vesterberg.se

We have many interesting initiatives in Sweden; I have written about Tällberg Foundation earlier. We also have the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which was started in January 2007. It is an international centre that focuses on research for governance of social-ecological systems with a special emphasis on resilience. The term social-ecological means that humans  must be seen as a part of, not apart from, nature.

What is resilience? Wikipedia says:

Resilience is the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.

Stockholm Resilience Centre defines it this way:

Resilience refers to the capacity of a social-ecological system both to withstand perturbations from for instance climate or economic shocks and to rebuild and renew itself afterwards.

A resilient system is prepared for change and can deal with it and survive. It bounces back after challenges and shocks. Its goals are sustainability. Nature is designed this way.

Most of our man-made systems have developed in the other direction. We desire efficiency, maximized production and monetary profit. Diversity is suffocated. Healthy buffering is removed and just-in-time is what counts. The result is short-sightedness. We get fragile and nervous systems. In economical turbulence, when one fall – many others fall. We have to identify the dangerous policies and exchange them for resilient policies, whether it be in the social, economical or any area.

Stockholm Resilience Centre have a lot of interesting videos at their site, many interviews and some seminars. For example, have a look at an interview with Buzz Holling, a well-known researcher on this subject.

We have been taught that nature is a place of competition and that different species must struggle for existence. Darwin wrote “All nature is at war, one organism with each other or with external nature.” Man is supposed to be the one which has climbed the highest and now dominates nature. Obviously we have exerted dominion. But Darwin’s ideas were influenced by the prevalent classical, mechanical view of nature. He considered each species in isolation. Darwin’s theory was an insufficient explanation of what was going on in nature, a limited model.

Many scientists are reevaluating Darwin’s model today. It is evident that there is a lot of cooperation going on. The fact is that nature is a web of life where the species cooperate and need each other. There is no waste. Everything is reused. All organisms are dependent on the others for the completion of their life cycles. Each one has found its own niche.

During the last three decades a revolution has occurred in the life sciences that has enlarged the framework for understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this view, the relationship between parts or individual organisms is often characterized by continual cooperation, strong interaction and mutual dependence.

For example, the fossil records indicate that the temperature and composition of the Earth’s atmosphere have been continuously regulated by the whole of life during the last million years, even though the intensity of the Sun has changed quite much. The least discrepancy would have resulted in catastrophe and a sterile planet. We have millions of species interacting by complex feedback loops. Here diversity is a necessity and key to survival of life on planet earth.

We are surrounded and composed by microorganisms, bacteria, germs and they are indispensable to every known living structure on Earth today. These tiny fellows are not way down on the evolutionary ladder. They are the building blocks of life at this instant.

The more diverse a system is, the more resilient it is and the more able it is to withstand stress. This is the way the world operates. Obviously we should join its way of operating. Yet man has fought diversity through colonialism and industrialization. In the spirit of old Darwinism we spread out and conquered the world, ignorant of our true dependency of own environment.

If the Darwinian model is the ultimate model; we are at war, and our hope to stop this craziness is in vain. But the more I realize that the nature is cooperation and that diversity is actually a strength, the more hope rises in me. Life is all around us. Man ought to realize his place in the web of life and begin to cooperate.

As you can understand from my blog I am thinking and reading a lot along these lines. There is always a personal application also. As I was out walking with my dog today, I meditated over being part of the web of life. Fascinating. A responsibility.