Weather Whiplashing

SUBHEAD: Climate change damages water quality by seesawing between drought and flood.

By Brendan Lynch on 29 March 2017 for KU News Service -
(https://news.ku.edu/2017/03/23/research-weather-whiplash-triggered-changing-climate-will-degrade-midwests-drinking)


Image above: Weather Whiplash in Georgia, 2013: the center of the state was in exceptional drought as the beginning of the year, but heavy rains in February, March, and April busted the drought. Heavy May rains then brought flooding. Image credit: U.S. Drought Monitor. IB Publisher's Note: The previous post on this blog was about the recent bankruptcy of Westinghouse Corporation. It has been building a nuclear power plant in Waynesboro, Georgia. It just happens to be in the extreme drought and flooding zone in the middle right of these maps of Georgia. We wonder how that plant will operate safely through expected heavy "Weather Whilpashing" in the future.  From (https://thinkprogress.org/weather-whiplash-strikes-again-extreme-drought-to-flood-in-georgia-572cc9250eb8).

One consequence of global climate change is the likelihood of more extreme seesawing between drought and flood, a phenomenon dubbed “weather whiplash.”

Now, researchers at the University of Kansas have published findings in the journal Biogeochemistry showing weather whiplash in the American Midwest’s agricultural regions will drive the deterioration of water quality, forcing municipalities to seek costly remedies to provide safe drinking water to residents.

“As rainfall patterns change with climate change, it’s predicted there will be more times of drought, and more times of excessive rainfall — really big storms,” said Terry Loecke, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Kansas and lead author of the new investigation.

Loecke and co-author Amy Burgin, associate professor of environmental studies, said the extreme flux between drought and rainfall changes the storage of nutrients in the agricultural landscape — nitrogen used in fertilizing farms most importantly.

 “Farmers put on their normal amount of fertilizer, but when we have a drought, plants don’t grow as big and don’t take up as much nitrogen,” Loecke said. “Instead of going into the plants, which would be harvested, it stays in the soil — and no water is flushing it away.”

But when floods occur, nitrogen is washed into surface waters such as tributaries that feed into rivers.
“The soil is like a sponge, and when it’s dry the nitrogen stays put,” Burgin said. “But as soon as you wet it, like when you wring a sponge, the nitrogen can flood into the rivers.”

Because many of these rivers supply drinking water for communities throughout middle America, remediating high loads of nitrogen will stress taxpayers as water departments are forced to build new facilities to eliminate nitrogen from municipal water supplies.

The KU researchers, along with Diego Riveros-Iregui of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adam Ward of Indiana University, Steven Thomas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Caroline Davis of the University of Iowa and Martin St. Clair of Coe College, analyzed data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as other sources.

The team took a close look at a 2012-2013 drought and flood cycle that affected much of the Midwestern United States, leading to a nitrogen spike in surface waters.

“We looked at observations of the 2012 drought that ended in a flood and asked how frequently that has occurred across upper Midwest across in the last 10-15 years,” Loecke said. “We found that the connection between drought-to-flood conditions and high nitrate was pretty common.”

Indeed, skyrocketing nitrate levels in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers forced the Des Moines Water Works to construct a $4.1 million nitrate removal plant that costs $7,000 per day to operate.

“The drinking water is a real problem, especially in Des Moines,” Burgin said.

“It has one of most expensive nitrate-removal facilities that we know about. In recent years, they’ve been running it from 25 to 150-plus days each year. That’s really adding up, because the money isn’t in the budget they have to spend to get clean drinking water to citizens.”

Recently, the water utility sued several farm-dense Iowa counties upriver from the city to recoup its denitrification costs.

According to Loecke and Burgin, who both also serve as scientists with the Kansas Biological Survey, surface-water nitrate spikes like the ones plaguing Iowa will occur more widely throughout the agricultural Midwest as weather whiplash becomes more commonplace in the region.

“The average person will pay more to have clean drinking water, like in the city of Des Moines,” Loecke said. “A city can’t predict how many days they’ll have to run a nitrate-removal facility.

When they run it a lot, it’s a huge hit to their budget, and they have to pass it on to their citizens, and it will spread out to rest of the Midwest. Midwesterners will have to pay more for drinking water going forward.”

