Welcome to Frontier Earth

Published: April 1st, 2011

Credit: unonymous/flickr

It’s a destination. This blog is a journey to all the places and ideas and stories along the way.

Let me you give you some background.

Anyone familiar with human history knows we are a resilient species. The evolutionary biology tale alone speaks to our incredible resilience. But the age-old story of tribes, society, and peoples is one of bouncing back repeatedly from war, disease, hunger, trauma, and all manner of natural disasters.

Consider the story of Japan this past month. While the nuclear crisis has dominated much of the news, to my mind the big story is the resilience of the Japanese people, how they have endured disasters of epic proportions with equanimity and resoluteness.

But my purpose with this blog is to explore another dimension of resilience that is less well known but just as vital to human well-being: the durability of the ecosystems we rely on and live in tandem with, and the durability of our societal institutions and infrastructure, when put to the test by sudden (as in the case of Japan), cascading shocks.

In recent years, a paradigm and a body of scholarship have emerged to address mounting climate and environmental concerns. It is called Resilience Science. Here is a nice definition of the concept from an interdisciplinary group of scientists:

We depend on ecological systems for our survival and we continuously impact the ecosystems in which we live from the local to global scale. Resilience is a property of these linked social-ecological systems.

Resilience Science seeks to identify "tipping points" that could push an ecosystem beyond the point of self-repair. But the field recognizes that ecosystems and human society are intertwined, so the implications for people are obvious. Resilience Science also seeks to identify ways to enhance the stability of social-ecological systems in advance of disturbances.

This involves identifying measures that strengthen institutions and infrastructure to withstand increasing impacts from climate and environmental related changes. Among the topics that contain this resilience framework that interest me are climate adaptation, environmental security, and sustainability science.

Indeed, the latter strikes me as the flipside of Resilience Science. We live in a world where rising population pressures, natural resource scarcities, peak energy concerns, and climate instability are coming together in combustible ways that seriously challenge the durable capacity of the planet and human societies.

The nascent field of Sustainability Science will help chart the journey to Frontier Earth.

In the next post, I’ll discuss in more detail the kinds of stories I’ll be covering in this space. (I’ll also say a few words about your humble host). But one important feature of this blog I want to emphasize at the outset is the role of you, the reader. I want you to be actively engaged in the material covered here. To that end, I welcome all your suggestions and story tips. Additionally, I will encourage discussion in the comment threads. I also intend on highlighting some of your contributions to the dialogue.

I look forward to taking this journey with you.

Posted in Impacts, Responses, Trends, Climate, Society, Global, Frontier Earth

« Frontier Earth

Comments

By Geoff Dabelko (Washington)
on April 1st, 2011

Great you are tackling these issues through the resilience frame Keith. Looking forward to the reporting and discussion you can enable.

By Keith Kloor (brooklyn, NY)
on April 1st, 2011

Thanks, Geoff. Your twitter feed and The New Security Beat blog are essential reading for me. Since environmental security is part of the portfolio here, I’ll probably be pestering you more than usual.

By Barry Woods (UK)
on April 1st, 2011

It does sound an interesting blog.. yet personally I don’t think ‘climate instability’ part is a given.. No current weather or patterns as far as I’m aware would be held up as anyhing of the sort. So perhaps projections of future ‘climate instability’ reflect an age old human condition of ‘the end is nigh’.

There has been an alterbative viewpoint (rational optimist being one) that by a number of measures, the human condition has improved (and is still improving) measurably over the last century and will continue to do so. And a large part of resilience is adaptation and new opportunities.

Don’t let anyone accuse me of being an optimist though (just ask my wife on that one )

By Alexander Harvey (UK)
on April 2nd, 2011

‘Resilience Science seeks to identify “tipping points” that could push an ecosystem beyond the point of self-repair.’

It is my opinion that the majority of the misery that will befall us will be due to acute as opposed to chronic distruption. I worry not so much as to whether the situation is risilient, in that it can self-repair, but in that it does not explore the extremes. I think it matters little whether a few million or billion lives are blighted or lost due to irratic markets in basic commodities like food or fuel measured in periods of months, or due to their degrading over decades to centuries or to their sudden irrevocable collapse. To my mind much of future thinking is bedevilled by tendencies to seek solutions optimised by cost or efficiency as opposed to diversity and modes of failure, that heralds a world where more and more eggs are in fewer baskets and that the inherent time horizons become shorter and shorter, and at best we all suffer from repeated and increasing frequent bouts of pain and misery, should we cheat death.

