Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
seems to be the rule. Thus, in the project to fashion a sustainable planet, uncertainty
will inevitably figure greatly as experimentation is difficult when there is only one
planet. There can be no control, many disciplines are involved and an ethical reluctance
to experiment with human cultures, combined with a political reluctance to see
beyond the next election, simply adds to the challenge. Cairns (2003: 3-4) writes
that, because of continuing uncertainty, ethics and social learning will be necessarily
an important part of any decision-making process. He continues:
Humankind is now moving from the age of reductionist science to an age of
synthesis or integrative science. This transition does not mean that reductionist
science is no longer appropriate, but rather that as levels of complexity in any
system increase, new properties emerge that were not apparent at lower levels.
Consequently, one means of reducing uncertainty in this age of synthesis is
determining how congruent a particular hypothesis or body of evidence is with
other related bodies of evidence within the particular system being studied.
Both systems and systems-thinking continually evolve. For instance, from recent
studies of natural hazards, systems thinkers write of the relationship between
uncertainty, vulnerability and resilience. An ecological, social or economic system
may experience some disturbance, such as an oil spill, crime rise or bank failure,
but it is the resilience or capacity of the system to absorb this disturbance and
reorganize itself, while experiencing change and still maintaining essentially the same
function, structure, identity and feedbacks, that is truly important (Folke
et al
., 2003;
Berkes, 2007). Some disturbances, like climate change, will affect everything, and
complexity theory and resilience thinking enables us to recognize that disturbances
will have broad-based, non-linear consequences. A threshold point may arrive when
one relatively stable state, or regime, flips into another. In social-ecological systems,
such as a local neighbourhood community, adaptability and resilience will inevitably
be the product of human agency, of individual and institutional leadership, of the
capacity to learn from previous experience, of the strength of social and cultural
networks and relationships, and of the capacity to remember past mistakes and not
repeat them. Resilience is not a concept that looks back or has a single straightforward
meaning. Rather it a concept that is generative of approaches that require positive,
proactive change and transformation (Blewitt and Tilbury, 2013). As Jared Diamond
(2005) has shown in his highly detailed examination of why some societies collapse,
and why some people simply do not learn, do not see, understand, remember
or care, our mechanistic conceptual frameworks have led us to underestimate or
simply be blind to system effects even when they are upon us. As Diamond asks,
'What did that person think when he felled the last tree on Easter Island?' Instead
of hierarchy, of seeing one thing as more important than another, there is panarchy
(Holling, 2001, 2004), meaning a basic equality and connectedness between systems
and subsystems. For Walker and Salt (2006) and Berkes (2007), resilience thinking
offers important opportunities for fashioning new ways of coping with future surprises
and unknowable risks through intentionally building up resilience in social-ecological
systems. This can be achieved by:
•
learning to live with change and uncertainty;
•
nurturing ecological, social, economic and cultural diversity;
