Speech written and delivered by Steve Harrell at the University of Washington Global Health Seminar, 06 March 2009
“I am honored to be invited to come speak to you today; honored and a little bit puzzled. Global Health? I don’t do global health. I don’t do health at all. I’m an anthropologist with an interest in ecology and geography.
But we want you.
Want me to do what?
Want you to talk about resilience and resurgence.
I only do resilience; still waiting for the resurgence to happen.
So talk about resilience.
Resilience in ecosystems?
Yes?
OK, here goes….
So perhaps I come to you out of an interest in health after all. Not the health of individuals, as in medicine, or even the distribution of human health through geographic, temporal, and social space, as in public health. But the health of the systems in which humans are embedded, the health of the political, social, economic, and in particular the ecological systems in which people live their lives. I can’t prove that the health of the systems has any direct relationship to the health of the people in them; that is something for the biostatisticians to work on—though I can’t imagine that it doesn’t. So let’s assume that it does, that a healthy, resilient ecosystem gives people a better chance of maintaining or recovering health, and go from there. I will spend my time today talking about a what makes a healthy, resilient ecosystem. At the end of my talk I will make some suggestions as to how this kind of thinking might contribute to an approach to health problems, and invite your comments and discussion.
I will organize my presentation today around three dichotomies: productivity vs. resilience, traditional knowledge vs. technological knowledge, and command-and-control management vs. golden-rule management. Each is an aspect of the larger dilemma that faces us in the 21st century.
Productivity vs. Resilience
Productivity and its twin, efficiency, are all around us. We measure our success by GDP growth, worker productivity, just-in-time manufacturing, energy efficiency of our economy. We are committed in most of what we do to a principle of maximizing output per unit of input. In some ways this is justified. It has given us our modern economy, including not only a comfortable material standard of living, but also the surplus over subsistence that allows us to develop non-material resources, and to spread beyond the privileged elites of society those things that we consider make life worth living, including not only arts, literature, and culture, but also science and medicine.
In fact, it is possible to see human history over the long term as the story of the growth of productivity. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens sapiens perhaps 120,000 years ago, the amounts of goods and services that we have managed to extract from the earth and cycle through our bodies and our social institutions has increased by several orders of magnitude. In pure natural selection terms, this was inevitable, at least until the last few decades. Those individuals who produced more could rear more children to adulthood; those societies (if we believe in group selection) that could marshal resources more efficiently could prevail over those who could not, and so expanded at the expense of their less efficient rivals.
But even several hundred years ago in many places, making societies more productive, managing resources for maximum efficiency of output per unit of input, sometimes caused ecological and social collapses because of lack of resilience. The case studies that Jared Diamond narrates in his popular book Collapse provide some well-known, if occasionally disputed, examples. Easter Islanders maximized timber production for monuments, boats, and weapons, and ended up using up the forest faster than it could restore itself by natural growth. Mayans managed irrigated agriculture to maximize the surplus available for ritual, governance, and the living standards of the upper classes, and when prolonged drought came, they were unable to deal with it. In a more recent and less disputed case, the cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic, which was being managed for something called maximum sustainable yield, all of a sudden collapsed in the early 1980s. The message of these cases is clear: when we manage our resources for maximum output over the short term, the system in which the resources are embedded loses the ability to deal with large-scale shocks or disturbances: it loses its resilience.
We need to define resilience carefully here. The founder of resilience ecology, C. S. Holling, divides resilence into two types: engineering resilience, the time it takes for a system that has been disturbed to return to its original state, and ecosystem resilience, the magnitude of shock that a system can absorb without changing the basic variables that control the state of the system. Here I am concerned almost entirely with ecosystem resilience, defined in another way as the ability of a system to maintain its basic nature in the face of outside shocks or disturbances. A good example comes from the famine-relief system of late 17th and 18th-century China, the heyday of the Qing dynasty. China by this time was already a highly populated country, with a population during this period that grew from about 200 million to about 350 million people. Realizing the danger of famine in a land that was subject to frequent floods and droughts, the Dynasty established a system of granaries and grain reports to deal with the eventualities of crop shortages. Every county had a state-managed granary that was kept full and kept fresh—as it became clear each fall what the current year’s harvest was likely to be, a suitable proportion of the previous year’s grain was sold off while it was still edible. And local officials, in addition to keeping the granary full and fresh, were also charged with making regular reports on the grain prices in the local markets. If they found the prices to be rising too rapidly, they would dump grain from the granary on the market, so as to prevent hoarding and speculation and make sure that there was a supply of grain for people if their own harvests came up short, and to make sure that prices did not rise to the paradoxical point where people would starve even though there was grain around, because they could not afford it. In this way, despite the frequent floods and droughts, and despite the high population density, there were very few famines; the system was resilient in the face of outside shocks.
But toward the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, the granary system, along with the administration of the dynasty in general, began to decay due to corruption, fatigue, lack of leadership at the top, and perhaps too much population growth to be accommodated even by such an admirable and well-designed mechanism as the granary system. Granaries began to be left empty, price reports were sometimes not based on real data, or not made at all, and all the grain that was produced was consumed directly or went into the markets rather than into emergency storage. There was no mechanism to put surplus grain on the market, because there was no saved surplus, and thus no mechanism to keep prices at an affordable level. So when drought or flood hit for several years in a row, prices rose, there was no way to keep them down, producers could not buy to supplement their own harvests, and the frequency of famines went up, despite the fact that overall production continued to rise, and production per capita remained steady.
What had changed from the late 17th century to the mid-19th was not that the production of the system had gone down; in fact it had gone up. Nor was there a decline in productivity, defined in terms of output to input ratio; it had at least stayed steady. And of course the frequency of abnormal weather had not gone up or down. What had changed was that the resilience of the system had decreased, the buffer against calamity had come down, the ability of the system to absorb disturbances and still function had gone down. Or in strict mathematical terms, the size of the disturbance that the system could absorb and still retain its basic functions had decreased. Even a short-term drought or a one-season flood, in some areas, could lead to famine. The controlling variables in the system had also changed; no longer was preventing famine locally a matter of keeping the granaries full and fresh and monitoring market prices; with the granaries no longer full, monitoring market prices became an empty bureaucratic exercise.
You will notice that all the examples I have given so far have been cases where human societies are coming up against the limits of their production capacity given available technology. Islands of course are prime examples of environments with finite possibilities to expand their resource bases, and so are technologically advanced, densely populated societies like 18th and 19th- century China. And we have to admit, the simple logic of natural selection says that, in the short run (a few generations), those who produce more will prevail over those who produce less, and the logic of maximum production, like a genetic trait that confers reproductive fitness, will be passed on to the culture, the ideology, the morals of the next generation.
So we should not be surprised that productivity and efficiency will win out in the short run over resilience. And for most of the earth’s history, in favorable environments at least, this has come at little cost. The loss of resilience was usually trivial compared to the gain in productivity, though there were always local examples of systems that became brittle and unresilient, and reached thresholds or tipping points which, once crossed, no longer enabled them to operate as before. But now we are in a different kind of world, where our current level of productivity is clearly unsustainable on a global scale. And science, as it has developed in the service of economic growth, development, and increases in the standards of material well-being, has typically been productivity oriented. This certainly has to change, but given that we have nearly 7 billion of us, we can’t just give up productivity in the interests of building a more resilient system. What to do?
It seems to me that we can draw a partial lesson—and I emphasize that the lesson is only a partial one—from communities who have managed their resources for resilience over centuries or millennia. Such communities that still exist today are often those we have come to label “indigenous,” living in small enclaves on the borders or margins of more productive polities and populations, with low population densities and relatively low levels of productivity and resource consumption, but with high levels of resilience. These peoples have developed not only practices, but also forms of knowledge that we often call TEK—Traditional Environmental Knowledge or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and on the basis of this knowledge have succeeded in managing their marginal environments in ways that have preserved their resilience. Let’s take a closer look at TEK and the ways it contrasts with, and perhaps ultimately can be made compatible with, modern scientific knowledge.
