I was surprised and delighted to learn during this year, 2006, that several organizations have recently been established with resilience as one of their primary themes. The most recent is a new Center on Resilience and Sustainability for Social/Ecological Systems in Sweden. It has just been formed by Stockholm University, the Beijer Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute. It joins three other centers that have been recently established with resilience as their focus– for Centre for Coral Reef Biodiversity in Australia, for Climate Change at the Tyndall Centre, UK and, more loosely, for Parks, Ecosystems and People in South Africa.

All have indicated programs for collaboration among the groups, and other members of the Resilience Alliance itself. That is all a very new acceleration of work on both the theories and practices of resilience. They are extraordinarily appropriate places for launching novel experiments, novel knowledge and novel actions at this time of international turmoil. They provide places that beautifully stimulate novelty and excellence across disciplines in a flexible atmosphere where discussion and debate periodically pace deep deliberative enquiry. The Internet can play a big role that creates an international place for such enquiries and debates. They are outstanding examples of the creation of integrative support for fundamental interdisciplinary study.

I started this paper with a good news report and a bad news one about events I now see locally, nationally and internationally.

Essentially I have learned that at such times I certainly do not try to solve the problems of the rigid or the collapsing system. Instead, I initiate a variety of experiments, mobilize my understanding, develop experiments, models and tests, and wait for an opportunity to emerge that might use the results. In our variety of regional studies that always happened. At that time a menu of possibilities then exist for renewing the system. And we hope that happens globally as well.

No one at this time of deep change should define the profile for the research that will grab the emerging systems in the world. Instead, it is precisely the time to ask what interests you? It is the time where individuals can have the greatest effect.

So, in closing, here is what interests me, one individual, now.

Social Traps: I’d sure like to learn more about different societal traps and why some are irreversible. We guessed at two in the Panarchy book’s third chapter. One was a “poverty trap” where a society flips out of an adaptive cycle at a large political scale in a way that progressively triggers similar collapses at ever-smaller scales. Structure (organizations and institutions) is destroyed in the process, leaving the society finally as independent families separately struggling for survival, having lost their portion of the society’s capital. Learning and self-help is minimal. We also posited a “rigidity trap”, where wealth was great, resilience high and internal connectedness strong. That is the kind of hierarchist trap that freezes the adaptive cycle by ejecting dissidents and minimizing learning. I think of the fundamentalist religions as examples- dangerous examples. I know the healthy state for a society is one where there is a nested set of adaptive cycles; continually testing changed circumstances and adapting to them. But they can slip out of that sustaining state, into traps. Some of those traps are essentially irreversible. We need to learn more about them. We need more examples that demonstrate them. And we need to learn ways that can lead to ways out of them.

Social Adaptive Cycles: I’d also like to discover where and why some social systems- public organizations, private firms, regions, nations, international consortia- are much slower than ecosystems to break creatively and seem so much slower to transform into new structures with new opportunities. That often seemed to be the case for our case studies of regional public and political organizations, at least, where a market does not force change. And for national and international assemblages, think of the anthropological and modern examples- anarchy and the first World War, the Marshall Plan and its incredible success in facilitating recovery in Europe, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had mixed results we are still living with. Panarchy, resilience and the connections of memory and revolt between scales provide a new focus for this old question.

Living on the Edge: I am very interested to see tests that show whether cities, organizations and economies on the edge of social/economic/ecological lumps, have the same features of living on the edge of crisis and opportunity as do animals living on the edge of their body mass lumps. That is where the dynamic nature of panarchies starts to provide insights into constraints and opportunities for changes and transformations that can ride the natural forces.

A Panarchy Game: I would love to see collaboration between those who have developed panarchy thinking and those who are developing certain kinds of games. Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and the Sims, was an early one, and now has efforts that capture abilities to zoom in to the small and out to the large or into the fast and out to the slow [Spore]. These are the games of the “Long Zoom and the Long Now” that are emerging independent of the kind or research that led to Panarchy. But it is driven by the same goals, the same fun, and the same intensity. The two need to be joined for a bump in innovation.

Globalizing Experiments: I’d also like to see more experiments on the Web and the internet, some in conjunction with occasional face to face meetings, some designing new ways to present educational programs, some using novel ways to display complex data or policies simply, some providing new ways to present and explore information, like Goggle Earth, some developing interactive games for regional and global social and ecosystemic designs, some presenting more Blogs, debates and discussions, some that use movies that express dynamic changes in an intelligible manner. We have done some of that- most notably by Garry Peterson for his Young Scholars Dialogues in Ecology and Society and this blog – Resilience Science. We need more.

Self-organization Combining with Evolution: I’d like to support studies that explore how the link between self-organization of entities at different scales in the Panarchy link with natural selection to affect the speed and scale of evolutionary change. I believe that self-organization and natural selection jointly flourish and interact as a new way to view evolution, opening up another fruitful landscape for enquiry and theoretical development. In the sciences of biological evolution, that combination can often be viewed as either an obscure or an excessive representation! But it is suggestive and provocative, and that has particular value at times of deep change. It again opens a new landscape of thought for investigation and action from local, to regional to global scales. That is a big journey from its start, over 40 years ago, when I was immersed in lovely experiments of deep enquiry about praying mantids!

