Panarchy

Alfons

Way of the future
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6008
http://www.resalliance.org/

Anyone know anything about this stuff? Are these respected theories?

My dad sent me this article. He's a very concious environmentalist, but all within the current framework (ngo work, protesting, letter writing, trying to have a green house hold, driving a prius etc). I enjoy getting him riled up about environmentalism and send him Björn Lomborg/Michael Chrichton type stuff all the time, so he sends me stuff like this back.

I like the idea of interconnected systems of various scales, and the idea of a disaster striking them when they are all at there least resillient stage makes sense, but I think the analogy is transferred onto human society and the global economy a bit to hastily in this article. The "holland-times-10" quote is also hillarious.

Thoughts?
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I like the part where they describe the cycles of the forest... seems to make sense although I'd like to read more by that forest cycles guy before I saw a direct parallel to human societies/global society...
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards.

roffle
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
the Resilience Alliance reminds me of the SFI - i used to go to their public lectures when i lived in NM: http://www.santafe.edu/ i'm interested in how this systems-cybernetic-complexity science approach might translate into politics. consumer researchers have been studying collective/emergent behaviors for a long time - they understand you need to have a simultaneous perspective on the local and global effects, and they've developed ways of controlling flows of collective perceptions, affects, even ideas and so on, but it isn't an exact science.

i like this group's approach. the bit about nested cycles is especially interesting: "There's one more essential part to Holling's theory. He argues that no given adaptive cycle exists in isolation. Rather, it's usually sandwiched between higher and lower adaptive cycles. For instance, above the forest's cycle is the larger and slower-moving cycle of the regional ecosystem, and above that, in turn, is the even slower cycle of global biogeochemical processes, where planetary flows of materials and elements-like carbon-can be measured in time spans of years, decades, or even millennia. Below the forest's adaptive cycle, on the other hand, are the smaller and faster cycles of sub-ecosystems that encompass, for instance, particular hillsides or streams. In fact, adaptive cycles can be found all the way down to the level of bacteria in the soil, where the smallest and fastest cycles of all are found. Here things happen on a tiny scale of millimeters or even microns, and they can take place in minutes or even seconds. So the entire hierarchy of adaptive cycles-what Holling and his colleagues call a panarchy-spans a scale in space from soil bacteria to the entire planet and a scale in time from seconds to geologic epochs."

anywhere humans leave an imprint, you find some kind of rupture in the natural flows of these various systems. this simply has to change. we'll go extinct if we're not able to stabilize all these systems. i think there's a future in organic design (like this: http://www.organicarchitect.com/), whether in architecture or whatever. i guess biofuels and stuff like that form a natural cycle-within-a-cycle, or an organic fusion with the natural environment. so it's not an artificial extension of the (artificial) human. personally i'd like to live in one of Paul Laffoley's plant houses:

vegetable_house_view.jpg
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This reminds me of a lot of the stuff in the later Dune novels, all about planning for the long-term survival and re-invigoration of the human race over thousands of years. Also the 'psychohistory' stuff in Asimov's Foundation series.
 
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Mr BoShambles

jambiguous
anywhere humans leave an imprint, you find some kind of rupture in the natural flows of these various systems. this simply has to change. we'll go extinct if we're not able to stabilize all these systems. i think there's a future in organic design.

Agreed. I reckon there's a cross-over here with the permaculture thread. The integrated design techniques/principles at the core of permaculture are derived from systems thinking and stress resilience and adaptability...
 
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