Resilience Thinking

Human management of socio-ecological systems tends to be unsustainable because...

1. Population growth and poverty put too much pressure on resources.

2. Humans have an innate problem: excessive production and consumption.

3. We have a poor understanding of the socio-ecological systems that we are trying to manage.

Expanding upon point number three, we could improve our ability to manage socio-ecological systems sustainably by applying resilience thinking to  rectifying three major misunderstood assumptions about socio-ecological systems...

1. Socio-ecological systems are primarily determined and characterized by their extremes, not their average conditions. Therefore, optimizing systems for average conditions will make the them vulnerable to extreme conditions.

2. In socio-ecological systems, there is tradeoff between efficiency and optimization on one hand, and resiliency and adaptive capacity on the other hand. Therefore, optimizing production of selected system components will make the whole ecological-system more vulnerable.

3. Socio-ecological systems constantly undergo change with processes operating at different time-scales. Therefore, managing systems under assumptions of equilibrium will make them vulnerable to changing conditions.