Our stay in Ucluelet has been so rich and rewarding every one of us in the cohort will struggle not to cross over the 500-word threshold. What’s more, many of us will have to make the difficult choice of including or excluding reflections that have made an impact on our understanding during the residency thus far. Today’s superb seminar with guest speaker Anita Charleston-Touchie imparted profound lessons in personal resilience and, incidentally, material for the production of this blog. The lesson in resilience can be extrapolated to better understand the effects of crossing boundary thresholds in various contexts and the ramifications for established systems. I have really enjoyed the immediate exchange of ideas among my peers during our residency. In a discussion with Jeremiah before breakfast this morning, he spoke of our C.S. Holling (1986) reading with a particular focus on Holling’s concept of “surprise”. Jeremiah drew a parallel to Holling’s Adaptive Cycle and that surprise occurred when a system crossed a boundary threshold such as the crossing from a conservation quadrant to a creative destruction quadrant. On the other hand, Matthias pointed out that Holling’s Adaptive Cycle was represented in Anita Charleston-Touchie’s infinity icon, which represented the positive and negative vortex of a person’s spiritual interplay. Interestingly, Anita showed us how the Nuu-chah-nulth Wellness Wheel therapy reinvigorated a person’s soul, and that a progression through the mental, physical, emotional and social quadrants was required to restore a person’s resilience. Her lasting message, however, was one of human interconnectedness, and that complex problems deserve the care of the community. A synonymous discussion took place this afternoon at Wickininnish Beach, and focused on the incredible power of collective action to adapt to major disturbances that threaten the existence of systems that support life. Greater care, via better environmental management, has resulted in concepts like community-based water management covered in the recently published Buckland-Nicks et al (2016) article. This was an example of the convergence of ecology and society whereby mulitple stakeholders like community volunteers, NGO staff and government officials could strike a balance that kept public interest keen and data collection precise. This experiment to create a model for better stewardship of the region’s British Columbian watershed seems to echo a greater movement towards more equitable collaboration among lay people and specialists. Thanks to Laura Loucks’ recent study that’s under peer review, we learned of a successful model whereby the concept of community science addressed the restoration and reparation for sustainability in the biosphere. Local Nova Scotia lobster farmers witnessed the destruction of fertility habitat when aquaculture was awarded development rights without proper environmental assessments. This government oversight nearly caused the collapse of the lobster industry and the livelihoods of the residents there who also looked upon the lobster harvest as their way of life. The fight for their culture’s relevance resulted in the formation of community science: “…the place-based relationship between the community’s experiential ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge holders. Social learning processes of iterative observation and reflection, local knowledge - science interaction, and asking clarifying scientific questions are embedded in the day-to-day experience of living in the same place and actively engaging in shared knowledge production. (Loucks et al, 2016, p. 5)” In my mind, Anita’s experiential role-play exercise was a microcosm for people to put their trust in the efficacy of collaborative networks and tackle super wicked problems in the biosphere. The increasing complexity of restoring various systems in an environment of climate change necessitates a holistic view. We must cross over from traditionally relying on reductionist mechanisms to solve problems, and call upon various communities on equal footing and equally vested interests to restore a healthy balance of interdependency with the biosphere. References Buckland-Nicks, A., Castleden, H. and Conrad, C. (2016). Aligning community-based water monitoring program designs with goals for enhanced environmental management. JCOM 15(3) Holling, C. S. (1986). Chapter 10: The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: local surprise and global change. In Clark, W. C. & Mann, R. E. (eds.), Sustainable development of the biosphere (pp.292-317). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Loucks, L., Armitage, D., Berkes, F. & Charles, A. (2016). The emergence of community science: Closing the governance gap through transformative learning. Unpublished: Royal Roads University and the Community Conservation Research Network
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