Traditional Environmental Knowledge vs. Scientific Knowledge
Traditional Ecological Knowledge, whether it is employed by a community that we would now call indigenous or not, must come from a community that has been in the same place, or the same kind of place, for a long time, long enough that empirical observations of the environment and how to manage it have become part of the received wisdom that is passed down from generation to generation, that has come to be assumed to be the way the natural world works. There are several important characteristics shared by systems of TEK the world over, and these characteristics are its common strength, at the same time they are its common limitation and the reason it cannot replace, but must be used alongside of, modern scientific knowledge.
First and foremost, TEK is place-based. On the whole, unlike science, it is not based on the deduction of universal principles and applying them to particular situations, but rather on deep, detailed, and long-term observation of particular phenomena and the relationships between them. It is not devoid of general principles, but these general principles are expressed in the form of particulars. For example, the science of population biology tells us that if we remove too many reproductive-age individuals from a population, the population will not be able to reproduce itself, and this could be applied to any population, including for example the caribou herds in the north of Quebec. The TEK of the native Cree, by contrast, tells you that if you shoot more than you can use, and if you don’t use every usable part of the animal you shoot, the caribou will get angry and not allow themselves to be shot. Different rules apply to fish management, though a population biologist would probably say they were applications of the same principles.
Second, TEK is applied. There is no “pure research” in traditional societies, or if there is, it is a matter of speculation about the cosmos, and even then it is often done with respect to real human and natural communities. So TEK principles are guiding principles, they are, in Clifford Geertz’s terms, models for as well as models of behavior. The Nuosu people in Southwest China with whom I work have a prohibition against cutting conifers during the growing season between the blooming of the first rhododendrons in the Spring and the harvest of the last crop of oats in the fall. Anyone who violates this prohibition will bring lighting and hail upon the community. There are, to be sure, perfectly good, completely material reasons for not cutting trees during the rainy season when they will cause erosion, and Nuosu people understand the relationship between bare ground and erosion perfectly well. But the point is made in terms of what one should and should not do, in terms of the moral as well as the ecosystemic consequences of violating the prohibition.
Third, TEK is resilience-oriented, rather than productivity oriented. In all long-abiding small-scale societies, we find both ecological and ethical injunctions not to use more than one needs. Koyukon salmon fishermen in central Alaska, for example, have a rule that when you have what you need, you stop fishing. Anything more is greed, and greed will be punished—ethically as well as ecologically—by diminished availability of fish in the next season. In modern times, people use outboard motors, and they don’t have to consume everything they produce; they can market some of the fish to meet some of their daily needs. But to use them to get rich is to risk the implicit contract between people and the species they consume—if people consume them wisely, morally, without greed, then the species will allow themselves to continue to provide food or other resources for humans. Thus there is always leeway; there is always something left, and this renders the system resilient in the face of unexpected shocks.
Fourth, and we can see this embodied in the three principles I have talked about already, TEK does not distinguish natural phenomena from moral phenomena. Scientists, of course, also argue over the question of whether or not science is value-neutral, and the consensus, I’m sure, in a room full of public health professionals is that it is not. What you study and how you use the results have moral consequences. But the morals are not inside the science itself—science cannot determine whether something is moral or not, and only philosophy, ethics, and politics can determine whether science is moral or not. But in the TEK view of the world, the way components of an ecosystem—human and non-human—relate to each other is itself moral. Shooting too many caribou or cutting pine trees in the summertime is itself an act with moral consequences, in this case negative ones. There is no option to decide that, even though we know a particular practice will diminish the population of a particular resource, to go ahead and do it anyway. The fact that the salmon population will fall and the fact that greed in fishing is wrong are one and the same fact.
When approaching TEK for the first time, especially coming from a background that includes some critique of science, it is natural to want to embrace all these good principles of place-based, practical, resilience- based, morally connected knowledge. But they have their limitations. Because TEK is so tied to time and place, there are questions about whether it is generalizable or exportable, and indeed about whether the system of knowledge is itself resilient enough to deal with the widespread disturbances that occur in the form of the imposition of modern science, particularly in the service of developmental projects conducted by state or NGO organizations. If a previously subsistence-oriented community becomes tied to the market, if its children are formally educated for the first time in government schools, if commercial interests extract community resources in the name of development, these may all bring about problems that a community did not face previously, and whose solutions are not readily apparent in the TEK of the community. In addition, as the world becomes more interconnected economically, ecologically, even microbially, problems may arise that are beyond the scope of TEK to conceptualize or handle. In other words, even though it emphasizes resilience and resilience is a good thing, TEK is not equal to a lot of problems in which local communities are now embedded. We need science. But we need science that embodies resilience thinking, not just science that embodies productivity thinking. Let’s see if we can explore what the difference between these two kinds of science might be.
I think we need to begin with the idea of “high modernism.” This began as a concept in literature and the arts—Picasso, Bauhaus, Stockhausen and all them—but expanded to cover the attempts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to engineer the social and ecological world in the same rational way that Stockhausen manipulated the chromatic scale, Picasso the space on the canvas, or the Bauhaus architects the living space of modern citizens. James Scott used the term “high modernism” in his book Seeing Like a State, whose brilliant subtitle refers to a kind of science that emphasizes productivity: why certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Scott includes the great rational developmental projects of the early 20th century—colonialism, Stalinism, fascism, and after the second world war, the ideology of development espoused not only by first-world agencies like USAID, but also by the governments of what have successively been called “poor,” “underdeveloped,” “third-world,” and now, in that most maddening of euphemisms, “developing” i.e. poor, countries.
So many of these state-instigated schemes that have failed have invoked science as their guiding principle. But I would venture that it is not the science that most of the scientists on the UW campus would recognize as such. The science that scientists do involves hypothesis testing, experimentation, controlled observation. Above all, it involves skepticism, inquiry, and verification or, if we are strict Popperians, falsification. But science, as used by developmental regimes, has little to do with these admirable principles of intellectual inquiry. It involves taking the results of such inquiry and transforming them into schemes for rationalizing the world. Stalin’s scientific socialism and the development of the mechanized collective farm, British colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in Africa, US colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in the American southwest, the introduction of high-yielding varieties of grains in the Green Revolution in Asia, management of fisheries for maximum sustainable yield, all of these have been attempts to use the results of science to engineer societies and economies, without the feedback loops of real science that monitors results, continually tries to formulate new hypotheses, and adjusts its applications of the results to real situations accordingly.
As Scott ruefully points out, because he like most academics is more sympathetic to the goals of the political left than to those of the political right, most of the extreme examples of trying to engineer the world have been perpetrated by socialist governments. Inspired by the Marxist dictum that materialism means changing the world by changing the relationship of humans to the means of production, they have undertaken grand schemes of engineering directed both at society and at the ecosystem. The great sociologist Franz Schurmann, himself a leftist, characterized the Chinese revolution as the attempt to replace culture, an organically grown system of symbols and ideas, with ideology, an invented system of symbols and ideas, and to replace society, an organically grown system of relations among people, with organization, a similarly invented or engineered system of social relations. As we know, the Chinese revolution culminated in the retreat back into the exploitative, unfair, socially amoral system we call capitalism, whose rules and structures, however exploitative, unfair, and amoral, were organically grown and thus likely to have something to do with the realities they served to understand and to organize.
