Cultivating Resilience
Discovering grounds for community resilience in agriculture
What comes to mind when you think of a “sophisticated farming operation?”
Perhaps your answer is like Claude’s: a large farm with GPS-guided machinery, drones, sensors, climate-controlled environments, robotics, and specialized genetic techniques. I might have said something similar; we tend to equate sophistication with technology.
A book I read recently, Resilient Agriculture by Dr. Laura Lengnick, deeply challenges that thinking.
In fact, the book helped me see modern industrial farming techniques more as a costly attempt to avoid managing complexity and uncertainty, one that employs brute force rather than real sophistication. Real sophistication in agriculture is a cultivated capacity to continually adapt to uncertainty and change. It may or may not use advanced technology, but the technology is not the point.
This kind of sophistication requires a shift in thinking. It requires that we stop designing for illusory optimum conditions and then brute-forcing our way through “deviations.” Instead we need to embrace variability and create resilient systems designed to navigate it.
It’s a better way to think about problems and solutions in agriculture.
It’s a better way to think about problems and solutions in social systems as well. I’ll come back to this at the end.
Why Resilience?
Dr. Lengnick is a soil scientist and ran the sustainable agriculture program at Warren Wilson College for over ten years. In 2008 she already knew plenty about climate change. But in preparing a talk on how it is changing the way we eat in the mountains of western North Carolina, she found herself shocked. Like most of us, she saw the climate crisis as a looming threat in the future. What she discovered was that it was already happening and already changing everything.
In 2011 she was tapped by the USDA to be the lead scientist on adaptation for the first national report on agricultural adaptation to climate change. Her key realization from that work was that “climate change adaptation is not about figuring out how to adjust to a ‘new normal.’ It is about figuring out how to manage the risks created by more variable weather patterns that are likely to change at a faster pace and grow more intense through at least mid-century.”
In other words, it’s not about adapting to a change, but to constant change.
That was also where she learned about resilience science.
People typically use the term resilience to refer either to psychological resilience, people’s ability to bounce back from personal challenges, or to engineering resilience, which is about increasing mechanical tolerances so equipment can operate over a wider range of conditions. Both are valuable, but neither is adequate to the challenge of adapting to constant change.
The resilience relevant to adaptation is socio-ecological resilience, which is distinctive in two ways. First, as is obvious from the term, it explicitly encompasses both people (including the technologies we use) and the environment. Second, it is actually defined as "the capacity of a system … to deal with change and continue to develop.” In other words, it’s exactly what’s required to meet the challenges of the climate crisis.
Importantly, socio-ecological resilience is not just a vague concept or collection of ideas. It’s an applied system science, grounded in ecology, that offers a useful set of concepts and language to understand complex change, as well as practical tools to help guide actions and decisions.
What Makes a System Resilient and How Do We Foster That?
Two key qualities distinguish resilient socio-ecological systems: diversity and a modular pattern of connections.
Diversity can happen along a variety of dimensions in farming. It might be a diverse mix of animal, crop, or ground cover species; of markets; of distinct small-scale ecosystems; of power or water supply sources; or of mechanisms for maintaining soil health; to name just a few. The greater the diversity, the greater the possibilities for creating different combinations that can adapt to changing conditions and continue to flourish.
The second key quality, a modular pattern of connections or relationships, may be less familiar.
At a given scale a system can be seen as a collection of interacting components, each itself a smaller subsystem. To foster resilience, relationships within the component subsystems should generally be “tight,” which means that they transmit information, energy, or materials that are critical to the well-being of the system. But connections between components are ideally kept “loose” in the sense that the system can continue to function if they are temporarily disconnected or shifted to a different component.
Take a simple example. Most crops need a tightly integrated system for monitoring and responding to their need for water – disconnection from the water supply can be fatal. But it is advantageous for the farmer to maintain a variety of loose connections to different buyers and distribution mechanisms to more easily adjust to demand fluctuations and other disruptions. The supply chain disruptions during COVID are an excellent example of what happens when components are connected too tightly.
These qualities provide the conditions for resilience and allow the emergence of resilient system behaviors like self-organized cooperation between different organisms to the benefit of all or feedback cycles that maintain system stability or drive it to a new, more stable state when conditions change. You will find such systems everywhere in nature, but creating them in an agricultural operation within a limited time period requires active management and design.
The rules for that are simple:
Cultivate diverse networks of reciprocal relationships.
