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Assignment for Wednesday, April 10: Sustainability and Ecosystem Resilience I

Read at least three of the following five articles:

Simon A. Levin et al., "Policy Forum: Resilience in Natural and Economic Systems," Environment and Development Economics 3 (1998) 221-262.

Brian Walker, C.S. Holling, Stephen R. Carpenter, and Ann Kinzig, "Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems," Ecology and Society9, 2 (2004), Article 5

Donald Ludwig, Brian H. Walker, and C.S. Holling, "Models and Metaphors of Sustainability, Stability, and Resilience," in Lance H. Gunderson and Lowell Pritchard, Jr., eds., Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems, Washington, Island Press (2002), pp. 21-48

Lance H. Gunderson, "Adaptive dancing: interactions between social resilience and ecological crises," in Fikret Berkes, Johan Golding, and Carl Folke, eds., Navigating Social-Ecological Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003), pp. 33-52

Bobbi Low, Elinor Ostrom, Carl Simon, and James Wilson, "Redundancy and Diversity; do they influence optimal management?," in Fikret Berkes, Johan Golding, and Carl Folke, eds., Navigating Social-Ecological Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003), pp. 83-114

This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it's the heart of what we want to get at this quarter. We will begin with a presentation by Jodie Little, who has thought very hard about such things. After that, two things we can do are to compare the diagrams used by these authors with some of the diagrams that we have come up with in class, and to start meditating (arguing?) on the similarities and differences, or the connections and overlaps, among the various terms such as sustainability, stability, resilience, and redundancy.