Resilience Thinking

"This is one of those books that barely mentions planning as such, but has lots of implications for it. It's short but will repay some extra quiet time...Their goal is to get us to look at the world and its systems in a fresh new way."--Planning "...a clear, readable, non-academic explanation of the difference between an optimization mindset and a resilience mindset."--GreenSpirit "Resilience Thinking provides a much-needed accessible entree into a concept that holds the key to our future.... Full of wisdom, sophisticated science, and practical guidance, this book provides profound ideas, insights, and hope to scientists, students, managers, and planners alike."--Jane Lubchenco "Distinguished Professor of Zoology, Oregon State University " "Resilience Thinking is an essential guidebook to a powerful new way of understanding our world--and of living resiliently within it--developed in recent decades by an international team of ecologists. With five clear and compelling case studies drawn from regions as diverse as Florida, Sweden, and Australia, this book shows how all highly adaptive systems--from ecologies to economies--go through regular cycles of growth, reorganization, and renewal and how our failures to understand the basic principles of resilience have often led to disaster. Resilience Thinking gives us the conceptual tools to help us cope with the bewildering surprises and challenges of our new century."--Thomas Homer-Dixon "Professor of political science, University of Toronto " "Resilience Thinking is an impressive and highly successful effort to explain complex ecological and social interactions and changes in a unified framework and in language accessible to a wide audience. This book should stimulate extensive discussions on these critical issues and innovative ways to approach them."--Harold Mooney "Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University "

Brian Walker is past chief of Australia's CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology and is currently science program director of the Resilience Alliance. David Salt is a science writer and editor with 18 years' experience writing and producing popular science magazines and newsletters for a wide range of audiences.