Mouserat

From Each According to Their Ability, To Each According to Their Need

That's what Karl Marx was thinking about, almost 200 years ago, as the early stages of the industrial revolution were already looking bleak for humanity.

In the first few chapter of  A Finer Future, Hunter Lovins describes the failure of neoliberalism to create happiness, or to create a healthy, caring society, or to realize any of its own promises.

It's sad, but I'm not surprised.  I see neoliberalism as the latest layer of Russian Doll on top of an inherently flawed and inhumane, anti-ecological idea:  capitalism.

I'd re-write the tragedy of the commons to be the tragedy of capitalism:  both tragedies share a root.  The root cause of so many of the tragedies we face today, as Lovins reviews in painful detail, is individualism being prioritized over the common good.  Another way to see it this:  greed and short-term selfishness are prioritized over a long-term, ecosystem-wide approach.

Using the Meadows Memorandum, Lovins and her co-authors suggest a new narrative, a more compelling story, a dynamic tale of possibility, healing, and prosperity. 

Lovins' core concept, Natural Capitalism, seems both suspect and improbably, like soft porcupine quills, or dry water.  But if she and her latest brainchild, Leading for Well Being, are able to shape and influence the business and industrial world toward resilient, sustainable, eco-wisdom that allows us to create a garden of Eden and Eve on the earth, that will be excellent.

Once we arrive in this happy place, when we look at the economic structures, I think they will look like this:  a flow of giving and receiving.  A circulation of energy, goods, materials, and care.  An economy of sharing and caring.  It will look a lot like love.

 Here's a question for you:

Speaking of love, let's consider the military-industrial complex.  That is, the world spends over half of our resources on weapons and war.  Do you think we will need to abolish war in order to achieve a low-carbon future?  Can we still play war while reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

 

 

 

The Western U.S. Water System - Is it Resilient?

    To be upfront, my opinion is that the overall water system in the Western U.S. is not resilient.  While there are resilient practices and techniques emerging within the water system (water banking, super ditch concepts, changes in ag. practices, etc.), I think that the system as a whole is actually counterproductive in terms of resiliency.  

    As many of us know, the water system in the western us is built upon the doctrine of prior appropriation.  According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources (within the Department of Natural Resources) this "first in time, first in right" concept means that "The first person to appropriate water and apply that water to use has the first right to use that water within a particular stream system. This person (after receiving a court decree verifying their priority status) then becomes the senior water right holder on the stream, and that water right must be satisfied before any other water rights can be fulfilled," (http://water.state.co.us/surfacewater/swrights/pages/priorapprop.aspx).  Historically, the prior appropriation doctrine has been successful in managing the waters of the west and promoting development.  In 1903, the Bureau of Reclamation was formed in order to develop the water infrastructure system of the west.  The prior appropriation doctrine lent its self to increased water storage and dam-building by the BOR - so much so that the Yampa River is the only major free-flowing river in the state of Colorado.  However, the Western United States has seen this dam-building decrease steadly over the 20th century.  There have even been large dams removed in the PNW for tribal, conservation, and ecosystem benefits!  This prior appropriation mentality is very entrenched (similar to grazing rights), and it would be very hard to change the system.  But there is hope: Australia underwent this very change in the early 2000s.

    However, much has changed over the past few decades.  Changes in the precipitation regime are starting to show themselves, and the system needs to respond accordingly.  According to Dr. Lander, my Western Water Professor, roughly 80% of water in the west is being used for agricultural purposes.  On the other hand, agriculture only accounts for 3% of the GDP.  This seems problematic in the sense that population is growing, industrial and municipal water use is growing, and the system is not changing accordingly.  In my opinion, there needs to be a revamp of the water system that reflects these use changes.  I'm not sure what that would look like (probably need a professional team of both scientists and policy experts to address this), however I think it is quite obvious that the lack of resilience in the water system will be problematic in the future.  As reservoirs on the Colorado River slowly empty, more and more people are simultaneously depending on the Colorado River system.  The next 25 years will be very interesting regarding western water- as California has already showed us through its inevitable droughts and floods.

Question: Do you see any more potential issues in the water system of the western U.S.?  How can this system increase its resilience? (Here is a resource for some Colorado-specific water questions: http://www.colorado.edu/geography/class_homepages/geog_4501_s14/readings/CG-Law2004.pdf)

Fragility, Resilience, Redundancy: Fishing for Solutions. Or, let's take a road trip (biodiesel) to Long Island.

Resilience Practice by Salt and Walker (Island Press, 2012) gives a tantalizing overview of current thinking about resilience as a next step in sustainability.  

After we create sustainable, closed systems (recycling, conserving waste and water and energy, powering our new Nissan Leaf with our new Tesla solar roof), we still need to consider how much strength, depth, and redundancy surrounds those systems, and how bouncy, robust, and thick are these systems that support our lives and our future.