Loecke and Burgin said they hoped their research could help inform farmers, policymakers, water departments and the general public.

“Municipal water services should be paying attention,” Burgin said. “Iowa is the bull's-eye of this problem, and it’s going to spread out from there — this might not be at the forefront of a lot of Kansas minds right now. But given it’s an agricultural state, it’s a matter of time before we’re in same boat. In Iowa, now it’s hitting smaller municipalities.

According to analysis by the Des Moines Register, 30 percent of them will have this problem — and most don’t have the tax bases to support huge nitrate-removal facilities.”

The National Science Foundation supported this work.

• The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. The university's mission is to lift students and society by educating leaders, building healthy communities and making discoveries that change the world. The KU News Service is the central public relations office for the Lawrence campus.

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Paris COP21 and Peace

SUBHEAD: We must remember that there will be no peace between people if we do not make peace with the Earth.

By Vandanah Shiva on 2 December 2015 for the Asian Age -
(http://www.asianage.com/columnists/paris-and-peace-155)


Image above: From (http://www.countercurrents.org/shiva061215.htm).

Land, water and agriculture-related conflicts are deliberately mutated into religious conflicts to protect the militarized agriculture model which has unleashed a global war against people.

Humanity stands at a precipice.

Merely 200 years of the age of fossil fuel has driven species and biodiversity to extinction, destroyed our soils, depleted and polluted our water and destabilized our entire climate system.

Five hundred years of colonialism have driven cultures, languages, peoples to extinction and left a legacy of violence as the basis of production and governance.

The November 13 Paris attacks have led to an escalation of violence in our way of speaking and thinking while dealing with a conflict. Paris has emerged as the epicenter of the planetary ecological crisis and the global cultural crisis.

From November 30 to December 11, movements and governments converge in Paris for COP21 — 21st Conference of Parties on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

COP21 is not just about climate change; it is about our modes of production and consumption which are destroying the ecosystems that support life on this planet.

There is a deep and intimate connection between the events of November 13 and the ecological devastation unleashed by the fossil fuel era of human history. The same processes that contribute to climate change also contribute towards growing violence among people. Both are results of a war against the Earth.

Industrial agriculture is a fossil fuel-based system which contributes more than 40 per cent of the greenhouse gases leading to climate change. Along with the globalized food system, industrial agriculture is to be blamed for at least 50 per cent of the global warming.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are based on fossil fuels and use the same chemical processes used to make explosives and ammunition. Manufacturing one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent to two liters of diesel.

Energy used during fertiliser manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion litres of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030. Synthetic fertilizer, used for industrial agriculture, is a major contributor to climate change — it starts destroying the planet long before it reaches a field.

Yet the dominant narrative is that synthetic fertilizers feed us and without them people will starve.

The fertilizer industry says that “they produce bread from air”. This is incorrect.

Nature and humans have evolved many non-violent, effective and sustainable ways to provide nitrogen to soil and plants.

For example, pulses and beans are nitrogen-fixing crops. Bacteria named rhizobia, which exists in the nodules of their roots, converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia and then into organic compounds to be used by the plant for growth.

Intercropping or rotating pulses with cereals has been an ancient practice in India. We also use green manures which can fix nitrogen.

Returning organic matter to the soil builds up soil nitrogen. Organic farming can increase nitrogen content of soil between 44-144 per cent, depending on the crops that are grown.

Organic farming not only avoids the emissions that come from industrial agriculture, it transforms carbon in the air through photosynthesis and builds it up in the soil, thus contributing to higher soil fertility, higher food production and nutrition and a sustainable, zero-cost technology for addressing climate change.

Ecologically non-sustainable models of agriculture, dependent on fossil fuels, have been imposed through “aid” and “development” projects in the name of Green Revolution. As soil and water are destroyed, ecosystems that produced food and supported livelihoods can no longer sustain societies.

As a result, there’s anger, discontent, frustration, protests and conflicts. However, land, water and agriculture-related conflicts are repeatedly and deliberately mutated into religious conflicts to protect the militarized agriculture model, which has unleashed a global war against the earth and people.