Can I presume that this type of resilence will be in the bedrock of Frontier Earth?

Alex

By Keith Kloor (Brooklyn, NY)
on April 2nd, 2011

Alex,
Definitely stop by on Monday, as I’ll have a post up then discussing the kinds of stories and themes one can expect to see at Frontier Earth.

By Dan Ferber (Indianapolis/Indiana/46254)
on April 2nd, 2011

Keith, I, too, am glad to see you’re taking this tack. Resilience is exactly what we will need most in the years ahead. Understanding it in complex systems is, well, complex, and I’m glad to see that researchers are making serious efforts. Look forward to reading your typically incisive commentary on this and other environmental issues.

By Steve L
on April 2nd, 2011

Resilience science sounds potentially interesting. Your description of it is certainly broader than the ecological training I received in the past. Nevertheless my thoughts are drawn narrowly to the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis. Biodiversity (and more contentiously, productivity) was viewed to have an optimum rate of disturbance, with a falling off with either less disturbance or more than this amount, and science was to define these optima and recognize tipping points in various ecosystems. Whereas a system that has not been disturbed enough could easily be added, it is very difficult to undo disturbances that are over the limit. Thus it is not surprising to me that a focus on the latter end of the spectrum has resulted in sustainability/resilience research. With climate change and ocean acidification, impacts will be pretty unidirectional too. I wish the researchers luck. For efforts with respect to tipping points I hope they get further than those testing the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis. My understanding of their eventual conclusions in mapping ecosytem forcings and trajectories is essentially this: “It depends.”

By Matt C (UK)
on April 3rd, 2011

As someone interested in resilience science I’ll be keeping an eye on this blog too, Keith- thanks for starting it up.

I think it would be wise to make clear early on- as a health warning if you like- that the term ‘resilience’ means different things within different disciplines. Sounds like you’re focusing on (social-)ecological resilience, as first described by CJ Holling, then developed by Brian Walker and many others, which makes sense for a climate blog. But people should be aware that ecologists, psychologists, engineers, economists, and social scientists interested in disaster studies may have different, though often overlapping (and thankfully in recent years, converging) understandings of the term.

I suppose this is always a problem with an emerging field. Until definitions and links have been firmly established you need to be careful everyone is actually talking about the same thing.

By Brandon Keim (Brooklyn & Bangor, ME)
on April 3rd, 2011

As a fellow science journalist with a resilience beat, I’m happy/irritated to see this, and will be looking forward to reading it/avoiding it because it seems like spying. Complicated, innit! Best wishes on the new space.

By StuartR
on April 3rd, 2011

“The nascent field of Sustainability Science “

Will have to get fully born and be summat real, and actually useful

Good luck with the blog.

By keith Kloor (brooklyn, NY)
on April 3rd, 2011

Matt C,

Thanks for raising an excellent point. Your cautionary advice reminds of something similar I learned from Kathleen Tierney, the Director of the National Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, when I was a Fellow at the University’s Center for Environmental Journalism in 2008-09. Tierney spoke at one of our weekly seminars, and she got to talking about some basic terminology problems that made for confusion between two disciplines when discussion mitigation and adaption. “The climate change community has a different terminology than [the discipline of] Natural Hazards,” she explained.

Mitigation means one thing in the climate change community and another in the Natural Hazards world, she said at the time. In the former, mitigation is narrowly defined as a policy or action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To Natural Hazards & Disasters scientists, mitigation is the whole ball of wax. “It means preparedness, response, and recovery,” said Tierney. “By mitigation, we mean things you can do in advance.”

So I’ll take care to be as specific as possible when using all these terms, and see if I can settle in on a usage of resilience that works across disciplines. Thanks again for the heads-up.

By Pascvaks
on April 4th, 2011

Bon Voyage!

One day, perhaps, our species will develope a far better way to communicate and a better memory too. Till then we need to be reminded on a regular basis who, what, where, how, why, and when we are, and work at effective communication. I have a feeling you’ll do well. Break a leg!

By thingsbreak
on April 4th, 2011

Looking forward to your new blog, Keith. Congratulations.

By Bart Verheggen (Netherlands)
on April 4th, 2011

Hi Keith,

Congrats on your new gig! This place (Climate Central) offers great potential I think. I’ll try to check in from time to time, though I have to admit that I’m looking to decrease my blog reading rather than increase it…

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