This kind of engineering, the application of scientific results generated under laboratory conditions to attempt to control complex systems in the real world, brought us Hetch Hetchy dam, palm oil plantations for biofuels, soil-bleeding wheat monocultures in the Palouse, levees that allowed New Orleans to grow, the air polluting steel mill, and antibiotics that would kill just about any bug except the one that mutated to be resistant to it. But let’s not be ridiculous. It also brought us clean, safe drinking water, inexpensive ways of moving goods, including those that can serve for famine relief, the pluot, the iPhone, and the anaesthesia that makes most modern surgery possible. The problem is not science; the problem is science in service of the hubristic mentality that there is no system it cannot engineer, no problem it cannot solve, nothing so complex as to be beyond the reach of its methods to understand and control. It would by silly to think we should be giving up science for the modern equivalent of TEK, some sort of touchy-feely, place-based, organic system of local knowledge, and try to run our lives with it. In the first place, there is no TEK for us to go to. We have not been in one place long enough, we cannot create place-based knowledge that informs a large area, let alone the whole earth, and we have to be able to communicate across national, regional, geographic, and cultural divides. What we need is a more humble form of science, one that recognizes the complexity of natural and social systems, and that can and should try to influence their structure and functioning, but not to control them, because it recognizes that they are more complex than the models that science can formulate to understand them, or than the prescriptions that science can dictate to control them. It is what Robert Francis of our own School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, using ideas adopted from Holling’s and his colleagues’ resilience ecology, calls “second stream science.” In contrast to “first-stream science,” which assumes that natural and social systems are knowable and predictable, and seeks to make predictions and to manage the systems based on those predictions, instead recognizes that these systems have unknowable and unpredictable elements, and seeks to understand rather than to predict, and to manage based on promoting, or just leaving in place, those aspects of the system that promote resilience.
I’m getting abstract here; perhaps an case study from my own work in the mountains of southwest China will bring us back again to empirical reality. In the Cool Mountains of southern Sichuan, the Nuosu and other indigenous peoples have lived sustainable livelihoods in a harsh mountain environment for over a thousand years. Material resources were few, weather and crops were unpredictable; the standard of living was not high. But the cultures managed to flourish in this environment, I think, because they recognized the principles of resilience, redundancy, and sustainability that are so important to understanding ecosystems as they actually functioned. They not only developed an intricate and detailed catalogue of plant, animal, and fungus species in their environment, where each one grew or roamed, when it bred or blossomed, what it was good for or what was dangerous about it. More significantly, they developed a systems understanding of how the ecosystem worked, how the social system worked, and what were the parallels and connections between the two kinds of systems. One of the ways in which they taught this ecosystem knowledge to their children was through a series of parallel proverbs, called lurby. A couple of examples will illustrate how these worked to transmit knowledge about the nature of systems and the need to preserve their resilience.
Aqu mu, aqu zze. Do the white, eat the white. White here refers to the white wood of the pine tree, a species that is central to people’s lives providing poles and boards for house construction, branches to protect mud walls from rainstorms, branches and needles to mix with manure to make fertilizer for the fields. As many of you no doubt know, te kie shot ap fa, when you cut the pine, it doesn’t regrow. You can’t prune a pine (or a Doug Fir, for that matter) back to the ground and have it grow again. So if you have cut the pine, it’s not going to come back. This doesn’t mean don’t cut the pine. You need pine trunks to build houses. It means realize the consequences if you cut the pine; consider the long-term consequences for the forest, rather than just the short-term consequences for the house you are building.
Onyi abbo mi, yy ke lo ji she. Mother’s brother gives to father; water flow is maintained. This one took me awhile to understand. But what it does is draw an explicit and beautiful parallel between two complex systems: the social system and the ecosystem. The social system is composed of patrilineal clans, which of course need to reproduce a new generation. And the only way they can do so, since the virtually universal incest taboo proscribes marriage within the clan, is to ally with another clan by accepting its gift of a bride who will be mother and reproducer for the original clan. What does this have to do with the flow of water? Well, in order for the clan to produce the material things it needs for its present and future existence, it must have a variety of natural resources, but the key to all these is water. Water not only feeds the people, it feeds the crops and the livestock. So as with the flow of descent within the clan, the flow of water must be maintained. And water must be kept clear, which means that, according to yet another proverb, ssy zzu i pa mu, yy zzu i pa mu, trees are parents, water is parents. The water will be clear and suitable for feeding people and animals if it has trees next to it to prevent erosion and keep down the sediment load. The water without the trees will be muddy, unsuitable for production, just as the clan will be sterile without the wife’s clan to help it reproduce.
There is no time here for further details of Nuosu ecological thinking. But consider what happened when the Chinese revolution came to this area and, in
Schurmann’s words, attempted to replace culture and society with ideology and organization. For the Communists, productivity, development, and national strength stood alongside social justice as pillars of the revolution. And these ideas were summed up in a series of slogans with form not unlike those of the Nuosu lurby, but with very different content. For example, population needed to increase, in light of the Marxist principle that it was human labor that built wealth and transformed the world. In a slogan, 人多力量大 “The more people, the greater our strength.” Also, labor would lead to the complete transformation of the natural world for the benefit of humans, or in a slogan, 人定胜天 “Humanity is destined to conquer nature.” In fact, it was only lack of courage that stood between us and the management of the world for almost infinite productivity, in a slogan, 人有多大胆，地有多大产 However courageous people are, that is how productive the land will be. In the Cultural Revolution, this was encapsulated in a slogan that located not only victory, but existential joy in human struggle against nature (as well as against other people), 与天斗，与地斗，与人斗，其乐无穷，Struggling against heaven, struggling against earth, struggling against people—the joy is boundless.
In light of these “scientific” principles, Nuosu, as a minority people at a low level of “development” along the Stalinist historical scale from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist to socialist societies, were thought of as backward (their productivity was low) ignorant (only the priestly clans new how to read and write), superstitious (they believed in the animistic principle that there are spirits everywhere, in all things), and above all unscientific. They needed to replace their scattered compounds with concentrated villages where they could better be mobilized to take part in the revolution; they needed to replace their low-productivity, diversified, un-rationalized system of mixed fixed and shifting agriculture with a high-productivity system of modern crops; they needed to replace their exploitative clan and caste system with a just, rational system of people’s communes and agricultural production cooperatives. More than anything else, they needed to boost the productivity of their ecological system. As a consequence, a whole series of attempts to engineer the system were brought to the land of the Nuosu. The results were mixed.
On the one hand, I continue to strive to avoid romanticizing other, simpler ways of life. One thing that the revolution brought was elimination of smallpox and a few other epidemic diseases. This was done by forcing everyone to be vaccinated—no religious or moral objections. More endemic things like leprosy took a lot longer to cure. Another positive benefit was the opportunity to go to elementary school and become literate in the Chinese language, the key to success in the wider society in which Nuosu people were now embedded. And there were some roads, which made getting places easier, as well as serving their primary function of improving mobility for administrative and military personnel.
But on the whole, most changes did not improve people’s living standard very much, though they did decrease the resilience of the system. In the Great Leap forward, large swaths of forest were cut down, to fire the kilns to bake the tiles for new houses in concentrated villages, to plant more crops and raise productivity, and for a short time to fuel the steel mills that every county was required to build in China’s initial drive for industrialization. Initially, the results were disastrous. As resilient as the original system was, it could not survive the shock of precipitous communization, and 20 or 30 people starved to death.
But the radical experiment did not last long; by 1961 or so, collective agriculture had been established as an alternative stable state, and the long-term net results were two: biodiversity loss and more erosion. Both of these meant that the new system was a lot less resilient than the old. Forced to grow crops on marginal land, there was less watershed protection, and the river began to flow in a braided course, with much more seasonal flooding and a higher sediment load. With nearby forests cut down, people had to travel farther to gather firewood and other forest products. Many species with symbolic or aesthetic meaning became difficult to find. And all through this, people did not have any more to eat, and continued to live a subsistence existence. In other words, the attempt to boost productivity did so only marginally, at the price of a huge drop in resilience.
Command-and-Control vs. Golden Rule Management
These two forms of science—first-stream science that takes the results of observation and experimentation and attempts to apply them to engineer social and ecological systems, and second-stream science that recognizes that these systems are too complex to be commanded or controlled—have their equivalents in two kinds of management strategies. In their important work on the “pathology of resource management,” C.S. Holling and Gary Meffe name these command-and-control management and Golden Rule management. Command and control management means trying to manage a system for maximum output, and in doing so to minimize the variation that is natural to the system, but that makes production amounts less reliable. Golden Rule management takes into account that the resilience of systems is dependent on their diversity and complexity, and manages with one “golden rule” in mind—“strive to maintain critical types and ranges of variation in natural systems.” I will begin with some examples of command-and-control management as applied to systems somewhat different from those I have dealt with so far.