And we need to notice our fragility, pay attention to the sharp edges of our life support systems, and explore what could happen when we cross an irrevocable threshold (Salt and Walker, p. 13).

I think of my friend Wilma, an electrical engineer at Boeing Airlines.  She described that every system on the airplane had 5 redundant back-up systems.  If one fails, there's another, and another, and another...  But capitalism, market forces, the push toward efficiency and maximizing profit, seem to produce a thinning phenomenon, where redundancy is stripped away.  

Instead of 10,000 small farms in Colorado, we have giant agro-business farms growing GMO corn for methane-producing, water-polluting, antibiotic-sucking, inhumane feedlots.  It's easy to see how this system could collapse, or how other failing systems could easily lay waste to this food production system.

Combined, sustainability and resilience could strengthen our food systems.  We could create small, organic farms, and strengthen all the systems these farms need:  markets, distribution centers, seed storage, weather protection, livestock protections, culture, information.  We could reinforce each system and seek to create a network of  mutually supportive interactions.  We can study other lands, like Syria, where drought destabilized and destroyed whole sectors agriculture and farmers' lives.  What redundancies would have allowed small farmers in Syria to remain on their land?  How many layers of reinforced water systems do farms in Colorado need? How can my water conservation efforts connect to support for my food systems?

One amazing worker in sustainable resilience is Bren Smith.  He runs Thimble Island Ocean Farm on Long Island, and has a vision of 3D kelp ocean farming that creates redundant, supportive, reinforcing systems, building both A farm and a movement.  He's a visionary and pragmatic hero of our time. But even his ocean farm was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy; he was able to bounce back, this time.

As we create circles of support and reinforcement around our sustainable systems, here's another layer of what can be done, how we can build out and support our renewable energy systems:  Germany turns old coal mines into renewable battery storage.

Finally, a gift to you, for your sustainable and resilient spirit, because an equitable and diverse society can solve all these problems, with our shared creativity and inspiration.  We need every mind, every voice.

Black & White by Todrick Hall with Superfruit and Kirsten Maldonado

And a question for you:  what about sustainable resilience?  Or resilient sustainability?  Is that a thing?

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Building a more resilient energy system

Within the energy industry, people are focused on efficiency. Efficiency means lower costs, less land needed for power plants, and, in the case of fossil fuel resources, fewer emissions. It also generally means higher returns for shareholders and lower rates for customers. However, as a heavily technological system, resilience within the energy industry is often overlooked or mistaken for robustness. While we design our power plants and transmission resources to withstand natural or human disasters, they are often not designed to be flexible or modular. This means that unexpected events can have devastating consequences

Lack of flexibility in the energy system has made transition away from fossil fuels, in the face of the ever more present threat of climate change, very challenging. Generation resources have enormously long lifespans, with coal plants lasting 40 years and nuclear plants lasting 50-70 years. Because these projects take a long time to pay back their initial investment, there is a strong incentive to use them for their entire useful lives.

The current energy system also lacks modularity. Failures in one part of the system cause cascading failures throughout the system. An example is the blackout in the Northeastern United States in 1965. An incorrectly programmed protective feature on a transmission line caused that line to suddenly shut down. This overloaded the other transmission lines on the system, causing blackouts in eight US states and Canada. Another example of the lack of modularity in the power system, which we discussed in class a few weeks ago, is the reliance of the Fukushima power plant on the availability of some electricity to operate the emergency cooling system.

Interestingly, solar, and to some extent wind, offer opportunities to address the rigidity in the power system. Both solar and wind have shorter lifespans than fossil fuel resources, meaning that the period during which those assets must generate power to be profitable is shorter. Furthermore, each solar panel or wind turbine is modular, meaning the rest of a wind or solar farm may continue to operate, if one turbine or panel needs to be replaced or served. In addition, solar can be installed on residential or commercial rooftops, meaning that people aren’t entirely dependent on a centralized generation resource. However, distributed solar is less cost effective than utility scale solar, which some have pointed to as a flaw with the distributed model.

It’s clear that tradeoffs between efficiency and resilience will need to be made as we move towards a more low-carbon system. Given historical trends, it’s important that we seek resilience in the mix.

Question: What are other examples of ways to increase the resilience of our energy system?

What is it?

What is resilience? What a great question. We all have our own answers, and thoughts. And we all describe resilience differently.

Last time I asked you all to tell me how you would describe resilience to a five year old. You did, luckily. However, you each came up with a very unique description, and therefore made it hard to say definitively how we would describe resilience. I recently asked another party to weigh in: she said resilience is like a bubble: if you have a city seated in the middle of a bubble, and a meteor slams into the bubble, the city would be fine because the bubble would take the brunt of the impact. The bubble might be slightly deflated, or smaller, but would still be able to bounce back.