I witnessed this in Punjab while I was doing research for my book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, on the violence of 1984. We are witnessing this today, as conflicts which begin because of land degradation and water crises — induced by non-sustainable farming systems — are given the colour of religious conflicts.

Since 2009, we heard of Boko Haram while we missed the news about the disappearance of Lake Chad. Lake Chad supported 30 million people in four countries — Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. Intensive irrigation for industrial agriculture increased four-fold from 1983 to 1994.

Fifty percent of the disappearance of Lake Chad is attributed to the building of dams and intensive irrigation for industrial agriculture.

As the water disappeared, conflicts between Muslim pastoralists and settled Christian farmers over the dwindling water resources led to unrest. As Luc Gnacadja, the former secretary-general of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, states about the violence in Nigeria, “The so-called religious fight is actually about access to vital resources”.

The story of Syria is similar. In 2009, a severe drought uprooted a million farmers who were forced to move into the city for livelihood. Structural adjustment measures, imposed by global financial institutions and trade rules, prevented the government from responding to the plight of Syria’s farmers.

The farmers’ protests intensified. By 2011, the world’s military powers were in Syria, selling more arms and diverting the narrative from the story of the soil and farmers to religion.

Today, half of Syria is in refugee camps, the war is escalating and the root causes of the violence continue to be actively disguised as religion.

Haber, the inventor of Zyklon B — a poisonous gas used in 1915 to kill more than a million Jews in concentration camps — was given a Nobel Prize in chemistry. American biologist Norman Borlaug received a Nobel Prize for Peace for the chemical-based Green Revolution that has only left a legacy of violence.

For me, COP21 is a pilgrimage of peace — to remember all the innocent victims of the wars against the land and people; to develop the capacity to re-imagine that we are one and refuse to be divided by race and religion; to see the connections between ecological destruction, growing violence and wars that are engulfing our societies.

We must remember that there will be no peace between people if we do not make peace with the Earth.

• Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust

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The art of farming with trees

SUBHEAD: Agroforestry techniques to create more varied productive, profitable, healthy, and sustainable approaches to land use.

By Dan Kiprop Kibet on 5 November 2013 fr Resilience.org -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-05/agroforestry-the-art-of-farming-with-trees)


Image above: Luceana tree is an excellent nitogen fixer. In Hawaii it is known as Haole Koa (false koa). It is a  pioneering tree on the south shore of Kauai between Poipu and Hanapepe. In the valleys it competes with Opiuma (Manila Tamerind). Further west, to Mana, it mixes with Kiawe (Mesquite). Both are also nitrogen fixers.  From original article.

Kenya is an agricultural country, endowed with an abundance of fertile soils. Farming serves as the most important economic activity for up to 80 per cent of its population. Out of this majority, a large number are small scale farmers, owning plots of less than five acres of land across the country.

Small scale farmers play a key economic role, not only in food production, but by contributing to self employment and boosting the local economies all over the country.

As the UN Special Rapporteur on right to food affirms: “small scale farming is creating employment and contributing to rural development…it is better at preserving ecosystems because farmers combine various plants, trees and animals on the piece of land.”

Like any other pursuit, small scale farming is fraught with challenges that prevent farmers from reaching their full potential. Obstacles range from:

1. Depletion of soils resulting from overuse of the “shamba”- a Swahili word for land.  
2. Lack of information on sustainable farming approaches
3. Pest and disease management and to 
4. Drought, extreme precipitation and cold weathers.

Despite all these setbacks, efforts to end hunger and keep the land productive, however small, are now geared toward low-cost, sustainable approaches to farming. Agroforesty is now prominent among these solutions, deemed as the next agricultural solution to feed the world; it is defined as a dynamic and ecological method of land management involving the simultaneous cultivation of farm crops and trees.


Image above: Beans growing in Kenya under partial shade of Luceana trees can utilize the nitrogen enriched soil. One advantage of Luceana trees over Opiuma and Mesquite is that it does not have the long nasty thorns of those species.  From original article.   

Agroforestry combines agricultural and forestry techniques to create more varied productive, profitable, healthy, and sustainable approaches to land use. It diversifies and sustains production for increased social, economic, and environmental benefits on plots of land of any size.

