Resilient Plants and Ecological Youth Development

Text: Folke, et al. "Resilience and Sustainable Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of Transformation." (a simple Google search will allow you to access a PDF)
I chose this article because the title mentioned resilience and capacity, two themes we mentioned during class last week.

The Social-Ecological System is an important concept in this article, and I'll be honest, I had some trouble wrapping my head around it--maybe because it has been outside the realm of my experience to think of ecosystems as human habitats as well (even though I had a cerebral understanding that humans were a part of ecosystems, too). Broadly speaking, the social-ecological system refers to the set of interactions between humans and nature. Within this domain, "resilience" is meant to describe "(a) the magnitude of shock that the system can absorb and remain within a given state, (b) the degree to which the system is capable of self-organization, and (c) the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation" (7). However, for our purposes, I don't think we're so concerned with human-nature interactions (although a good nature hike, like good music, can work wonders for soothing the savage breast). Therefore, my focus for this article was to try to distill principles of resilience and vulnerability that could be transformed from the social-ecological system domain, to a domain more relevant to our pursuits. With that in mind, lets reexamine the article's definition of "resilience" and substitute something else for "system": (a) the magnitude of shock that the [individual/family/community] can absorb and remain within a given state, (b) the degree to which the [individual/family/community]  is capable of self-organization, and (c) the degree to which the [individual/family/community] can build capacity for learning and adaptation.
The article goes on to indicate that resilience is linked to diversity, including diversity "of human opportunity" (8). Diversity of experience builds resilience because, while surprise is inevitable, exposure to novel situations makes surprise less daunting and more manageable: "Managing for resilience enhances the likelihood of sustaining development in changing environments where the future is unpredictable and surprise is likely" (13).
On the flip side is vulnerability. In the words of the article, vulnerability is "...the propensity of social and ecological system [sic] to suffer harm from exposure to external stresses and shocks" (13). Building coping or adaptive capacity is key to overcoming vulnerability and establishing resilience. Adaptive capacity is "the ability of a social-ecological system to cope with novel situations without losing options for the future" (17). The article identifies four factors that contribute to this ability: "learning to live with change and uncertainty; nurturing diversity for resilience; combining different types of knowledge for learning; and creating opportunity for self-organization towards socialecological sustainability" (18). All four are easily adapted to our context. However, from there the article gravitates more specifically toward biodiversity and case studies of overfishing, etc., so this article's utility seems mostly tied up in getting some of these words added to our vocabularies.