The Year of Adaptive Processes

The new theme for research in BES emphasizes adaptive processes as a key to understanding and working with urban sustainability.  Because of its importance, the intellectual theme for BES this year will be socio-ecological adaptive processes.

From Sanitary to Sustainable: The Guiding Idea

To review a bit, BES III takes the transformation from the sanitary to the sustainable city as a major ongoing environmental shift that has the potential to affect all aspects of the city-suburban-exurban system of Baltimore.  Sustainability is a socially agreed upon set of goals that accounts for environmental, social, and economic health of the total urban ecosystem.  It necessarily incorporates social values.  

The Science Supporting Sustainability

But what scientific information is needed to advance sustainability, and to evaluate the degree of success in achieving sustainability?  The concept of resilience, which is both a powerful metaphor of change and adjustment is the next link in the intellectual path to understanding and working with sustainability.  Resilience, as mentioned earlier in this Web Log (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/01/resilience-ecology-evolution-and.html) is the ability of a system to experience internal and external shocks and still adjust and persist in a dynamic form.  Resilience can have socially desirable and socially undesirable outcomes, and that is judged against the three-pronged sustainability goals chosen.  The system of automobile based transport in metropolitan America is resilient, but in some ways, an environmentally unfortunate one.  Wetlands are a resilient aspect of coastal systems affected by hurricanes and storm surges.  Resilience per se is neither good nor bad.  Sustainability, when the goals are well chosen, may admittedly involve trade offs, but at least those trade offs must not neglect off hand such things as social equity and ecological function.

Making Resilience Work

Figure 1: The Adaptive Cycle

Resilience is on the one hand, a metaphorical conception, and on the other a very general theoretical framework cast in the form of the “adaptive cycle” (Figure 1).  How does such a general concept get translated into something that can be measured and tracked?  The answer is to use adaptive processes to fill in the details of how systems develop, how they react to stresses and disturbances, and how they periodically reorganize.

Resilience Depends on Adaptation

What are adaptive processes?  They are the structures, fluxes, and interactions that allow systems to adjust to sudden or gradual changes.  Social and biogeophysical features can contribute to the adaptive capacity of urban systems.  The literature suggests a number of general kinds of adaptive processes (Figure 2).  It is these features which BES needs to concentrate on in the coming year.  How do our ongoing, long-term measurements support the scheme of adaptive processes?  What kinds of trends can be determined and can they be interpreted in terms of the resilience cycle and socially described sustainability goals?  What new measurements or analyses might be required?  Are there clear parallels between various social and biophysical adaptive processes?

Figure 2. The determinants of adaptive capacity, shown as adaptive processes in social and biophysical realms.  Of course the processes in the two realms interact.

Toward Improved Understanding of Adaptive Processes

Over the coming year, discussion of adaptive processes should suffuse all our activities and research discussions.  Then, during our annual meeting in October, we may be in a better position to evaluate the state of adaptive processes, and to understand how they affect the transition from the sanitary to the sustainable city.  Addressing this issue will undoubtedly take a long time.  It’s a good time to start.

Adaptive Explanations in Cities

Cities are hard to explain, no doubt.  Within and between cities, social capital, historical contingency, economic resources, and the deployment of power are well known explanatory variables.  One kind of explanatory process, however, has been notably absent from the roster of possibilities in urban socio-ecological research.  Surprisingly, that missing element is one of the most fundamental explanatory tools of modern biology and ecology – the adaptation of social organisms as groups.  The application of the principles of natural selection (Box 1) to social groups may also have a role in understanding the social structure of cities and urban agglomerations, and hence the effects of social groups and neighborhoods on environmental processes.

Prof. David Sloan Wilson 

This lapse is being corrected by the scholarly and practical efforts of Professor David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University, a part of the State University of New York system.  Prof. Wilson is one of the world’s leading evolutionary ecologists.  He has studied the adaptation of groups of organisms in both model and actual situations for decades.  Although some biologists find adaptation of groups to be problematical, preferring to leave adaptive explanations at the nexus of individuals and the populations they constitute, the weight of models and experimental outcomes has convinced many, including myself, that this kind of explanation has great power and legitimacy.  The emergence of altruism against the seemingly unassailable momentum of individual benefit has required forceful explanatory tools.  Groups that exhibit greater altruism and cohesion are expected to be more successful than those which do not promote group benefit.