Having been practiced by farmers for decades, agroforestry focuses on a wide range of trees that act as fertilizers, soil improvers, fruit providers, fodder, fuel wood, and medicine. Today, trees in farms are seen as a crucial bridge between forestry and agriculture, striking a balance between conservation and production. While Kenya’s forests diminish, more trees are being planted in farms, and small scale farmers are doing this for their own benefit and that of Mother Nature. More so, it is a strategy to compliment the 10% forest cover advocated by the Kenyan government.

Representing Kenya’s agroforestry for this article is John’s small plot; trees form part of his farming endeavors. Through this noble partnership, he has experienced a constant production of food and other tree products in a rejuvenated soil. He says that, if done well, agroforestry offers the best use of land if joined with good agricultural practices, such as organic farming. “It thus increases resiliency towards fighting hunger,” he adds.

John Chepsoi, 45 year old small scale farmer  living in Nakuru, North west of Nairobi has incorporated trees which do not compete with his crops (silvoarable system), but bring in multiple benefits to him, his livestock, crops, soil, and the environment at large. They are Nitrogen Fixing Trees (NFTs).

It began when he planted a few trees on a section of the plot four years back. He observed that the soil in the area with the trees usually looked fertile and alive. The crops were healthier and yielded more compared to the bare land. This led him to introduce more trees on his plot to increase fertility and increase production. He has harvested potatoes and his beans are blossoming. He is expecting a good harvest this season as he says all systems are functioning well under this agroforestry method of farming.

Walking round his farm, trees which are fast maturing and able to fix nitrogen in the soil are planted; he uses these trees as fodder for livestock and also as fire wood. When cut, he says that they are able to coppice again, hence avoiding the urge to invade the forest. Some of these trees include: grevillea, luceana, calliandra, acacia and sesbania sesban. The Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI) provides useful information to field workers and farmers on different useful trees that can be planted in farmland. (www.kefri.org)

One example of the acacia tree, which has long been combined with traditional farming in Africa, is the Faidherbia albida, also known as “Mgunga” in Swahili. It possesses the unique ability to produce much needed nitrogen for the soil and plants. With its phenology, Faidherbia goes dormant and sheds its nitrogen-rich leaves during the early rainy season, when crops are being planted, and resumes leaf growth in the dry season.

The air we breathe consists of approximately 80% nitrogen gas. This Nitrogen is normally unavailable to plants, but nature has devised a unique way to cycle those nutrients through the trees. This is done through Nitrogen Fixing Trees (NFTs) which are able to utilize the atmospheric nitrogen through an association with a Rhizobium, a bacterium which is hosted in the root system of nitrogen fixing trees. These plants biologically accumulate nitrogen by pulling essential nutrients out of the air for their own use, and if managed well, can make it available to other crops as well. This reduces the need for commercial nitrogen fertilizers.

Through an agroforestry system, John farms without the application of synthetic fertilizers (DAP/CAN) commonly used by many farmers, but lets nature perform this duty through NFTs.  His style of farming has been a productive and conservative one, and he sees these as a long-term strategy and is happy he followed the path of agroforestry.  “The goodness of agroforest trees is that they are there to offer their free services all year round,” he adds.

He is planning to establish an agroforestry nursery in the future where he can raise and sell seedlings to other farmers, in the effort of spreading the benefits of agroforestry in building sustainable future and earning income.

John explains that during the dry season, from December to March, some trees are able to shed their leaves, while others remain green, which he uses to feed his livestock. He further says that producing staple food crops like maize, sorghum and millet under these agroforestry conditions dramatically increases their drought resilience in dry years because of the positive soil moisture and better microclimate.

The fallen leaves, weeds and crop residues don’t go to waste. They are heaped to naturally decompose and later used to fertilize the farm. John is keen not to throw away any of this, as he calls it a treasure. After they are heaped, they usually attract many beneficial micro organisms, which feed on them. As we turn a heap together, there were hundreds of earthworms at work. Earthworms are described as “ecosystem engineers.” Charles Darwin referred them as “Earth ploughs.”

