Product details
Product name: Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World
Reviewer: Jenny Blackford
Author: Brian Walker and David Salt
Publisher: ISLAND PRESS
Price: $49.95
Size: 174 PAGES
G Rating:
Brian Walker is the science program director of the Resilience Alliance, a network of ecologists and social scientists who have worked for over fifteen years on 'resilience thinking'.
Previously, Walker was chief of CSIRO's Division of Wildlife and Ecology.
Walker and co-author David Salt lay out this new, ecologically sound approach to the discipline of natural resource management in this book, likely to be of interest for professionals in this field.
The authors use case studies (including Australia's Goulburn-Broken Catchment) together with management diagrams to explain the key concepts.
Engineering resilience is about bouncing back fast, but ecological resilience thinking is about identifying and understanding the thresholds at which an ecosystem changes, perhaps irreversibly.
Sometimes, even when problematic practices are stopped, an ecosystem cannot return to its natural state. It has undergone a "regime shift": a change to a different stable state.
For example, a fishery may not recover when fishing is halted, as the collapse of the North Atlantic cod population tragically demonstrates.
