Brian Walker (4) (1940–)

Resilience Thinking is a slim book about sustainability and systems in ecology. Structured around five case studies, this volume is both a manifesto and a strong work of popular scholarship. Brian Walker clearly elucidates the failures of command-and-control ecosystem management based on optimizing one part of a system for efficiency. As the case studies in ecosystem management show, human prosperity is based around ecosystem services. Over decades and centuries, human intervention in these show more systems has disrupted natural cycles, the accumulated damage pushing these systems across a threshold where lakes become stinking stagnant ponds, coral reefs bleached deserts, and forests highly flammable pest traps.

The antidote to fragility and collapse is diversity of response, pluralistic management systems, and recognizing slow changes in key variables, like ground-water salinity. Systems with many species and redundancies perform better under pressure. Long term build up of phosphorus in water, or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, cannot be easily reversed once a tipping point has been crossed.

There's an element of tragedy to this book. With over a decade since its publication, I can't bear to go and check on how the cases have performed. The logical of capitalism, of maximizing immediate profits and protecting voter interest groups, seems too strong to easily overcome. And as a card-carrying ecomodernist, I wonder how resilience fits in with a program of intensification and decoupling. Still, this is an important book and one that deserves careful attention. show less

This slim volume serves as a good introduction to several concepts of systems theory.

It covers the importance of:
*looking at problems from a unified socio-ecological framework where people and environment are considered together,
*being aware of key thresholds that if crossed put the system in a new regime or stable state that may be quite different than before,
*considering where in the adaptive cycle of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization the system may be and what the show more implications of that are,
*and the importance of looking at what's happening at different scales and how they interact.

Taken together, this way of thinking and planning can profoundly alter the way we seek to manage our human and natural resources. The authors provide plenty of case studies to demonstrate the principles discussed, which I think increases the book's effectiveness. show less