They contribute to enriching and improving soil for plants, animals and even humans. Earthworms create tunnels in the soil by burrowing, which aerates the soil to allow air, water and nutrients to reach deep within the soil.

Earthworms eat the soil which has organic matter. After the organic matter is digested, the earthworms release waste from their bodies, called castings, which contain many nutrients for the crops. As an important addition to their other roles, trees not only act as natural fertilizers, but as niche for these hardworking earthworms and microbial life.


Through constant pruning and cutting firewood, he is able to increase the organic matter (leaves) in the soil, which act as mulch, keeping it moist and well aerated, and increases the activity and population of microbial life in the soil. The leaves also act as humus, a very important feature in building soil fertility.


John also acknowledges that trees are able to suppress weeds, reducing the time and energy needed for weeding, and promoting “easy to work” soil. Other trees, like luecena, attract bees during flowering. While collecting nectar, they help in pollination and repelling harmful insects. Trees here are able to provide a microclimate.

The place is cool, and you could feel the breeze. John says he is able to work without feeling the hot sun, and the same applies to the crops. “These trees protect my crops from both dry season and heavy rains,” John says. And adds that, “it conserves soils and reduces run off in my small plot.”

With growing concerns about how small holder farmers can continue to feed themselves in their small farms without destroying local ecosystems agroforestry is the best thing to happen to sustainable farming. I applaud small scale farmers like John and hope that other small scale farmers will follow suit and plant trees on their farms for a better and more productive future.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Growingfruit in a nuthouse 11/4/13

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Limits to Resilience

SUBHEAD: The term metabolic rift describes the alienation between humans and nature that opened up industrialization.

By John Thackara on 15 January 2013 for Doors of Perception-
(http://www.doorsofperception.com/infrastructure-design/john-thackara/)


Image above: Octagon Chart showing limits to resiliency of eight crucial variables for our life on Earth.  From (http://www.doorsofperception.com/infrastructure-design/john-thackara/).

The term metabolic rift describes the alienation between humans and nature that opened up with the growth of the the modern economy. Could the growth of bioregionalism, and research into ‘social-ecological systems’, be signs that the rift may be healing? And if so, what are the opportunities for design to contribute?


Spare a thought for global business leaders as they prepare for this year’s World Economic Forum, in Switzerland. Instead of a guide to apres-skieateries, their host has sent them Global Risks 2013.

Highlights of this guide to possible futures include a killer virus pandemic; unmanageable deflation; a geomagnetic storm that wipes out the internet; global food shortages; and ‘unprecedented geophysical destruction’. Taken together, says the WEF, their top-trending risks “are a health warning regarding our most critical systems”.

The WEF is not alone in its somber outlook. What their Global Risks does for the economy, Global Trends 2030 does for geopolitics and security. The latter report, just published by the US National Intelligence Council, aggregates the research of 17 intelligence agencies with a collective budget of $75 billion and several hundred advising professors.

Having digested all this input, the NIC report concludes that ‘natural disasters might cause governments to collapse’ and warns that ‘we are at a critical juncture in human history.’

And those are the known risks. More alarming still is the possibility of a so-called ‘ecological surprise’ – a transformational change in one or more natural systems that can be sudden, non-linear, and catastrophic. We know they can happen – but we don’t know when; they cannot be predicted.

To add to the uncertainty there’s no consensus on how risks should be weighted. Trends that signal ‘risk’ to one researcher are perceived as ‘opportunity’ by others.

Wired founder Kevin Kelly, for example, thinks that the increased interdependency of systems, and the compound growth connectivity, are good news: They signify, he says, that our economy is in an ‘evolutionary uplift’ on its way to a ‘post-productive’ mode.

Reflecting on the same phenomena that Kelly celebrates, complex systems researcher Noah Raford draws a different conclusion: Too much inter-connectivity makes systems vulnerable to ‘phase transition’ – a word that sounds more benign that it probably is.

When a system reaches a critical state, Raford explains, ‘even a tiny change can lead to massive fluctuation and collapse.’ The sheer complexity of interacting social and ecological systems makes it impossible to forecast with certainty how they will evolve – catastrophically or otherwise.

Given that uncertainty, what is our best course: Plough on regardless – or take a different route?

