Resilience – a neoliberal captured term or a chance for a hub of change? / by Pasi Heikkurinen

Marcus Petz (Scientific Coordinator NomadTown), marcus.kit.petz@student.jyu.fi

I am currently at the University of Jyväskylä studying rural resilience and how communities can use community currencies to support themselves. Here I look at how action research can manifest in achieving resilience. A social technology called S.T.O.P., that is being developed at NomadTown, in Karelia, Finland is promoted to enable cultural evolution in the direction of a deeply adapted or resilient society post climate change. I am directly involved in systemizing, writing-up and disseminating that technology to early adopters.

We are beset with calls to make a change to adapt to climate change. Denialists have become sceptics and with their feet dragged to the fire (Scotty from Marketing I am thinking of you) there has come a realisation, even from conservative politicos that lip service and BAU (Business As Usual) will not do any more. So what form is that change taking? We are seeing now the use of terms being captured from those of us that have long advocated solutions. 

Those of us to which a crisis has been evident for decades have talked about mitigation, and now adaptation, extended by some as deep adaptation and resilience. These are ways that we hope to deal with the Great Transition that we must undergo – like it or not – under the effects of anthropogenic climate change AND crucially concomitant ecological extinction.

Resilience is a term that is suffering the same semantic shifts as sustainability did not so long ago. There is a danger that such shifts can render the word meaningless. In the case of sustainability, the view of a sustainable business is often considered from the view-point of homo economicus’s neoliberal approaches. This is one that only looks at cash-flow and excludes as many externalities as it can (both the positive and the negative ones). 

Another way of looking at a sustainable business, even in terms of economics, would be to look within green / ecological economics paradigms and perhaps from the view-point of multiple capitals approaches. I like particularly the idea that we might look at forests and lakes as a capital and how we approached things in Finland if this was the capital we were enhancing. If korppi (the wild wood) was what we were considering re growth we would look at the forest stocks we have in a whole different way.

Imagine, if you will, that plantation forests – even though they had much harvestable timber – were to be found poor because there are insufficient:

White-backed woodpeckers (Dendrocopos leucotos) – who nest in deciduous old trees and thus show a landscape level of woodland health, 

Wood anemones (Anemone nemorosa) – which as a slow growing shady woodland species is indicative of old growth forests 

Or even biodiversity. That is not only indicator species or at the local level, but in concert with other biodiversity at a landscape level. 

These different levels of biodiversity are termed thus: 

alpha biodiversity is a local diversity in a small habitat and the average diversity there. 

beta diversity which is the diversity between 2 alpha diversity areas / habitats or regions and can be called a regional diversity. It is calculated by (number species in habitat 1- number of species habitat 2+1 have in common) + (number of spp. in H2- number of spp. H1+2 have in common).

Gamma diversity is the whole ecosystem or landscape species diversity.

So growth in these landscapes would be related to enriching the landscape – does that or rather how does that relate to human populations that live in that biocultural landscape? Just like an inhabitant in the fictitious Flatland 2D world finds it hard to conceive of a 3D world, so it is hard for conventional accountancy practices to look at this way of seeing things (and even harder for mainstream economists or their politician followers), though some relationships can be drawn out and efforts are being made from a financial industry perspective to do this, particularly to know how to value these things in terms of insurance and payments for loss and damage. 

Degrowth (décroissance) perspectives and associated ways of looking at economics try to reduce the impact and take a kind of topsy-turvy view of winding back or undoing rather than redirecting the damaging processes that are in place. Can we instead try to build an alternative and repurpose those processes? Perhaps we can. The resilience that was introduced in this article as a manifestation of deep adaptation is one such way of doing that. It is very much connected to the turquoise meme of spiral dynamics. This is one that manifests in trying to unite disparate trends, histories and traditions to create a new paradigm constructing a different whole – rather like trash labs, that turn junk into treasures in artistic workshops as part of maker spaces. 

This redirecting is quite hard to think about without some understanding of spiral dynamics history. So, the history of spiral dynamics has come from several thinkers and is very strongly associated with Ken Wilbur. Wilbur is a somewhat mystical in how he interacts with the science community. He does not want spiral dynamics to be subjected to consensus or peer review as much of science is. His reasoning seems to be that the scientists’ world-view will color that in such a way that his ideas will be unacceptable (found unscientific and thus dismissed as pseudoscience).

To make that clear, those who share Wilbur’s perspective often regard postmodernists who are reputed to analyse by smashing things into smaller pieces as destructive forces which believe false philosophies such as there is no objective truth or that different perspectives are equally valid. Yet the second order thinking of the Turquoise meme is able to contain cognitive dissonance – and contradictory thoughts are not just acceptable, but desirable in an agonist philosophy that allows their integration for a functioning whole. This is integral thinking – not holistic thinking.

We can see a manifestation of this in activism where we have altermondialisation / alterglobalisation contrasted with antiglobalisation. The activists engaging in the former actually want globalisation, but on their own terms. So how does this manifest in the Finnish context? We have a clear example where such efforts of resilience building are taking place now. This is NomadTown, which is being constructed as a resilience hub. It is in Karelia and supported by the association called Sydänlanka (Heart-string). Nomad Town is not only manifesting as a place you can visit (or live if you are so inclined), but also has an out-focusing missionary aspect to what it is doing. The aim is that it will influence the nearby city of Joensuu, the wider region and hopefully internationally too, to adopt its more resilient practices. 

Finland’s first resilience hub is bringing a response to the situation that we are living in a crisis, created by exceeding ecological and climatic limits in our environment. It is making a cultural adaptation to this situation. Part of such adaptation necessitates reflection and evaluation to create a path forward in the biocultural landscape for members of the community and connected communities. Resilience hubs offer a way to spread techniques for development of alternative ways to exist. 

This year NomadTown is developing a social technology with a focus on green skills, rural crafts and foraging practices. The social technology is called S.T.O.P. This project is being supported by Bridge47 – an EU funded project administered by FINGO. FINGO is an NGO platform and an expert on global development. FINGO represents 300 Finnish civil society organisations and strives to build a fairer world for all. Also connected with the project are members of SUCH. This institutional support has been sought out by Sydänlanka as it helps in technology transfer. The knowledge capital will be spread more widely through these organisations.

Scientists and activists connected with NomadTown are thus engaged in the process of creative place making of a resilience hub and the associated cultural milieu. This process takes advantage of the concept of co-learning where the “teachers” are the community at large (which includes the institutional environment and organisation in Finland) and also they are the “learners” (who will act as multipliers of the results of that learning). Sydänlanka is making use of the rural symbolic economy by bringing a contemporary iteration of rural sustainable culture, which is akin to the arts and crafts movement, to a wider audience. It will also act in ecosynergy with the natural world that NomadTown is embedded in. NomadTown is manifesting as a low ecological impact culture.

There are plans to share S.T.O.P. at:

Additionally, a peer reviewed paper, which explains more deeply the concept of a resilience hub and how it relates to the action research of Nomad Town will report on the pedagogical aspects of S.T.O.P. 

As S.T.O.P. is running this spring why not come and join us at one of the Full Moon Full S.T.O.P. events? You can see more on the Sydänlanka Blog in Finnish or English

http://sydanlanka.blogspot.com/

Keywords: Deep adaptation, resilience, survivalism, nomadology

 

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