First, corn. I am guessing that many of you have read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but if not, and you are interested in questions of resilience, you should read the first section, on corn. Agriculture in the American Midwest is to a large extent based on three crops—corn, wheat, and soybeans—but more than anything else on corn and its secondary products, from beef and pork to cornstarch and high fructose corn syrup to corn ethanol—don’t call it booze—to run our cars. The ecological effects of having such a monocrop regime are noteworthy—single crops, managed for maximum output, eliminate genetic diversity in crops. Solution—command and control. Establish seed banks to keep the currently non-favored varieties from extinction. Also monocrops are susceptible to pest outbreaks that put the whole crop at risk (we might contrast this to what happened when a hailstorm hit our valley in Southwest China in summer, 2004. It wiped out the corn, but didn’t hurt the buckwheat or the potatoes, so people had a hard time, but they didn’t starve). Command-and-Control solution to pest outbreaks—pesticides. Pesticides hurt humans and may further diminish crop variety. Command and control solution—GMO. Engineer the pesticides right into the crop—we have bT corn. Genes from BT corn may invade the genome of other varieties, but there is probably a command-and-control notion to that, also. Chasing our collective tail.
But the ecological effects of the monocrop are perhaps no more important than the economic ones. Everyone is dependent on the price of corn; if there is too much, according to the laws of supply and demand, the price will drop. Command-and-control solutions? Two. First, since the price is so low, get farmers to grow more, so their gross income will not drop. This, of course, violates the assumptions of classical economics and will drive the market price even lower, but there is a command-and-control solution—create a subsidy price that the government will guarantee. Right now, farmers are dependent on these subsidies, and it remains to be seen whether President Obama’s considerable persuasive powers will be enough to persuade Congress to eliminate them for farmers making over half a million a year.
Another example of the pathology of resource management, an even more pathological one. The Soviet Union. The whole thing. Lenin and Stalin and their bureaucratic successors had engineered a completely artificial social and political system, whose economy was planned entirely according to command and control principles. Realizing at some level that the system was pathological, they developed a dual apparatus to command and control it. The first was of course the famous security apparatus—prohibit free expression and free flow of information, and punish those who attempt to violate the prohibition. The second was the propaganda apparatus—command the categories of thought that can circulate publicly. Berkeley linguist Aleksei Yurchak analyzes the linguistic aspect of late Soviet society in an aptly titled article called “Everything was forever, until it was no more,” and shows that late Soviet propaganda language had no verbs. The ideological and organizational system was commanded not only into the linguistic equivalent of a monocrop, but into complete immobility. It had so little resilience that all it took was Mikhail Gorbachev to nudge it just a little bit to try to make it work better, and the mighty edifice fell apart.
Now I’m going to venture, with some trepidation, into your field. Several possibly related phenomena come to my own non-expert mind. First is chasing antibiotic-resistant microbes. A resistant strain evolves, whether it is falciparum malaria or MRSA or whatever the next one is. Eventually we get a drug for it, and then some other strain evolves that is resistant to that drug. The second is our preoccupation with antisepsis and the recent reports that allergies and asthma have risen in prevalence in this country in the past few decades, perhaps due to the phenomenon of disinfecting everything all the time. I have no proof, but something that an organic dairy farmer in Whatcom County said to me may have a bearing here. I asked him why he pasteurized his milk, since it is legal and possible with meticulous attention to standards of cleanliness to sell raw milk in the state of Washington. He said he had no proof, but he thought our current society was too clean for people to be able to tolerate even the low levels of infection that are normal in raw milk, and which were tolerated in milk from Daisy the family cow a hundred years ago.
What about management according to the Golden Rule strategy: allow possibilities, maintain diversity, keep some resilience in the system? The TEK-based systems of management I mentioned above certainly do this, but there are other examples that occur on larger scales and are more appropriate to our contemporary world. I think first of all about not building in floodplains. Despite the human suffering involved with Hurricane Katrina, I think New Orleans will end up a much more ecologically healthy place if areas susceptible to breaks in the highest levees remain as natural wetlands instead of being restored as residential districts. Here in Washington, the floodplains of major rivers seem to bear the same lessons. Build buffers against agricultural chemicals seeping into the stream, grow a diversity of crops suited to different micro-environments, better yet, control pests by diversifying the crop, not growing too many things too close together, and you won’t need so many agricultural chemicals. It is very interesting to talk to apple farmers in Eastern Washington who have switched from “conventional” agriculture, controlling pests with chemicals, to organic methods where they encourage the predators who feed on the pests (and would otherwise be killed along with the pests by the agricultural chemicals). They report that pest infestations go up right after the switch, but then they go down again, and they end up having fewer pests with the organic regime—no chemicals—than they originally had when they were spraying regularly. Predators—birds or parasitic insects—are part of the natural diversity, and if you follow the golden rule and manage for diversity, the net outcome is less trouble with pests.
Again, I hesitate to venture too far into the public health field, but I am thinking of the history of AIDS in Uganda as a lesson in something like golden-rule management. I got in interested in this case through learning from Martina Morris about transmission networks, and through learning from a very gifted UW microbiology undergraduate, Carly Cox, about the conjunction between the disease and the social changes there. As you all know, Uganda is widely regarded as the greatest success story in the fight against AIDS, with prevalence declining from a high of at least 15% in the early 1990s to an estimated 5 percent today. And the USAID report “What Happened in Uganda” provides two conclusions that link the relative success in Uganda compared to many other African countries with originally comparably high HIV prevalence: First, “The most important determinant of the reduction in HIV incidence in Uganda appears to be a decrease in multiple sexual partnerships and networks.” AIDS spread in a system where people routinely had multiple, short-term sexual partners, itself a result of a breakdown in traditional social order during and after the Amin regime. To address this problem, a coalition of government, international NGOs, and local activists undertook a social and educational campaign to restore some order to sexual behavior. Rather than attack one single variable, they worked to minimize the whole nexus of systemic factors that caused the problem, something analogous to allowing the apple pest predators to come back into the system or not crowding livestock to the point where they need antibiotics. They created, in a sense, a system with its own controls, rather than trying to control problems that were originally caused by unwise alterations in the system. Secondly, expenditures over a 10-year period on the education campaigns that are reported to have led to changes in sexual behavior are estimated at about $2.50 per adult. How much would it have caused if prevalence stayed high and everyone were provided with ART therapy? And current worries that the US-supported abstinence-only programs might be responsible for a possible recent rise in incidence once again remind us of command-and-control management. Rather than a system-wide approach that tries to keep dangerous sexual behavior in check, the abstinence-only programs concentrate on maximizing (or in this case minimizing) a single variable. Just like feeding antibiotics to cattle instead of giving them enough room, like planting corn everywhere and then developing the pesticides to control the inevitable outbreaks that you have caused yourself.
Some concluding thoughts
I hope I have managed to suggest ways in which managing whole systems for resilience rather than for maximum productivity reduces the chances of calamity, whether it is famine, corn blight, epidemics, or even total system collapse. But of course we can’t always ignore productivity, not when there are nearly 7 billion of us, there will soon be close to 9, and many of us are still poor compared to the few wealthy ones. We can’t go back to maximum resilience and all second-stream science. Confucius spoke of the Doctrine of the Mean, and Buddha of the Middle Way. Both were reacting, 2,500 years ago, to extremists, and perhaps we ought to react the same way to extremists on the side of technological fixes and also to extremists on the side of the “natural,” unforced functioning of systems. To find a middle way between productivity and resilience is the great challenge of the 21st century.”