To conclude, I argue that we preeminently need novel integrative work. Specifically, novel work that integrates the economic and social with ecosystemically driven understanding. Multi-scale, searching for the relatively simple features of complex systems. Fundamentally non-linear. A testing of a range of methods and a disbelief in any of them. A wedding of theory, empirical examples and application. An emphasis on a search for generality, which needs cooperative works with others expert in other fields, but ones who share the curiosity and fun of mutual discovery. That is much more valuable, now, in this time of political turbulence and transformation in the world, than new policies and new planning exercises. They are too early, and too dangerous in their reliance on successes that worked for past problems. We now live in too new a world.

I have been asked why I have so many novel, yet useful ideas, ones that eventually move to some kind of fruition, testing and, usually, after a very long time, acceptance.  I do not really know, so what I write here is a guess.

I am prodigiously curious about nature, and that triggers initial ideas.   I am also terribly persistent and stubborn about developing and testing an idea that grabs me; at those times I am totally and narrowly focused, driven by the potential. That is what eventually makes an idea useful.  So I conclude that nature creates the idea; stubbornness makes it useful!  But I have had to learn how to see nature.  It is curiosity, anecdote, funny correlations, jokes and metaphors that have done that.

I enjoy communicating the excitement and the evolving stages of these ideas to others.  And I like to discuss all this in classes with students, involving them directly in whatever research is most topical.   That leads me to careful mentoring of some younger colleagues whose talents stand out.  Earlier I mentioned a number of them.

I am delighted if others become interested and propose extensions or alternative explanations.  I get profoundly upset if, at such times, someone says these suites of nascent ideas, or any one idea is wrong and that projects based on them should stop. I have got into big arguments with distinguished scholars over that one!  In contrast, I see them as rich ways to explore the unknown; I see them as rich ways to develop friendships that endure.

Frances Westley once pointed out to me the three principal types of scientist she sees.  Those are consolidators, technical talents, and artists. Consolidators accumulate and solidify advances and are deeply skeptical of ill formed and initial, hesitant steps. That can have great value at stages in a scientific cycle when rigorous efforts to establish the strength and value of an idea is central.

In contrast, I love those initial hesitant steps and like to see clusters of them. That is the kind of thing needed at the beginning of a cycle of scientific enquiry or even just before that. Such nascent, partially stumbling ideas, are the largely hidden source for the engine that eventually generates change in science. So I am not a particularly good consolidator.

I also am not a preeminently good technical person, though I do have sufficient technical experience to have developed considerable, well-grounded skepticism of the biases existing in traditional methods.   I know some statistics, something about modeling, something about mathematics and a lot about biology. I enjoy integrating across all those talents.

But I love the nascent ideas, the sudden explosion of a new idea, the connections of the new idea with others.  And I love the development and testing of the idea till it gets to the point it is convincing. That needs persistence to the level of stubbornness and I happily invest in that persistence.   I guess I fit somewhat into the artist type, less the technical type and still less into an efficient consolidator.

As part of that kind of scientist, I have tried to develop senses that help me listen to intriguing voices that are hidden amongst the noise.  Owlish ways to hear the rustle of the mouse. The simplest example of what I mean is in sculpting, another pleasure I have.  I start with a number of hazy ideas, and then I discover the image caught and hidden in the swirls of the wood’s grain.  I listen to the voice of the wood.

My research has always been like that.  In the early days of investigating predator/prey functional responses, the device that helped retain generalization was components analysis.  It was a way to engage levels of complexity and maintain generality.  It required a beast-for-the-moment design- the beast most appropriate for the step in hand.  The result was many voices, each playing facets of one song.  Praying mantis, insect parasitoids, deer mice and shrews, barracuda and iao, salmon, the suite of insectivorous birds in the boreal forest.  Lions and gazelles.  It was a way to listen to the hidden voice of nature.  Those voices led to the discovery of resilience.  Not a song but a symphony!

More recently, at last I heard the “world is lumpy” music that emerges from patterns in ecosystems at scales from centimeters to hundreds of kilometers, from days to millennia.  And the approach used to examine the subtleties is a bit of strong inference, but more of adaptive inference and multiple lines of evidence- from every major biome in the world, from endangered and invasive species, from nomadic and sedentary organisms (Holling and Allen 2002).  And beyond that, similar rhythms, once heard, seem to be in economic systems, social and behavioral.

Adaptive ecosystem management has been the same process.  The workshops evolved to let human voices speak- scientist, scholar, and practitioner.  I learned who they were, in heart and spirit, and each had a different contribution.  The Peerless Leader learned the guiding melody.  The Blunt Scot was on percussion.  The Snively Whiplash provided the creative dissonance.  The Utopian dreamed the impossible dreams. And the Compleat Amanuensis recorded it all.  The Benevolent Despot hummed a lot.  All these folks and the revealing workshop process and models are described in Holling and Chambers (1973).

At this point, I am delighted with the results of some of my more recent inventions, which have been made with great help from colleagues of the international Resilience Alliance and the Internet journal Ecology and Society. I really do not know what the Alliance and its journal will become as they evolve.  But basically right now they provide a foundation to develop devices to listen to the quiet voices of people- scientists and scholars of many stripes, practitioners, and for them to listen to each other.  In universities, government, the public and the private sector.  I wish in business as well.  For the moment, it is people in the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, in Spain and Malaysia, South America and Madagascar, Canada and Australia.  In Africa.  And not just in the US.  We identify voices that have been masked by the noise, ones where novelty and experience combine.  We are finding ways to have deliberative conversations among listeners.

References
Holling, C.S. and A.D. Chambers.  1973.  Resource science:  the nurture of an infant.  Bioscience 23(1): 13-20.

Holling , C.S. and Craig Allen. 2002. Adaptive inference for distinguishing credible from incredible patterns in nature.  Ecosystems 5: 319-328.