Cultivate regional self-reliance.
Cultivate the accumulation of community-based wealth.
Simple to state, but not at all simple to live by!
I won’t try to explore these in detail. I can’t do them justice in a short piece and you can read all about them in Dr. Lengnick’s book, which I highly recommend. Or you can listen to the podcast interview with her, which I’ve re-linked below.
Resilience in Community
In the meantime, I want to spend a few minutes reflecting on how all this applies to the issues this newsletter is usually concerned with.
I would start by pointing out that the words “farm” and “agriculture” do not appear in Lengnick’s rules of resilience and, at least at first glance, the rules seem to make a great deal of sense as community development strategies as well.
It’s also worth noting that the same kind of technosolutionism that we find in industrial agriculture plagues social policy as well. In her newsletter yesterday danah boyd shared this fantastic article on the need to shift from a "solutionistic" approach in technology and policy that assumes a determinism that doesn't actually exist to one that learns and iterates.
It’s also easy to find community parallels to the important qualities of a resilient ecosystem.
Take diversity. We know that an economy grounded in multiple industries and companies is better equipped to withstand economic turbulence than one concentrated in a single industry or just a few large companies. And I’ve noticed that recent efforts around housing and homelessness here in Buncombe County have increasingly acknowledged the importance of a diverse array of options that can match the needs of the wide variety of people who experience housing instability: singles, couples, people working multiple jobs, people who are unemployed, people struggling with mental illness or addiction, people with children, people with disabilities, people with pets, people recovering from illness or surgery, and so on.
It also dawned on me the other day that we witnessed the value of modular patterns of connection in the aftermath of Helene.
The communities that fared best in the aftermath shared two key characteristics: they were well-organized (tight internal connections) and their leaders were well-connected to other communities and leaders (loose connections to other communities). The first made them effective at distributing resources and supporting people within their community; the second helped them gain access to resources that they needed: if one source couldn’t help, another likely could.
And so what?
For me the “so what” is that, just as in agriculture, resilience thinking offers us a powerful, scientifically grounded set of concepts, resources, and practical tools to address the evolving challenges our community faces.
There’s work to be done to adapt them to the task – most existing tools, like the Resilience Alliance’s resilience assessment workbook, have been developed with an emphasis on the environmental side of the socio-ecological spectrum. But I expect most of the changes will turn out to be straightforward.
I for one am looking forward to getting started.
Upcoming Event
My long-time friend and teacher, Dan Snyder, is co-moderating a series of five talks on NAVIGATING THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE: How to Deal with Polarization, Inside-Coup, and Authoritarianism on Indivisible. You can think of these 5 Zooms as a class on Nonviolent Strategy 101. They will discuss how to navigate a deeply polarized nation that is under threat of devolving into authoritarianism, while gaining an understanding of political power from behavioral, systemic, and non-violent perspectives. The moderators are longtime lover of democracy Sheridan Hill and retired Pastoral Counselor Daniel O. Snyder, Ph.D. Dr. Snyder is a teacher-consultant on nonviolent strategies whose book, Praying in the Dark: Spirituality, Non-Violence and the Emerging World, offers an integrative model for transformational change in our personal and political lives.
Links & Thoughts
Resilient Agriculture with Dr. Laura Lengnick, Part 1 and Part 2. I originally included this podcast conversation with Dr. Lengnick in the January 29 Links & Thoughts. The host, David Rayburn, is scheduling a follow-up post-Helene conversation. The Practicing Gospel podcast is focused on Christian voices of the left and on issues of interest to Christians on the left. These particular conversations do not get into any specifically Christian or religious topics.
Photographic Examinations of Environmental Onslaught. A couple years ago my wife and I spent a week on the stunningly beautiful Pembrokeshire coast of Wales. Our host, Mike Perry, is also a photographer whose work examines “the interactions of landscape, nature and industrial society, questioning the romantic mythology of national parks as areas of wilderness and natural beauty.” His recent Reverse Sod Swap 2024 project compares “the impacts of enlightened ‘wilding’ of our inner city parks with the degrading impacts of monoculture farming” in Wales’ Natural Parks, which seems a fitting link for this issue. The title link takes you to a photo of agricultural plastic sheeting draped over a Blackthorn tree in an echo of Rodin’s The Bhurgers of Calais, one that I find devastatingly haunting.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.