Though, this seems to raise the question, how would we describe resilience to professionals? While sitting in the joint-MENV space the other day I overheard some researchers from Mickey’s lab having a conversation about the same question. They were stumped, and offering conflicting, and often vastly different definitions of resilience. Mickey was suggesting that there were, in fact, three or four definitions of resilience that are offered in the dictionary ­– ranging from, survival in the face of extreme odds, such as is the case in times of war; the idea of a sand castle being resistant to the tide washing it away, with the qualification that even the biggest wave can knock it down; and lastly the idea that resilience is unlike an elastic band, in that we expect the when released from a stretched position we expect the band to snap back to the original shape, yet in the case of resilience, the band only comes back so far – events change the shape of the elastic band.

All in all, the various researchers agreed to disagree. They concluded that, much like everything else in life (and in systems class), we all define problems and solutions based on our background and experiences, and that there can be no strict definition. Resilience allows for change; therefore, its definitions reflect its elasticity.

Question: should we worry about how we define resilience? Should we worry whether or not our response to a change or event matches the prescribed reaction?

Could Trauma Create Critical Resiliency Skills?

This week's reading suggested that the most important asset you have when it comes to resilience thinking is your own life experience. From this sentence could we draw the conclusion that people who have had more trauma in their life will be able to better recognize and handle resilience in ecosystems, organizations, and self-organizing systems?

On the American Psychological Association (APA) website, resilience in terms of psychology is described as: "the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress-- such as family relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stress. it means "bouncing back" from difficult experiences." (APA, 2016) This definition contains some wording specific to psychology, but is overall not very different from the definition given to us in the reading. In addition, similar to our reading, the APA also notes that, "research has shown that resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary." (APA, 2016)

If we are aware that resilience is ordinarily found among humans, and is something that can be learned and developed, I think the opening question is something that needs a closer look and further consideration. If you were to compare two different types of people working in ecological or more corporate fields, those who have overcome massive trauma in their life and those who have experienced little to no trauma, which do you think would be better at handling resiliency for their organization?

While the person with little to no experience with trauma will still be able to develop resiliency critical thinking skills, the individual who has already overcome traumatic experiences has a past to learn and draw from. These past traumas that have already been conquered can then translate into an unique take on ecological or organizational resiliency practices and tactics in complex adaptive systems.

Question: Do you think that people who have had more trauma in their life will be able to better recognize and handle resilience in ecosystems, organizations, and self-organizing systems? 

http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx

Future Resilience Officer?

Over the past couple of months, I have been going back and forth with different ideas for future career paths. Now that we are about halfway done with this program, it’s time to start thinking seriously about where I want to end up. Something that has always interested me and seems more appealing to me as time goes on is a career is disaster and emergency management. This would involve helping developing countries (as well as communities in developed countries) to bounce back after a disaster strikes.

     Resiliency is at the heart of this field. In order to create resiliency within a community that has been affected by a disaster, capacity building is necessary. Members of the community learn and complete tasks themselves with the help of aid workers so that in the future they will be more prepared. Natural disasters, such as tsunamis, are predictable to an extent so it is beneficial for the local community to be able to act as quickly as possible if a disaster were to occur. I think that this is a valuable asset for a community to attain, develop and foster, especially when a natural disaster is unexpected.

     Something that stood out to me while researching career paths and researching Boulder’s own resiliency is that we are a unique city. Boulder has developed its own resiliency strategies, as it was chosen as one of the first 32 cities in the 100 Resilient Cities campaign. This campaign aims to prepare cities not only for natural weather related disasters, but also social and economic challenges that may arise. I didn’t really think about this aspect before and it was interesting to explore the website and see what issues cities in this campaign were grappling with.

     Resiliency in and of itself is a difficult concept to pin down and actually applies to all aspects of a community’s sustainability and wellbeing. After looking through 100 Resilient Cities, I went on a bit of a mission and looked into more applications of resilience theory—which turns out there are many. Just when I thought I had my whole future figured out (sarcasm of course), I went and opened a can of worms on different (and interesting) applications of resilience. Guess it’s back to the drawing board!

Question: What are some social challenges that would require a city/community to rely upon resiliency strategies?

Resiliency and Transformation of the Energy System

      Thirst for Power by Michael Webber was on the summer reading list for the MENV program and was a great introduction to the “energy water nexus.” Webber’s main thesis throughout the book when it comes to water and energy is that we need to view the two through a more “holistic thinking that recognizes these resources as interconnected, and a systems-level approach that acknowledges how one change in one state to a water system could impact an energy system five states away” (Webber, 6).

