Reference no: EM132413183 , Length: word count:1500

Topic 1 - Complex Adaptive Systems and Resilience

"Humans are great short-term optimisers. But we're not so good over longer timeframes. That requires systems thinking. Resilience thinking is systems thinking." Walker and Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking. Island Press.

For too long our linear, reductionist approach to understanding the world has separated people from their environment and life support-systems, resulting in an overwhelming number of critical and urgent ecological and social problems. Understanding the world around us as a complex adaptive system, instead of a linear, one dimensional system, is a very important first step in addressing the many significant challenges we face.

Resilience is a property of a complex adaptive system, whether that system is an individual person, or a social group, or even more importantly, a community and the interactions with the natural world, what we call a social-ecological system.

While resilience exists to some degree in all systems, it can be enhanced and fostered, and it can also be weakened. A system that lacks resilience is brittle, easily broken or disturbed, and doesn't readily bounce back from shocks.

Because we cannot know exactly what the future holds, or precisely how major ecological challenges such as climate change will affect us, many authors and practitioners argue that creating more general resilience within systems will be crucial for readying our communities to face the future.

Reflection question - How do you think you might be able to determine whether a region or a community is resilient or not? What are some of the specific features or indicators you might look out for? Make your answer as specific as possible.

Topic 2 - Bioregionalism and Decentralisation

"Unless we humans can find ways to consider ourselves residents of natural regions and to clearly identify with endemic dimensions, limitations, and potentials of land, water, and other life-forms, we will not be able to live sustainably, and we will continue to overestimate the carrying capacity of the regions we inhabit." Robert Thayer. 2003. Life-Place: Bioregional Thought and Practice.

The concept of bioregionalism remains fairly niche and unknown, but it is potentially a very powerful inspiration for how to live sustainably within the carrying capacities of the land that we rely on.

Bioregionalism has a physical sciences component to it, with ecologists defining areas in terms of their biological and geological characteristics.

However the version of bioregionalism that we are interested in here is a more ethical and social version of bioregionalism. It starts with the biophysical features of a place, but it then asks us to consider how we might best arrange our economy, our communities and our politics to work within the constraints of the region in which we are situated.

Bioregionalism, then, is fundamentally about relocalisation, and decentralisation, and about the prospect of creating more self-sufficient communities and regions. It promotes a different model of development to globalisation, but importantly it is not parochial and xenophobic, and still looks outwards and seeks connection with the wider world.

Reflection questions - What do you believe are the two most important dimensions of bioregionalism? When you look at the region where you live, can you see any evidence of this kind of bioregionalism being practiced?

Topic 3 - Sense of Place and Environmental History

Those who are responsible for the care of landscape in this country can do much to resist the effects of homogenising technology, to individuate by understanding and clarifying the locally distinctive - in short, by respecting the genius loci. George Seddon, 1997, Landprints

Genius loci: 1. The guardian spirit of a place. 2. The distinctive character or atmosphere of place with reference to the impression that it makes on the mind.

Sense of Place is one of those concepts that you understand when you feel it. It might be the attachment you feel to the place you know best, or the place you grew up. It might also be an inexplicable feeling of home in a place that you don't know that well.

Cross (2001) describes two key dimensions to sense of place - firstly a relationship to place, which consists of the ways that people relate to places, or the types of bonds we have with places. The second dimension is community attachment, which consists of the depth and types of attachments to one particular place.

To be endemic is to 'belong exclusively to a certain place'. We commonly refer to biological endemism, but increasingly the task is to also consider what other characteristics are endemic to particular regions. One of the outcomes of a globalised economy is an increasingly homogenised world, and so this notion of endemism and sense of place become important countercurrents.

In this unit we take this idea of endemic sense of place even further to imagine how a sense of place might inform all the aspects of human society within a bioregion. It asks us to consider how communities, businesses, community organisations might all be infused with a sense of place. How can the endemic sense of place of a region be expressed, articulated, celebrated and perpetuated?

Reflection questions - What expresses an endemic sense of place for you, where you live? What is the evidence that your community expresses its own sense of place in ecological, social, cultural or economic realms?

Attachment:- Assignment File.rar