Guest post from Margot Hill Clarvis and Michael Schoon In the aftermath of major global weather events such as Superstorm Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan, companies have increasingly focused on resilient infrastructure, business continuity, and secure supply chains. But are business continuity and rapid recovery the hallmarks of resilience, or has there been a disconnect between the scientific […]
Bruno Latour‘s Gifford Lectures Facing Gaia: A new enquiry into Natural Religion, which were given at University of Edinburgh over the last few months are now on the web. Lecture 1: ‘Once Out of Nature’ – natural religion as a pleonasm Lecture 2: A shift in agency – with apologies to David Hume Lecture 3: The puzzling face of […]
As part of a project I am working on, I did a quick network analysis of co-authorship structure among papers in Ecology and Society. Based on this preliminary analysis, the papers below are the papers that most connect different research communities within the group of people who publish in Ecology & Society*. Toward a Network […]
The journal Ecology and Society publishes a lot of work related to resilience and social-ecological systems. As part of a project I am working on, I did a quick network analysis of co-authorship structure among papers in E&S, and based on this preliminary analysis, the papers below are the most typical of Ecological and Society […]
This is a guest post by Thad Miller, Assistant Professor in Urban Civic Ecology and Sustainable Communities at Portland State University’s Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning. You can visit his website here and follow him on Twitter at @Thad_Miller. This is the second post in a series on technology-Anthropocene-resilience. The first post about […]
The first presentation of the influential environmentalist book Limits to Growth was on March 1 in 1972 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, four decades ago. The study was both hugely influential and hugely controversial, and the authors were quite strongly attacked, often for analytical flaws that their study never said or did. However, after […]
The Anthropocene, the idea that the entire planet has become a social-ecological system, is now being discussed in the mass media. Three recent sightings… 1) The Economist has a feature story A man-made world: Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with. The author writes: To think of deliberately interfering in […]
Will Steffen and I gave contrasting talks in a Mock Court on the meaning of the Anthropocene at the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability in Stockholm. The talks are now online, along with other talks from the symposium (I recommend Frances Westley‘s on innovation). Will and I were arguing about four charges (defined […]
This critical question relates to a suite of resilience related research fields, ranging from early warnings of catastrophic shifts in ecosystems, non-linear planetary boundaries, and the role of perceived crisis as triggers of transformations towards more adaptive forms of ecosystem governance. The answer might seem quite straight-forward: “yes!”. Why wouldn’t political actors try to steer […]
In the end of October 2010, participants in the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) included in their agreement to protect biodiversity , a moratorium on geoengineering. This CBD moratorium came timely as the debate around geoengineering virtually exploded internationally with several high-profile reports being published by, amongst others, the British Royal Society, and the […]