       One point that I want to make about this nexus is that it is a flaw in the general resilience of our energy system. An aspect of addressing the general resiliency of our energy system includes looking at the diversity of the energy system and how we generate electricity. According to the EIA, in 2015 87% of our electricity was generated by nuclear or fossil fuels leaving only 13% of our energy system is capable of operating without water. Increased renewables would allow for additional energy diversity and less reliance on water for energy. When Brian Walker discusses the diversity aspect of general resiliency in Resilience in Practice he asks the question “Where in the system is there only one way of carrying out a vital function?” (Walker, 64). If we ask that question of our energy system, we realize it is currently a one-trick-pony. We have built in water to carry out a vital function of generating electricity that leaves the entire system susceptible to the availability of water.

     Considering that the energy system permeates through economic, ecological, and social systems we stand to lose a considerable amount if we cannot transform the system away from using both water and carbon. Looking at the aspects considered most important to transformability in Walker’s Resilience in Practice, the system needs; “to get beyond the state of denial, to create options for change, and have the capacity for change” (Walker, 82). Depending on who you ask, we are still in a state of denial as a whole about transforming our energy system; otherwise, we would see our government acknowledging climate change.

      Much like admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, controlling the denial of the climate change issue is impeding our ability to move further into the process of transformation by not allowing us to focus on creating additional options or capacity for changing the energy system. Unfortunately for the deniers, we have never had more options in terms of emerging technologies to move towards low-carbon energy and suppressing our desire to move towards renewable has only increased our tenaciousness and capacity to engage. In turn, climate change deniers are carrying out a vital function of their system in only one way and we must exploit that weakness with science!

Question: Should we focus on developing our options and capacity to change the energy system if we cannot control the denial of the problem?

Blame Humans, Not El Niño

I’m choosing to go off the beaten path (not too far) this week and write about something that is of great interest and concern to me. The article put together by the Stockholm Resilience Center about resilience and its connection to socio-ecological research put forth many interesting (and in my opinion, not often discussed) points. One of these points in particular referred to El Niño. Having spent most of my undergraduate career obsessing over its cycles, history and effects on local climate, I was happy to go back to my former meteorologist self for a bit.

El Niño, the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), brings a warm current to the west coast of South America every 4-7 years and lasts between 9-12 months. There are many local weather effects associated with this large-scale atmospheric-oceanic interaction, such as warmer temperatures, wetter than average conditions, or drought depending on location. Biodiversity and local livelihoods also depend on this “predictable” cycle. While intensity of El Niño oscillations can vary when they do occur, nature has its way of coping with these changes. However, when humans start to interfere and exacerbate the effects of El Niño (such as drier than normal conditions), we start to have a HUGE problem.

Due to our growing demand for palm oil, which is used in a variety of consumer products, we require more trees from the Dipterocarp family than ever before. Forests in Borneo that house the Dipterocarp trees usually thrive and flower in El Niño conditions. However, due to increased logging to access the trees’ resources, we are negatively affecting this ecosystem. On top of that, burning the land has made the dry effects of El Niño even worse. By creating this new problem, in what was a natural cycle, we are adding to our own demise while satisfying our “urgent” need for foreign palm oil.

Being a smart consumer is extremely important to me as an environmentalist. Learning about where products come from and how they are produced helps me to make better decisions. It worries me that consumer needs are prioritized over the health of our global environment. By paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes (which was also mentioned in this article)--- we need to remember that we are a part of nature, not apart from it. By doing this, we realize that we are a part of a larger system which not only affects us, but those around us and those yet to come.

Question: The produce (or other food item) that we want at any given time is not always in season. Are we being selfish by purchasing these items, knowing (or not knowing) that the places that they come from are being destroyed ecologically?

I also came across this very timely article earlier today: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-06/trump-and-a-possible-el-nino-may-confound-palm-oil-market-bears

Problem Solving in a Changing Landscape

My first job was at a company that had just experienced a major change. The company used to run a statewide energy conservation program, and had recently lost that contract to a competitor. In addition, they were subject to some longer-term pressures, such as the increasing need for computer systems with the capacity to handle large amounts of data and the employees to run those systems. I think it’s fair to say the company was in a state of release and trying to move towards reorganization. When I was there, unfortunately, not a lot was getting done.

Contrast this with my second job, at a newer company, which was in a phase of growth. The company had started a little over a year before I started working there and there was a lot of room for flexibility and creativity. This company was definitely in a growth or exploitation phase.

I found companies a very entry point into understanding Fath et al.’s adaptive cycle. Given how far beyond the boundaries we have pushed several key environmental systems described in the “What is Resilience?” article, are we on the brink of a period of global release? How quickly will we be able to reorganize and cope with impacts of the environmental damage we’ve done? Can some of the solutions (e.g. escaping the rigidity trap) presented by Fath et al. help us shorten or mitigate the effects of a period of release?

Question: How does conceptualizing systems in these different phases change our approach to developing interventions?