Two Kinds of Knowledge and the Health of Human and Natural Systems
13 03 2009Speech written and delivered by Steve Harrell at the University of Washington Global Health Seminar, 06 March 2009
“I am honored to be invited to come speak to you today; honored and a little bit puzzled. Global Health? I don’t do global health. I don’t do health at all. I’m an anthropologist with an interest in ecology and geography.
But we want you.
Want me to do what?
Want you to talk about resilience and resurgence.
I only do resilience; still waiting for the resurgence to happen.
So talk about resilience.
Resilience in ecosystems?
Yes?
OK, here goes….
So perhaps I come to you out of an interest in health after all. Not the health of individuals, as in medicine, or even the distribution of human health through geographic, temporal, and social space, as in public health. But the health of the systems in which humans are embedded, the health of the political, social, economic, and in particular the ecological systems in which people live their lives. I can’t prove that the health of the systems has any direct relationship to the health of the people in them; that is something for the biostatisticians to work on—though I can’t imagine that it doesn’t. So let’s assume that it does, that a healthy, resilient ecosystem gives people a better chance of maintaining or recovering health, and go from there. I will spend my time today talking about a what makes a healthy, resilient ecosystem. At the end of my talk I will make some suggestions as to how this kind of thinking might contribute to an approach to health problems, and invite your comments and discussion.
I will organize my presentation today around three dichotomies: productivity vs. resilience, traditional knowledge vs. technological knowledge, and command-and-control management vs. golden-rule management. Each is an aspect of the larger dilemma that faces us in the 21st century.
Productivity vs. Resilience
Productivity and its twin, efficiency, are all around us. We measure our success by GDP growth, worker productivity, just-in-time manufacturing, energy efficiency of our economy. We are committed in most of what we do to a principle of maximizing output per unit of input. In some ways this is justified. It has given us our modern economy, including not only a comfortable material standard of living, but also the surplus over subsistence that allows us to develop non-material resources, and to spread beyond the privileged elites of society those things that we consider make life worth living, including not only arts, literature, and culture, but also science and medicine.
In fact, it is possible to see human history over the long term as the story of the growth of productivity. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens sapiens perhaps 120,000 years ago, the amounts of goods and services that we have managed to extract from the earth and cycle through our bodies and our social institutions has increased by several orders of magnitude. In pure natural selection terms, this was inevitable, at least until the last few decades. Those individuals who produced more could rear more children to adulthood; those societies (if we believe in group selection) that could marshal resources more efficiently could prevail over those who could not, and so expanded at the expense of their less efficient rivals.
But even several hundred years ago in many places, making societies more productive, managing resources for maximum efficiency of output per unit of input, sometimes caused ecological and social collapses because of lack of resilience. The case studies that Jared Diamond narrates in his popular book Collapse provide some well-known, if occasionally disputed, examples. Easter Islanders maximized timber production for monuments, boats, and weapons, and ended up using up the forest faster than it could restore itself by natural growth. Mayans managed irrigated agriculture to maximize the surplus available for ritual, governance, and the living standards of the upper classes, and when prolonged drought came, they were unable to deal with it. In a more recent and less disputed case, the cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic, which was being managed for something called maximum sustainable yield, all of a sudden collapsed in the early 1980s. The message of these cases is clear: when we manage our resources for maximum output over the short term, the system in which the resources are embedded loses the ability to deal with large-scale shocks or disturbances: it loses its resilience.
We need to define resilience carefully here. The founder of resilience ecology, C. S. Holling, divides resilence into two types: engineering resilience, the time it takes for a system that has been disturbed to return to its original state, and ecosystem resilience, the magnitude of shock that a system can absorb without changing the basic variables that control the state of the system. Here I am concerned almost entirely with ecosystem resilience, defined in another way as the ability of a system to maintain its basic nature in the face of outside shocks or disturbances. A good example comes from the famine-relief system of late 17th and 18th-century China, the heyday of the Qing dynasty. China by this time was already a highly populated country, with a population during this period that grew from about 200 million to about 350 million people. Realizing the danger of famine in a land that was subject to frequent floods and droughts, the Dynasty established a system of granaries and grain reports to deal with the eventualities of crop shortages. Every county had a state-managed granary that was kept full and kept fresh—as it became clear each fall what the current year’s harvest was likely to be, a suitable proportion of the previous year’s grain was sold off while it was still edible. And local officials, in addition to keeping the granary full and fresh, were also charged with making regular reports on the grain prices in the local markets. If they found the prices to be rising too rapidly, they would dump grain from the granary on the market, so as to prevent hoarding and speculation and make sure that there was a supply of grain for people if their own harvests came up short, and to make sure that prices did not rise to the paradoxical point where people would starve even though there was grain around, because they could not afford it. In this way, despite the frequent floods and droughts, and despite the high population density, there were very few famines; the system was resilient in the face of outside shocks.
But toward the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, the granary system, along with the administration of the dynasty in general, began to decay due to corruption, fatigue, lack of leadership at the top, and perhaps too much population growth to be accommodated even by such an admirable and well-designed mechanism as the granary system. Granaries began to be left empty, price reports were sometimes not based on real data, or not made at all, and all the grain that was produced was consumed directly or went into the markets rather than into emergency storage. There was no mechanism to put surplus grain on the market, because there was no saved surplus, and thus no mechanism to keep prices at an affordable level. So when drought or flood hit for several years in a row, prices rose, there was no way to keep them down, producers could not buy to supplement their own harvests, and the frequency of famines went up, despite the fact that overall production continued to rise, and production per capita remained steady.
What had changed from the late 17th century to the mid-19th was not that the production of the system had gone down; in fact it had gone up. Nor was there a decline in productivity, defined in terms of output to input ratio; it had at least stayed steady. And of course the frequency of abnormal weather had not gone up or down. What had changed was that the resilience of the system had decreased, the buffer against calamity had come down, the ability of the system to absorb disturbances and still function had gone down. Or in strict mathematical terms, the size of the disturbance that the system could absorb and still retain its basic functions had decreased. Even a short-term drought or a one-season flood, in some areas, could lead to famine. The controlling variables in the system had also changed; no longer was preventing famine locally a matter of keeping the granaries full and fresh and monitoring market prices; with the granaries no longer full, monitoring market prices became an empty bureaucratic exercise.
You will notice that all the examples I have given so far have been cases where human societies are coming up against the limits of their production capacity given available technology. Islands of course are prime examples of environments with finite possibilities to expand their resource bases, and so are technologically advanced, densely populated societies like 18th and 19th- century China. And we have to admit, the simple logic of natural selection says that, in the short run (a few generations), those who produce more will prevail over those who produce less, and the logic of maximum production, like a genetic trait that confers reproductive fitness, will be passed on to the culture, the ideology, the morals of the next generation.
So we should not be surprised that productivity and efficiency will win out in the short run over resilience. And for most of the earth’s history, in favorable environments at least, this has come at little cost. The loss of resilience was usually trivial compared to the gain in productivity, though there were always local examples of systems that became brittle and unresilient, and reached thresholds or tipping points which, once crossed, no longer enabled them to operate as before. But now we are in a different kind of world, where our current level of productivity is clearly unsustainable on a global scale. And science, as it has developed in the service of economic growth, development, and increases in the standards of material well-being, has typically been productivity oriented. This certainly has to change, but given that we have nearly 7 billion of us, we can’t just give up productivity in the interests of building a more resilient system. What to do?
It seems to me that we can draw a partial lesson—and I emphasize that the lesson is only a partial one—from communities who have managed their resources for resilience over centuries or millennia. Such communities that still exist today are often those we have come to label “indigenous,” living in small enclaves on the borders or margins of more productive polities and populations, with low population densities and relatively low levels of productivity and resource consumption, but with high levels of resilience. These peoples have developed not only practices, but also forms of knowledge that we often call TEK—Traditional Environmental Knowledge or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and on the basis of this knowledge have succeeded in managing their marginal environments in ways that have preserved their resilience. Let’s take a closer look at TEK and the ways it contrasts with, and perhaps ultimately can be made compatible with, modern scientific knowledge.