For climate scientists and ecologists, the consequence of unknowability is clear: we must live within the known carrying capacity of the earth’s living systems rather than grow the economy regardless.

To guide us on this cautious path, climate scientists have delineated a set of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that describe living systems that are systems essential for human survival.

Their chart (above) includes the scientists’ estimate of systems that have been pushed post their safe limits already (they are Biodiversity, Climate Change and Nitrogen Cycle) – They are at the point at which there is a risk of such ‘irreversible and abrupt environmental change’ that our own survival is threatened. The

As conservation ecologist Gretchen Daily concludes, “We cannot go on treating nature like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Boundaries? What Boundaries?

Boundaries and limits are anathema, however, to the World Economic Forum.

Its founder, Klaus Schwab, seems almost to relish the global risks identified in this year’s report: He describes them as opportunities ‘that we should grab with relish to ’improve the state of the world’ and to pursue the ‘critical goal…of future growth.’

Under the banner of a virile new concept called ‘resilient dynamism’, Schwab’s implicit advice to business leaders is to focus less on the causes of global risks and more on learning ‘how to adapt to changing contexts’ and ‘how to withstand sudden shocks.’

There is no acknowledgement – not a word – that compound economic growth could possibly be the cause of the biosphere-threatening trends described in the Global Risks.

As for the fact that exponential economic growth on a physical planet contravenes: That is simply ignored.

This is not to deny that resilience – ‘the capacity to bounce back’ as Andrew Zolli‘s book so well explains it – is a desirable condition. The trouble is that a lot of people perceive resilience – dynamic or otherwise – to be a new variety of risk management that gives them the opportunity to carry on with business-as-usual.

Chris Anderson, for example, editor in chief of Wired, states that ‘in an increasingly complex world, we can’t avoid shocks - we can only build better shock absorbers.

But wait a minute: Anderson’s metaphor would just about work if the world around us were indeed a tarmac track disfigured by potholes. But it’s not: Those ‘bumps’ we’re driving over are better understood as the bodies, metaphorical or otherwise, of living systems.

Why would anyone even consider driving over them?

Metabolic Rift

Paved surfaces and shock absorbers have a lot to answer for. By shielding us both from the weather, and from the state of the soil, they act as psychological barriers to empathy with the living systems that support us.

For as long as people have moved into cities – with their paved roads, and media-cultural shock absorbers – they’ve lost physical contact with nature and therefore stopped worrying how their actions might be affecting it.

Cities are like intensive care units in which the screens have been covered over, and the audio warnings turned off.

The term metabolic rift was coined by the environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster to describe the alienation between humans and nature that has opened up with the growth of the modern economy.

Building on Karl Marx’s critique of how soil nutrients in the countryside are depleted to feed the towns, Foster argues that the capitalist economy, by distracting us from the condition of natural systems, enables us to exploit them without consideration of the consequences.

For so-called ‘dark ecologists’, the metabolic rift is a fundamental driver of our rush to ecological disaster.

The Kevin Kellys, Chris Andersons and Klaus Schwabs of this world can contemplate the destruction of living systems in the interests of the economy not because they evil bad guys, they argue, but because our whole society has been rendered cognitively blind.

In that sense, as Timothy Morton put it so memorably in 2008, ‘the ecological catastrophe has already occurred.’

Limits of resilience

The widespread embrace of resilience in this context – both as scientific practice, and as a cultural meme – is a mixed blessing.

For bodies such as the WEF, resilience is being used as a welcome diversion from the underlying causes of our difficulties – namely, our growth-addicted economic system.

The ‘risks’ scattered on the WEF’s charts are better described as disasters-in-progress: Resource depletion, water stress, malnutrition, biodiversity loss, and habitat destruction are not possibilities to be guarded against – they are the known and actual consequence of the economic system we have now.

In much the same way that ecological disaster moves like The Day After Tomorrow suggest, misleadingly, that the worst problems lie ahead of us – so too does WEF-style risk management.

Hollywood is not alone in its use of the eco-bogeyman card to distract our attention from catastrophes already under way. Hypothetical future disasters have also been used by scientists to promote their projects.

