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THURSDAY, APRIL 24 RESILIENCE AND PANARCHY Recently a group of theorists calling themselves the Resilience Alliance have tried to combine all the conceptual approaches we have covered so far (crisis, spatial and temporal scale, system dynamics, modeling, sustainability, development, justice, and more) to develop a general theory of how integrated biophysical and social systems work. They have chosen the term resilience to replace former ideas of equilibrium and sustainability as the broad, system-based variable to concentrate on, and have invented the term panarchy, to describe the mutual interactions among social and ecological systems at different scales. This is conceptually difficult stuff, and not everybody agrees that it's going anywhere. But it's necessary for us to know about it. Before class, read the general summary by Holling and Gunderson from their edited collection, Panarchy. Today's discussion will be facilitated by a guest lecturer, since I am going to be in California. She may choose to lecture on resilience concepts first, and then proceed to a structured discussion. More when I have discussed the plans with her in detail. |