Traditional Environmental Knowledge vs. Scientific Knowledge
Traditional Ecological Knowledge, whether it is employed by a community that we would now call indigenous or not, must come from a community that has been in the same place, or the same kind of place, for a long time, long enough that empirical observations of the environment and how to manage it have become part of the received wisdom that is passed down from generation to generation, that has come to be assumed to be the way the natural world works. There are several important characteristics shared by systems of TEK the world over, and these characteristics are its common strength, at the same time they are its common limitation and the reason it cannot replace, but must be used alongside of, modern scientific knowledge.
First and foremost, TEK is place-based. On the whole, unlike science, it is not based on the deduction of universal principles and applying them to particular situations, but rather on deep, detailed, and long-term observation of particular phenomena and the relationships between them. It is not devoid of general principles, but these general principles are expressed in the form of particulars. For example, the science of population biology tells us that if we remove too many reproductive-age individuals from a population, the population will not be able to reproduce itself, and this could be applied to any population, including for example the caribou herds in the north of Quebec. The TEK of the native Cree, by contrast, tells you that if you shoot more than you can use, and if you don’t use every usable part of the animal you shoot, the caribou will get angry and not allow themselves to be shot. Different rules apply to fish management, though a population biologist would probably say they were applications of the same principles.
Second, TEK is applied. There is no “pure research” in traditional societies, or if there is, it is a matter of speculation about the cosmos, and even then it is often done with respect to real human and natural communities. So TEK principles are guiding principles, they are, in Clifford Geertz’s terms, models for as well as models of behavior. The Nuosu people in Southwest China with whom I work have a prohibition against cutting conifers during the growing season between the blooming of the first rhododendrons in the Spring and the harvest of the last crop of oats in the fall. Anyone who violates this prohibition will bring lighting and hail upon the community. There are, to be sure, perfectly good, completely material reasons for not cutting trees during the rainy season when they will cause erosion, and Nuosu people understand the relationship between bare ground and erosion perfectly well. But the point is made in terms of what one should and should not do, in terms of the moral as well as the ecosystemic consequences of violating the prohibition.
Third, TEK is resilience-oriented, rather than productivity oriented. In all long-abiding small-scale societies, we find both ecological and ethical injunctions not to use more than one needs. Koyukon salmon fishermen in central Alaska, for example, have a rule that when you have what you need, you stop fishing. Anything more is greed, and greed will be punished—ethically as well as ecologically—by diminished availability of fish in the next season. In modern times, people use outboard motors, and they don’t have to consume everything they produce; they can market some of the fish to meet some of their daily needs. But to use them to get rich is to risk the implicit contract between people and the species they consume—if people consume them wisely, morally, without greed, then the species will allow themselves to continue to provide food or other resources for humans. Thus there is always leeway; there is always something left, and this renders the system resilient in the face of unexpected shocks.
Fourth, and we can see this embodied in the three principles I have talked about already, TEK does not distinguish natural phenomena from moral phenomena. Scientists, of course, also argue over the question of whether or not science is value-neutral, and the consensus, I’m sure, in a room full of public health professionals is that it is not. What you study and how you use the results have moral consequences. But the morals are not inside the science itself—science cannot determine whether something is moral or not, and only philosophy, ethics, and politics can determine whether science is moral or not. But in the TEK view of the world, the way components of an ecosystem—human and non-human—relate to each other is itself moral. Shooting too many caribou or cutting pine trees in the summertime is itself an act with moral consequences, in this case negative ones. There is no option to decide that, even though we know a particular practice will diminish the population of a particular resource, to go ahead and do it anyway. The fact that the salmon population will fall and the fact that greed in fishing is wrong are one and the same fact.
When approaching TEK for the first time, especially coming from a background that includes some critique of science, it is natural to want to embrace all these good principles of place-based, practical, resilience- based, morally connected knowledge. But they have their limitations. Because TEK is so tied to time and place, there are questions about whether it is generalizable or exportable, and indeed about whether the system of knowledge is itself resilient enough to deal with the widespread disturbances that occur in the form of the imposition of modern science, particularly in the service of developmental projects conducted by state or NGO organizations. If a previously subsistence-oriented community becomes tied to the market, if its children are formally educated for the first time in government schools, if commercial interests extract community resources in the name of development, these may all bring about problems that a community did not face previously, and whose solutions are not readily apparent in the TEK of the community. In addition, as the world becomes more interconnected economically, ecologically, even microbially, problems may arise that are beyond the scope of TEK to conceptualize or handle. In other words, even though it emphasizes resilience and resilience is a good thing, TEK is not equal to a lot of problems in which local communities are now embedded. We need science. But we need science that embodies resilience thinking, not just science that embodies productivity thinking. Let’s see if we can explore what the difference between these two kinds of science might be.
I think we need to begin with the idea of “high modernism.” This began as a concept in literature and the arts—Picasso, Bauhaus, Stockhausen and all them—but expanded to cover the attempts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to engineer the social and ecological world in the same rational way that Stockhausen manipulated the chromatic scale, Picasso the space on the canvas, or the Bauhaus architects the living space of modern citizens. James Scott used the term “high modernism” in his book Seeing Like a State, whose brilliant subtitle refers to a kind of science that emphasizes productivity: why certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Scott includes the great rational developmental projects of the early 20th century—colonialism, Stalinism, fascism, and after the second world war, the ideology of development espoused not only by first-world agencies like USAID, but also by the governments of what have successively been called “poor,” “underdeveloped,” “third-world,” and now, in that most maddening of euphemisms, “developing” i.e. poor, countries.
So many of these state-instigated schemes that have failed have invoked science as their guiding principle. But I would venture that it is not the science that most of the scientists on the UW campus would recognize as such. The science that scientists do involves hypothesis testing, experimentation, controlled observation. Above all, it involves skepticism, inquiry, and verification or, if we are strict Popperians, falsification. But science, as used by developmental regimes, has little to do with these admirable principles of intellectual inquiry. It involves taking the results of such inquiry and transforming them into schemes for rationalizing the world. Stalin’s scientific socialism and the development of the mechanized collective farm, British colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in Africa, US colonial land surveys and stock rationalization programs in the American southwest, the introduction of high-yielding varieties of grains in the Green Revolution in Asia, management of fisheries for maximum sustainable yield, all of these have been attempts to use the results of science to engineer societies and economies, without the feedback loops of real science that monitors results, continually tries to formulate new hypotheses, and adjusts its applications of the results to real situations accordingly.
As Scott ruefully points out, because he like most academics is more sympathetic to the goals of the political left than to those of the political right, most of the extreme examples of trying to engineer the world have been perpetrated by socialist governments. Inspired by the Marxist dictum that materialism means changing the world by changing the relationship of humans to the means of production, they have undertaken grand schemes of engineering directed both at society and at the ecosystem. The great sociologist Franz Schurmann, himself a leftist, characterized the Chinese revolution as the attempt to replace culture, an organically grown system of symbols and ideas, with ideology, an invented system of symbols and ideas, and to replace society, an organically grown system of relations among people, with organization, a similarly invented or engineered system of social relations. As we know, the Chinese revolution culminated in the retreat back into the exploitative, unfair, socially amoral system we call capitalism, whose rules and structures, however exploitative, unfair, and amoral, were organically grown and thus likely to have something to do with the realities they served to understand and to organize.
