Familiar stuff all of this, I’m sure. Thomas Kuhn, the
philosopher and historian of science, coined the term “paradigm” for those
"universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide
model problems and solutions for a community of researchers" and
professors have employed that term tirelessly when words like “model” or
“pattern” or “program” just seem too darned plain. In contrast with the
“mop-up” work that is the business of “normal science” operating within a given
scientific paradigm (and who wouldn’t get excited about mop-up jobs) Kuhn
identified the manner in which rapid change in science is compressed into its
major revolutionary events.
For now my interest is not merely in the ways in which
Kuhnian analysis can be applied to ecology. Rather, I am curious about how
Kuhn’s model of paradigms and revolutions not only assists in developing our
explicit expectations of what revolutionary ecology makes possible, but also in
how ecological thought can double back and influence the way in which we might
think about the history of science in general. The revolution I have especially
in mind, as I will elaborate below, is that associated with a resurgence of
interest in ecological dynamics: ideas about the structure, function of
ecological systems and the way these systems respond to disturbance. Ecologists
are developing these conceptions at a level of generality that makes their
models epistemologically relevant to phenomena as diverse as lakes, financial
markets, and the history of science itself. So a paradigmatic shift relating to
theories of change in ecology allows ecology to reflect on the nature of all
paradigmatic shifts including its own ones. In this sense there is an ecology
of knowledge, and ecologists therefore can benefit from collaboration with, and insight from, non-traditional
partners in the humanities, in particular, with those that reflect on stability and change in systems not typically of interest to ecologists. Kuhn is just one such anomalous partner. In return, ecology may return the favor by exporting insights
gleaned from the study of nature, making them available for the behavior of other complex systems.
***
Ecology as a discipline has had in its short history its own
tempestuous changes, its revolutionary convulsions. Darwin’s theory was, of
course, an ecological one – the struggle for existence is what gets ecologists
up in the morning and the Darwinian revolution, therefore, is one we ecologists
can claim as our own. Other than that though, ecological revolutions seems like
bloodless coups compared to the emergence of Einsteinian mechanics, or Plate
Tectonics, or even the demise of Phlogiston theory. Even so, it may be useful
to regard such changes as revolutionary. Kuhn, in fact, seemed to have had in
mind an extended conception of scientific revolutions, one that went beyond the
roster of the usual suspects: the Copernican Revolution and those associated
with Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein. When
the structure of previously unrecognized revolutions is compared against those
more spectacular ones it is clear that they all had implications for recognizing
the “sorts of entities the universe does contain, but also by implication,
those that it does not.”1 So the question for ecology is how do its larger
conceptual shifts (let’s go ahead and call them revolutions) alter its
conceptions of what counts for a meaningful entity in the world?
What are some of these ecological revolutions? In my lifetime
there have been some profound shifts in ecological thinking that are relevant
to the entities we might seek to manage. For instance, the older notion of a
Balance of Nature has been set aside in favor of a now greater emphasis on
instability, fluctuation, stochasticity, and disturbance. With this
reconfiguration of emphasis, our thoughts about how best to conserve ecological
systems and their components have changed. For example, managing fire as a
disturbance for the purpose of maintaining the structure of rare biological
communities is now a conservation priority whereas before excluding fire from
“pristine” ecosystems had been the priority. What’s a good revolution without a
fire! Through the shift in an
ecological paradigm, fire shows up, in some senses for the very first time, as
an entity for ecology. This is true at
least in the sense that fire is now as seen as an entity operating within the
normal workings of most ecosystems.
Though ecological revolutions are generally less splashy
than say the Copernican one, nevertheless ecologists have gone one better than
a big splash. Ecologists have created in Resilience
Thinking a conceptual framework and a vocabulary that reframes stability
and change in a way that can accommodate not only thinking of stability and
change in scientific theories but also pretty much everything!
Resilience can be defined (and admittedly the terms has been
defined in other ways by other ecologists) as the capacity of a system to
absorb disturbance and still retain its normal structure and function. Or, to
put it another way, resilience is the capacity to withstand disturbance without
the normal state being tipped into a new one. Resilience thinking is a species of a more
general systems thinking. When one is satisfied that the problem entity of
interest can be regarded as a system, that is, a whole consisting of several
parts – a body, for example with its organs, tissues, and cells – there are
ideas from the resilience tool box that may applicable. The sort of systems
that resilience thinking is especially applied to, are so-called complex
adaptive systems. Complex Adaptive Systems are those that, according to the
Resilience Alliance (a multidisciplinary research group that explores the dynamics
of complex social-ecological systems) possess “inherent uncertainty in their
dynamics that tend to have multiple stable states and that exhibit
self-organisation.”
In its most refined form, resilience thinking provides a way
of examining social-ecological systems, that is, cities, ecological management
units, anywhere, in fact, where one can recognize a unit comprised of people
and the rest of nature. Resilience
thinking can be applied to the analysis of such systems in order to manage them
and to preserve their ability to function in a desirable way and preventing them
from crossing a threshold into a less desirable form. Or, one can, arguably, apply resilience
thinking to doing precisely the reverse.
Of the many key ideas that characterize the paradigm of
resilience thinking two seems particularly interesting. One is the recognition that change in systems
is rarely continuous and linear; changes come about in many ecological systems
episodically. For instance, relatively
clear lakes may remain stable for lengthy periods only to tip to a more turbid
condition rapidly. A forest may appear
unaffected by a particular invasive species only to become rapidly encroached
after a threshold has been, seemingly, breached. Fires, flood, hurricanes, pest outbreaks can
impose consequential changes to a system very rapidly indeed. Another key idea, a companion piece to the
first, is that once a system has crossed a threshold into a new “stable state”
the changes may be irreversible. There is
no going home again!
Although resilience thinkers reserve their most
sophisticated and explicit explanations for ecological case studies, the lay
reader of resilience literature is invited to think about the application of
resilience thinking to any system of
interest of especial interest to them. Once you start to apply it to the
complex systems around us it becomes hard to leave off. Stock markets: their
booms and busts, friendships: their trial and tribulations; social movements:
their development and their dissolutions; and scientific theories: their normal
operation and their revolutionary moments! In fact it becomes hard not to see
resilience and the crossing of thresholds everywhere. However, one must ask,
perhaps impertinently, if a way of thinking about the workings of the world
that covers pretty much everything, can, in fact, explain anything at all.
Resilience thinking can engulf Kuhn’s model of paradigms,
normal science and revolution. In one
sense, theoretical and empirical changes in ecology may conform to the Kuhnian
model, but in turn paradigm shifts seems to be just one of a general class of
phenomena to which resilience thinking might be usefully applied. For instance, the disturbance inflicted to
normal science coming from a few uncanny results may not be paradigm
shattering. A resilient scientific
theory persists despite a few congruous results. But one can ask about the circumstances under
which paradigm resilience is lowered and as a consequence that paradigm is
liable to be swept away in a revolutionary second.
Let us return in conclusion to this short and incomplete
piece to the nagging suspicion that resilience thinking is so sweeping that it
permits us to do very little in particular.
This time one can turn back to Kuhn and remind ourselves of his
observation that revolutions in science call our attention to certain
fundamental entities that comprise the universe. With this in mind, one must always ask, when
we apply resilience thinking to phenomena as disparate as financial systems and
forests, what new features of the system we are inspecting comes to light by
virtue of resilience perspective we are employing. If we merely achieve the goal of stuffing the
phenomena into the conceptual box of resilience thinking, then we have achieved
very little at all.
1 Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962., 7
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