, there is no comparable process of natural selection choosing among competing biospheres. What properties arise are hence largely emergent, reflecting selective events at much lower levels of organization. This is the principal reason that our biosphere is in trouble. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding at what levels selection operates most strongly.The questions that biologists from diverse subdisciplines are asking have commonalities that make clear the continued existence of fundamental challenges that unify biology and that should form the core of much research in the decades to come. Some of these questions are as follows: What features convey robustness to systems? How different should we expect the robustness of different systems to be, depending on whether selection is operating primarily on the whole system or on its parts? How does robustness trade off against adaptability? How does natural selection deal with environmental noise and the consequent uncertainty at diverse scales? When does synchrony emerge, and what are its implications for robustness? When and how does cooperative behavior emerge, and can we derive lessons from evolutionary history to foster cooperation in a global commons?
These are among what we identify as fundamental questions in biology, cutting across subdisciplines and with the potential to reunify the subject. To encourage recognition of these challenges, PLoS Biology is publishing a series of brief discussion papers raising core issues and designed to be provocative (the first in the series is published today [DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040299]). Contributions to the Challenges Series are encouraged; ideas should be sent to biology_editors@plosbiology.org.
Human societies have been built on biodiversity. Many activities indispensable for human subsistence lead to biodiversity loss, and this trend is likely to continue in the future. We clearly benefit from the diversity of organisms that we have learned to use for medicines, food, fibers, and other renewable resources. In addition, biodiversity has always been an integral part of the human experience, and there are many moral reasons to preserve it for its own sake. What has been less recognized is that biodiversity also influences human well-being, including the access to water and basic materials for a satisfactory life, and security in the face of environmental change, through its effects on the ecosystem processes that lie at the core of the Earth’s most vital life support systems.
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By affecting the magnitude, pace, and temporal continuity by which energy and materials are circulated through ecosystems, biodiversity in the broad sense influences the provision of ecosystem services. The most dramatic changes in ecosystem services are likely to come from altered functional compositions of communities and from the loss, within the same trophic level, of locally abundant species rather than from the loss of already rare species. Based on the available evidence, we cannot define a level of biodiversity loss that is safe, and we still do not have satisfactory models to account for ecological surprises. Direct effects of drivers of biodiversity loss (eutrophication, burning, soil erosion and flooding, etc.) on ecosystem processes and services are often more dramatic than those mediated by biodiversity change. Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence that the tapestry of life, rather than responding passively to global environmental change, actively mediates changes in the Earth’s life-support systems. Its degradation is threatening the fulfillment of basic needs and aspiration of humanity as a whole, but especially, and most immediately, those of the most disadvantaged segments of society.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation are launching a new program Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) designed to fund a new Green Revolution for Africa. Seperately, but with similar goals, George Soros is donating $50 million to pay for fertilizers, seeds, classrooms in Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Promise project.The original Green Revolution helped greatly increase farm yields in Asia and Latin America., but in never succeeded in Africa. The Green Revolution’s increase in crop yields greatly increased human wellbeing, but also had major negative environmental impacts and often failed to benefit poorer farmers.
Hopefully this Green Revolution will follow the advice of the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the applied ecologist Gordon Conway. His 1997 book The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century argued that a new increase in crop yields are needed, but unlike the first revolution this new revolution must work with rather than against local ecosystems (see previous posts on low input agriculture, Ecological synergisms in agriculture, and benefits of multifunctional agriculture).
Disasters, including big, system-disrupting disasters, are likely to become more common over the coming decades. Whether they are caused by “ordinary” system failures (like the North American blackout of 2003), terrorism, pandemic, climate change or global instabilities, we should all be prepared to live through times of shortages, service interruptions and danger.
Conventional thinking about disasters in the developed world revolves around seeing that people are prepared as individuals to survive for the short time it takes the authorities to respond to the emergency situation and restore normality. Almost no thought is given to changing the models for systems to make them substantially less brittle and more resilient.
But our planet is getting more dangerous (even uninsurable) and, as New Orleans has shown, recovery is not always rapid, even in wealthy countries. While individual preparedness and government response continue to be vital, perhaps we need to be putting a lot more thought into how we make the neighborhoods in which we live less vulnerable to disasters in the first place. Working with our neighbors and local government to increase the resilience of our communities might be one of the smartest moves we can make.
Building long last durable buildings is one way of approaching green building. Another approach, which was discussed in the TechnoGarden scenario of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, is designing ephemeral buildings that are there when needed and removed when they are not, allowing other uses of the land.A new adaptive architecture approach to the design of Irish seasonal houses has been developed by MacGabhann Architects. The project called Tideaways is part of Ireland’s contribution the Venice Biennale architecture exhibition. They propose houses and develops that are designed to respond to changing seasons and housing use.
In a Guardian article Vanishing trick for Ireland’s second homes (Sept 6, 2006) Owen Bowcott writes about the project:
The Tideaways designs refined by the MacGabhanns envisage rows of three terraces on the coast located inside existing communities. The first row would float on pontoons and could be towed to a harbour when unoccupied. The row behind would rise and fall, on hydraulic rams, with the tide; in winter they could be sunk down to ground level, disappearing into the landscape.
The third row would be permanent and would provide homes for long-term residents of the village. The houses, timber or metal-framed, would be mainly two bedroom bungalows.
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“Our model would ensure there was less impact on the landscape and better planning in villages. We have not built these yet but the Irish government has been very supportive.
“The proliferation of holiday homes has the potential to destroy the very landscape that attracts people in the first place. Despite being in use only 10-20% of the year, these buildings are visible 100% of the time.”