This kind of engineering, the application of scientific results generated under laboratory conditions to attempt to control complex systems in the real world, brought us Hetch Hetchy dam, palm oil plantations for biofuels, soil-bleeding wheat monocultures in the Palouse, levees that allowed New Orleans to grow, the air polluting steel mill, and antibiotics that would kill just about any bug except the one that mutated to be resistant to it. But let’s not be ridiculous. It also brought us clean, safe drinking water, inexpensive ways of moving goods, including those that can serve for famine relief, the pluot, the iPhone, and the anaesthesia that makes most modern surgery possible. The problem is not science; the problem is science in service of the hubristic mentality that there is no system it cannot engineer, no problem it cannot solve, nothing so complex as to be beyond the reach of its methods to understand and control. It would by silly to think we should be giving up science for the modern equivalent of TEK, some sort of touchy-feely, place-based, organic system of local knowledge, and try to run our lives with it. In the first place, there is no TEK for us to go to. We have not been in one place long enough, we cannot create place-based knowledge that informs a large area, let alone the whole earth, and we have to be able to communicate across national, regional, geographic, and cultural divides. What we need is a more humble form of science, one that recognizes the complexity of natural and social systems, and that can and should try to influence their structure and functioning, but not to control them, because it recognizes that they are more complex than the models that science can formulate to understand them, or than the prescriptions that science can dictate to control them. It is what Robert Francis of our own School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, using ideas adopted from Holling’s and his colleagues’ resilience ecology, calls “second stream science.” In contrast to “first-stream science,” which assumes that natural and social systems are knowable and predictable, and seeks to make predictions and to manage the systems based on those predictions, instead recognizes that these systems have unknowable and unpredictable elements, and seeks to understand rather than to predict, and to manage based on promoting, or just leaving in place, those aspects of the system that promote resilience.
I’m getting abstract here; perhaps an case study from my own work in the mountains of southwest China will bring us back again to empirical reality. In the Cool Mountains of southern Sichuan, the Nuosu and other indigenous peoples have lived sustainable livelihoods in a harsh mountain environment for over a thousand years. Material resources were few, weather and crops were unpredictable; the standard of living was not high. But the cultures managed to flourish in this environment, I think, because they recognized the principles of resilience, redundancy, and sustainability that are so important to understanding ecosystems as they actually functioned. They not only developed an intricate and detailed catalogue of plant, animal, and fungus species in their environment, where each one grew or roamed, when it bred or blossomed, what it was good for or what was dangerous about it. More significantly, they developed a systems understanding of how the ecosystem worked, how the social system worked, and what were the parallels and connections between the two kinds of systems. One of the ways in which they taught this ecosystem knowledge to their children was through a series of parallel proverbs, called lurby. A couple of examples will illustrate how these worked to transmit knowledge about the nature of systems and the need to preserve their resilience.
Aqu mu, aqu zze. Do the white, eat the white. White here refers to the white wood of the pine tree, a species that is central to people’s lives providing poles and boards for house construction, branches to protect mud walls from rainstorms, branches and needles to mix with manure to make fertilizer for the fields. As many of you no doubt know, te kie shot ap fa, when you cut the pine, it doesn’t regrow. You can’t prune a pine (or a Doug Fir, for that matter) back to the ground and have it grow again. So if you have cut the pine, it’s not going to come back. This doesn’t mean don’t cut the pine. You need pine trunks to build houses. It means realize the consequences if you cut the pine; consider the long-term consequences for the forest, rather than just the short-term consequences for the house you are building.
Onyi abbo mi, yy ke lo ji she. Mother’s brother gives to father; water flow is maintained. This one took me awhile to understand. But what it does is draw an explicit and beautiful parallel between two complex systems: the social system and the ecosystem. The social system is composed of patrilineal clans, which of course need to reproduce a new generation. And the only way they can do so, since the virtually universal incest taboo proscribes marriage within the clan, is to ally with another clan by accepting its gift of a bride who will be mother and reproducer for the original clan. What does this have to do with the flow of water? Well, in order for the clan to produce the material things it needs for its present and future existence, it must have a variety of natural resources, but the key to all these is water. Water not only feeds the people, it feeds the crops and the livestock. So as with the flow of descent within the clan, the flow of water must be maintained. And water must be kept clear, which means that, according to yet another proverb, ssy zzu i pa mu, yy zzu i pa mu, trees are parents, water is parents. The water will be clear and suitable for feeding people and animals if it has trees next to it to prevent erosion and keep down the sediment load. The water without the trees will be muddy, unsuitable for production, just as the clan will be sterile without the wife’s clan to help it reproduce.
There is no time here for further details of Nuosu ecological thinking. But consider what happened when the Chinese revolution came to this area and, in
Schurmann’s words, attempted to replace culture and society with ideology and organization. For the Communists, productivity, development, and national strength stood alongside social justice as pillars of the revolution. And these ideas were summed up in a series of slogans with form not unlike those of the Nuosu lurby, but with very different content. For example, population needed to increase, in light of the Marxist principle that it was human labor that built wealth and transformed the world. In a slogan, 人多力量大 “The more people, the greater our strength.” Also, labor would lead to the complete transformation of the natural world for the benefit of humans, or in a slogan, 人定胜天 “Humanity is destined to conquer nature.” In fact, it was only lack of courage that stood between us and the management of the world for almost infinite productivity, in a slogan, 人有多大胆，地有多大产 However courageous people are, that is how productive the land will be. In the Cultural Revolution, this was encapsulated in a slogan that located not only victory, but existential joy in human struggle against nature (as well as against other people), 与天斗，与地斗，与人斗，其乐无穷，Struggling against heaven, struggling against earth, struggling against people—the joy is boundless.
In light of these “scientific” principles, Nuosu, as a minority people at a low level of “development” along the Stalinist historical scale from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist to socialist societies, were thought of as backward (their productivity was low) ignorant (only the priestly clans new how to read and write), superstitious (they believed in the animistic principle that there are spirits everywhere, in all things), and above all unscientific. They needed to replace their scattered compounds with concentrated villages where they could better be mobilized to take part in the revolution; they needed to replace their low-productivity, diversified, un-rationalized system of mixed fixed and shifting agriculture with a high-productivity system of modern crops; they needed to replace their exploitative clan and caste system with a just, rational system of people’s communes and agricultural production cooperatives. More than anything else, they needed to boost the productivity of their ecological system. As a consequence, a whole series of attempts to engineer the system were brought to the land of the Nuosu. The results were mixed.
On the one hand, I continue to strive to avoid romanticizing other, simpler ways of life. One thing that the revolution brought was elimination of smallpox and a few other epidemic diseases. This was done by forcing everyone to be vaccinated—no religious or moral objections. More endemic things like leprosy took a lot longer to cure. Another positive benefit was the opportunity to go to elementary school and become literate in the Chinese language, the key to success in the wider society in which Nuosu people were now embedded. And there were some roads, which made getting places easier, as well as serving their primary function of improving mobility for administrative and military personnel.
But on the whole, most changes did not improve people’s living standard very much, though they did decrease the resilience of the system. In the Great Leap forward, large swaths of forest were cut down, to fire the kilns to bake the tiles for new houses in concentrated villages, to plant more crops and raise productivity, and for a short time to fuel the steel mills that every county was required to build in China’s initial drive for industrialization. Initially, the results were disastrous. As resilient as the original system was, it could not survive the shock of precipitous communization, and 20 or 30 people starved to death.
But the radical experiment did not last long; by 1961 or so, collective agriculture had been established as an alternative stable state, and the long-term net results were two: biodiversity loss and more erosion. Both of these meant that the new system was a lot less resilient than the old. Forced to grow crops on marginal land, there was less watershed protection, and the river began to flow in a braided course, with much more seasonal flooding and a higher sediment load. With nearby forests cut down, people had to travel farther to gather firewood and other forest products. Many species with symbolic or aesthetic meaning became difficult to find. And all through this, people did not have any more to eat, and continued to live a subsistence existence. In other words, the attempt to boost productivity did so only marginally, at the price of a huge drop in resilience.
