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Assignment for Tuesday, October 21As you know, your major research assignment for the quarter is to attempt to apply resilience concepts to a socio-ecological system of your own choosing. Guessing that after three weeks of very general and sometimes maddeningly abstract theory, you're wondering how in the world this is going to apply to the real world, today we spend the whole time working through a case study that I have been working on with various colleagues and students, applying the ideas of resilience and the adaptive cycle to the agro-silvio-pastoral system of the Baiwu Valley, in the highlands on the east slopes of the Tibetan Plateau in Southwest China. I hope that one or more of my co-workers in ecology or anthropology will also participate in this presentation; details will follow when they all agree or decline to participate.To prepare for this presentation, it would be good for you to do two things. First, read something about scale, since cross-scale interactions, as well as the problem of scales of analysis, are crucial to the understanding and critique of our case study. The most interesting article may be Simon Levin's The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology. Before we get to the presentation itself, we can spend some time going over different manifestations of the concept of scale and different kinds of cross-scale interactions. Second, read some other case studies that come straight out of the resilience literature. Here you have a choice. You should read at least two case-study articles, chosen from either Panarchy, chapters 11-14 or Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems, chapters 3-9. Also, if you are the kind of person who is helped by hearing things twice, or hearing and reading the same material, you can look over the presentation we gave on History and Resilience in a Mountain Ecosystem. |