Can this explanatory hypothesis apply to cities?  Prof. Wilson and colleagues are investigating this possibility by comparing various opportunities for “prosociality”[i] in Binghamton, NY.  In BES, we might refer to social capital or neighborhood cohesion as related concepts.  The arenas in which prosociality is being examined in Binghamton range from the reward systems in high school classes, to the willingness of persons in different neighborhoods to do good deeds for strangers.  A recent article in the journal, Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110608/full/474146a.html) has summarized in very engaging and clear terms the concepts and the many community-based activities that Prof. Wilson is employing in Binghamton.  His work is aimed at understanding the social structure of this post-industrial, upstate New York State city, but he and his colleagues are also engaged in activities aimed at improving the quality of life for the 47,000 residents in their many neighborhoods.

At the BES annual meeting, which takes place on 19-20 October 2011, Prof. Wilson will deliver the keynote address.  This will give us a chance to think about how the hypothesis of adaptive altruism of groups can be applied and tested in Baltimore.  For background on Prof. Wilson and his exciting work with Binghamton communities, see not only the piece in Nature referenced above, but also his own Web Log (http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/) and that of the Binghamton Neighborhood Project (http://bnp.binghamton.edu/).

I’m excited to explore how an adaptive model and the hypotheses it generates can help us better understand and promote the connection of science and society, and the prospect of people's well being in the Baltimore region.

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[i] Prosocial - Beneficial to all parties and consistent with community laws and mores; Contributing to a beneficial outcome by negotiation, problem solving, problem analysis, clarification, or respectful behaviors (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prosocial).

 The photograph of Prof. Wilson is from http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/

Resilience: Ecology, Evolution, and Engineering

The concept of resilience is key to BES III. This powerful concept is ideal for understanding and working with complex, human ecosystems. However, it is the object of some confusion because there are two contrasting ways to frame and theorize the concept.

Originally, engineering and physical systems were the source of the concept as applied in ecology. Under the equilibrium paradigm predominant at the time, resilience was conceived of as the ability of a system to absorb a shock or deformation and to return to its original, or equilibrium, state. A rubber band is a perfect example of such a system. The loose, floppy form can be stretched repeatedly, and still return to its general band-like shape.

Engineering or equilibrium resilience is the concept used to describe this dynamic. This sort of resilience can be called engineering resilience because it characterizes built structures and infrastructure. Key to this idea is that there is an acceptable, desired, or equilibrium state of the system. Of course, extreme deformation or perhaps consistent strong deformation over time can lead to system failure. The band breaks when stretched too far, or after years of material degradation while encircling a thick wad of forgotten papers in a hot attic.

Equilibrium or engineering resilience may be of value when it is possible to identify a desirable state that is expected to persist over some specified time or at a particular spatial scale. But for many purposes, it is best considered a special case of the concept of resilience. A more inclusive concept suitable to systems that are not at equilibrium, or which are undergoing periodic or constant change is ecological or evolutionary resilience.

Ecological resilience does not ask whether a complex system returns to a previous or equilibrium state. Rather, it asks about the changes that a system can experience and still persist in the same dynamic form. Resilience is about the ability to receive shocks and still stay in the game. Systems that can adapt to change are said to be resilient. This then is an evolutionary kind of concept since adaptation is a central feature. This is in contrast to engineering resilience which is concerned with stability or permanence. So, ecological and evolutionary resilience are concerned with adaptive capacity and adjustment to change, not to return to a stable point. Rather than asking about the ability of a rubber band to return to its unstressed state, evolution asks about the rubber band becoming something else that is better adapted to the new conditions. It is of course silly to think about a simple, physical-chemical system such as a rubber band changing in such a radical way, but evolution, adaptation, learning, and adjustment are familiar capacities of biological and social systems. In other words, they are complex systems that can adapt. Resilience in the more evolutionary sense is the idea that points toward the question of how -- and how well -- a particular system can adapt to changing conditions or sudden shocks that come at unexpected times.

Changing concepts of resilience are relevant to the BES III main theme of Sanitary to Sustainable City. The sanitary city identifies a desired state, and seeks to keep structures or processes at that level. Given that societal and regulatory decisions identify legal or desirable targets for some features people must manage, a classical or engineering definition provides guidance about how to measure success. However, under changing environmental conditions, including social, economic, and environmental alterations, it may be more appropriate to ask about the capacity of the system to adjust to those changes. Recognizing that feedbacks among social, economic, and environmental factors and processes are an unavoidable part of urban ecosystems, this suggests that we learn how to go beyond the engineering resilience concept and understand and use the contemporary concept of ecological or evolutionary resilience.

Here are some references about this contrast and the nature of ecological resilience that are relevant to socio-ecological systems.

Gunderson, L. H. 2000. Ecological resilience - in theory and application. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31:425-439.

Holling, C. S. 1996. Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. Pages 31-44 in P. C. Schulze, editor. Engineering within ecological constraints. National Academies of Engineering, Washington, DC.