Command-and-Control vs. Golden Rule Management
These two forms of science—first-stream science that takes the results of observation and experimentation and attempts to apply them to engineer social and ecological systems, and second-stream science that recognizes that these systems are too complex to be commanded or controlled—have their equivalents in two kinds of management strategies. In their important work on the “pathology of resource management,” C.S. Holling and Gary Meffe name these command-and-control management and Golden Rule management. Command and control management means trying to manage a system for maximum output, and in doing so to minimize the variation that is natural to the system, but that makes production amounts less reliable. Golden Rule management takes into account that the resilience of systems is dependent on their diversity and complexity, and manages with one “golden rule” in mind—“strive to maintain critical types and ranges of variation in natural systems.” I will begin with some examples of command-and-control management as applied to systems somewhat different from those I have dealt with so far.
First, corn. I am guessing that many of you have read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but if not, and you are interested in questions of resilience, you should read the first section, on corn. Agriculture in the American Midwest is to a large extent based on three crops—corn, wheat, and soybeans—but more than anything else on corn and its secondary products, from beef and pork to cornstarch and high fructose corn syrup to corn ethanol—don’t call it booze—to run our cars. The ecological effects of having such a monocrop regime are noteworthy—single crops, managed for maximum output, eliminate genetic diversity in crops. Solution—command and control. Establish seed banks to keep the currently non-favored varieties from extinction. Also monocrops are susceptible to pest outbreaks that put the whole crop at risk (we might contrast this to what happened when a hailstorm hit our valley in Southwest China in summer, 2004. It wiped out the corn, but didn’t hurt the buckwheat or the potatoes, so people had a hard time, but they didn’t starve). Command-and-Control solution to pest outbreaks—pesticides. Pesticides hurt humans and may further diminish crop variety. Command and control solution—GMO. Engineer the pesticides right into the crop—we have bT corn. Genes from BT corn may invade the genome of other varieties, but there is probably a command-and-control notion to that, also. Chasing our collective tail.
But the ecological effects of the monocrop are perhaps no more important than the economic ones. Everyone is dependent on the price of corn; if there is too much, according to the laws of supply and demand, the price will drop. Command-and-control solutions? Two. First, since the price is so low, get farmers to grow more, so their gross income will not drop. This, of course, violates the assumptions of classical economics and will drive the market price even lower, but there is a command-and-control solution—create a subsidy price that the government will guarantee. Right now, farmers are dependent on these subsidies, and it remains to be seen whether President Obama’s considerable persuasive powers will be enough to persuade Congress to eliminate them for farmers making over half a million a year.
Another example of the pathology of resource management, an even more pathological one. The Soviet Union. The whole thing. Lenin and Stalin and their bureaucratic successors had engineered a completely artificial social and political system, whose economy was planned entirely according to command and control principles. Realizing at some level that the system was pathological, they developed a dual apparatus to command and control it. The first was of course the famous security apparatus—prohibit free expression and free flow of information, and punish those who attempt to violate the prohibition. The second was the propaganda apparatus—command the categories of thought that can circulate publicly. Berkeley linguist Aleksei Yurchak analyzes the linguistic aspect of late Soviet society in an aptly titled article called “Everything was forever, until it was no more,” and shows that late Soviet propaganda language had no verbs. The ideological and organizational system was commanded not only into the linguistic equivalent of a monocrop, but into complete immobility. It had so little resilience that all it took was Mikhail Gorbachev to nudge it just a little bit to try to make it work better, and the mighty edifice fell apart.
Now I’m going to venture, with some trepidation, into your field. Several possibly related phenomena come to my own non-expert mind. First is chasing antibiotic-resistant microbes. A resistant strain evolves, whether it is falciparum malaria or MRSA or whatever the next one is. Eventually we get a drug for it, and then some other strain evolves that is resistant to that drug. The second is our preoccupation with antisepsis and the recent reports that allergies and asthma have risen in prevalence in this country in the past few decades, perhaps due to the phenomenon of disinfecting everything all the time. I have no proof, but something that an organic dairy farmer in Whatcom County said to me may have a bearing here. I asked him why he pasteurized his milk, since it is legal and possible with meticulous attention to standards of cleanliness to sell raw milk in the state of Washington. He said he had no proof, but he thought our current society was too clean for people to be able to tolerate even the low levels of infection that are normal in raw milk, and which were tolerated in milk from Daisy the family cow a hundred years ago.
What about management according to the Golden Rule strategy: allow possibilities, maintain diversity, keep some resilience in the system? The TEK-based systems of management I mentioned above certainly do this, but there are other examples that occur on larger scales and are more appropriate to our contemporary world. I think first of all about not building in floodplains. Despite the human suffering involved with Hurricane Katrina, I think New Orleans will end up a much more ecologically healthy place if areas susceptible to breaks in the highest levees remain as natural wetlands instead of being restored as residential districts. Here in Washington, the floodplains of major rivers seem to bear the same lessons. Build buffers against agricultural chemicals seeping into the stream, grow a diversity of crops suited to different micro-environments, better yet, control pests by diversifying the crop, not growing too many things too close together, and you won’t need so many agricultural chemicals. It is very interesting to talk to apple farmers in Eastern Washington who have switched from “conventional” agriculture, controlling pests with chemicals, to organic methods where they encourage the predators who feed on the pests (and would otherwise be killed along with the pests by the agricultural chemicals). They report that pest infestations go up right after the switch, but then they go down again, and they end up having fewer pests with the organic regime—no chemicals—than they originally had when they were spraying regularly. Predators—birds or parasitic insects—are part of the natural diversity, and if you follow the golden rule and manage for diversity, the net outcome is less trouble with pests.
Again, I hesitate to venture too far into the public health field, but I am thinking of the history of AIDS in Uganda as a lesson in something like golden-rule management. I got in interested in this case through learning from Martina Morris about transmission networks, and through learning from a very gifted UW microbiology undergraduate, Carly Cox, about the conjunction between the disease and the social changes there. As you all know, Uganda is widely regarded as the greatest success story in the fight against AIDS, with prevalence declining from a high of at least 15% in the early 1990s to an estimated 5 percent today. And the USAID report “What Happened in Uganda” provides two conclusions that link the relative success in Uganda compared to many other African countries with originally comparably high HIV prevalence: First, “The most important determinant of the reduction in HIV incidence in Uganda appears to be a decrease in multiple sexual partnerships and networks.” AIDS spread in a system where people routinely had multiple, short-term sexual partners, itself a result of a breakdown in traditional social order during and after the Amin regime. To address this problem, a coalition of government, international NGOs, and local activists undertook a social and educational campaign to restore some order to sexual behavior. Rather than attack one single variable, they worked to minimize the whole nexus of systemic factors that caused the problem, something analogous to allowing the apple pest predators to come back into the system or not crowding livestock to the point where they need antibiotics. They created, in a sense, a system with its own controls, rather than trying to control problems that were originally caused by unwise alterations in the system. Secondly, expenditures over a 10-year period on the education campaigns that are reported to have led to changes in sexual behavior are estimated at about $2.50 per adult. How much would it have caused if prevalence stayed high and everyone were provided with ART therapy? And current worries that the US-supported abstinence-only programs might be responsible for a possible recent rise in incidence once again remind us of command-and-control management. Rather than a system-wide approach that tries to keep dangerous sexual behavior in check, the abstinence-only programs concentrate on maximizing (or in this case minimizing) a single variable. Just like feeding antibiotics to cattle instead of giving them enough room, like planting corn everywhere and then developing the pesticides to control the inevitable outbreaks that you have caused yourself.
Some concluding thoughts
I hope I have managed to suggest ways in which managing whole systems for resilience rather than for maximum productivity reduces the chances of calamity, whether it is famine, corn blight, epidemics, or even total system collapse. But of course we can’t always ignore productivity, not when there are nearly 7 billion of us, there will soon be close to 9, and many of us are still poor compared to the few wealthy ones. We can’t go back to maximum resilience and all second-stream science. Confucius spoke of the Doctrine of the Mean, and Buddha of the Middle Way. Both were reacting, 2,500 years ago, to extremists, and perhaps we ought to react the same way to extremists on the side of technological fixes and also to extremists on the side of the “natural,” unforced functioning of systems. To find a middle way between productivity and resilience is the great challenge of the 21st century.”
Contributed by R. Chavid