The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk, for example - a joint initiative between a philosopher, a scientist, and a software entrepreneur – begins with the proposition that ‘developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole’.

Wow, that’s scary – and it’s not even a film. It’s almost as scary as the professors’ conclusion that the best response to the ‘threat of human extinction by science and technology’ is (wait for it) ‘a great deal more scientific investigation’.

But I digress. In other respects, resilience has enormous potential.

We know, for example, that extreme weather events are set to increase – so it is of course a good thing to be better prepared to respond effectively to these events – and to do so in new ways.

The most inspiring chapter in Zolli’s book, for example, is about the way new forms of crisis mapping and response that emerged in response to the catastrophe in Haiti. And San Francisco has been taking practical steps to turn itself into a resilient city since 2008.

Cultural surprise

But what about the causes of the future events we must be resilient to?

What about the metabolic rift: Can it be healed?

In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn introduced the term ‘paradigm shift‘ to describe the ways that scientific world views periodically undergo radical change in what appears at the time to be a sudden leap.

Kuhn explains that these ‘sudden’ paradigm shifts in world view follow years, sometimes decades, in which scientists have encountered anomalies that don’t fit in with the dominant paradigm of the time.

Could a paradigm shift in our understanding of ‘progress’ and ‘the economy’ be imminent? Are there grounds for optimism that the modernist myth – that the biosphere is a repository of resources to fuel endless growth – will be supplanted by something new?

The conditions are surely ripe for a new narrative to emerge. According to the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WGBU), the heavyweight scientific body that advises the German Federal Government on ‘Earth System Megatrends’, a ‘global transformation of values’ along these lines has already begun.

As reported here last month, this post-materialist thinking is not limited to the well­-off. In South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, India, and China, the WGBU also found, a significant majority ‘supports ambitious climate protection measures’ and would ‘welcome a new economic system’ to achieve that.

Many people despair, however, that utopian visions and ‘latent values’ are no substitute for positive change in the real world.

Whatever values we might wish the world to hold, they say, the obstacles to real-world change are insurmountable. These obstacles include system-wide ‘path dependencies’ (such as the financial system, and debt); the ‘lock-in effect’ of existing laws; and all-round institutional inertia.

These obstacles are real, of course – but this is where the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends gets interesting. It plots a variety of ways in which political and social change on the ground could undermine these institutional ‘path dependencies’.

Its report anticipates, for example, that power ‘could shift to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world.’ Enabled by new technologies, the NIC speculates, so-called ‘non-state actors’ – along with subnational actors such as cities, and city-regions – could play ‘important governance roles’. It describes this scenario as ‘political multi-polarisation’.

The NIC’s scenarios raise an interesting question: if profound paradigm shifts are possible in the world views of science, as Thomas Kuhn demonstrated; if ‘ecological surprises’ can transform natural systems, as ecologists have shown; and if today’s monolithic states could be transformed by the NIC’s ‘multi-polarisation’; in that case could a profound phase-shift in cultural belief systems also be on the cards?

It is surely plausible that a convergence of latent value change, as described by the WGBU, and the political fragmentation, as anticipated by the NIC, could unpave the way for a mosaic of globally-linked but self-governing bioregions.

Bioregional Stewardship

On the ground, examples of a transformation along these lines are already emerging. As Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network, explains in this short video, regional food economies, local currencies, and community energy projects are no longer fringe.

As these local food, water and soil projects mature, and connect with each other, we are seeing see examples appear in urban contexts of the social-ecological innovation that, until now, has only been studied in places like the Great Barrier Reef or tropical rain forests.

For the Stockholm Resilience Centre, cornerstone of what it calls ‘successful common-pool resource management’ is innovative forms of social connectivity among the people who are stewarding the land.

Based on its initial findings, the SRC recently published Seven Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services. These are:

1 maintain diversity and redundancy
2 manage connectivity
3 manage slow variables and feedbacks
4 foster an understanding of social ecological systems as complex adaptive systems
5 encourage learning and experimentation
6 broaden participation
7 promote polycentric governance systems

Those principles pose a number of challenges for design. These will be the focus of future posts on this blog, and of forthcoming Doors of Perception encounters with our partners.

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