 So, I would like to now shift gears and introduce our first speaker. When we think about the value of learning about concepts across a number of disciplines, it's appropriate then to start off with our first speaker who's going to give the first presentation, Sandra Vanderloo, who's the Dean of the School of Sustainability and Co-Chair of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative at Arizona State University. One of the things that's been very gratifying about New America's relationship with ASU is that ASU is an incredibly innovative research university in terms of blowing up silos and thinking as we're trying to do here today across various disciplines. And the School of Sustainability at ASU is a prime example on campus of this effort. Sandra is an archaeologist and historian by training. His research interests include the long-term dynamics of socio-environmental systems, reconstruction of ancient technologies, and urban dynamics. So Sandra, the podium is yours. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. It is a pleasure and an honor to be here, and I look forward to hearing from lots of disciplines that I don't normally meet over this day and to enlighten myself also. What I'm going to do this morning, as the slides are on, is very simply give you a little bit of a definition and then look back, and look back, oh, let's say a few hundred thousand years, and begin to sketch to you why our societies actually are getting into this sustainability resilience dilemma, and then end with a few remarks about things that we, in my opinion, might be able to do to actually get ahead with all of this. So let me start, and I hope this is the right one, yes. My starting point is an anomaly that, as an archaeologist, we noticed in Australia. We have nowadays, by analyzing prehistoric bones, the capability to see if people have suffered a famine during their lifetime. And what we find in Australia is that the people who are in the inland, which is very dry, is basically desert, they don't have any famines. The only people who show to have famines are the people who live in the lush forests of the Murray and Darling River Valley. So that posed a kind of a riddle to us as archaeologists. And if you look at these two landscapes, you can see the contrast. You can also see that people who live in the desert have to be very, very careful never to disturb the very fragile vegetation and to live above their means, because things change every day. They have to really go with the punches. One day they'll be in a place where it's dry and where they find hardly anything, and they'll move around and come to a place which is a little bit better. But they always have to adapt their social structure and their way of life to those natural circumstances which very severely limit them. So their focus is always on change, whatever happens that day or that season, whereas the people in the forests, they have a very lush vegetation. They have plenty to eat. So it is very easy for them to actually forget that nature can sometimes inflict a lot of harm. And so what we see in places like that is that population increases and all kinds of erosive, naturally erosive activities are undertaken, which then ultimately, and this may happen two, three times in a lifetime, actually lead to famines. So there is a difference here in systemic terms between a group of people that go with the punches and a group of people who actually don't, because there aren't for a long time punches, but those punches accumulate as it were to a particular moment where the situation gets so bad, and then they're in real trouble. So they are periodically vulnerable. They are not resilient. So this is just to give you a flavor of one way to look at resilience. It is that capability to actually always adapt to what is happening, make it into something that serves you rather than into a challenge, and thereby survive in a very positive way, as opposed to systems which for a long time seem robust, like our own system, for example, and which then at a certain point crash, because we have overreached ourselves in that situation. So that much about sort of an intuitive approach to resilience. Very brief history of the concept. It came about initially in material science, where it was the ability of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then released that energy upon unloading. It's basically, well, it bends a little bit and then it springs back. In psychology, which is the next discipline where this concept was applied, it isn't at least according to one definition, an individual's ability to cope with stress and adversity resulting in that person bouncing back to normal functioning or functioning even better than before. And the concept in which I, the discipline in which I have mostly used this, is ecology. In the mid-90s, a big project came under way funded by the MacArthur Foundation under quite a well-known ecologist, Holling, who actually defined it in the way that is said here the capacity of a system to absorb and utilize or even benefit from perturbations and changes without changing its structure, without changing its qualities. And of course, those changes, those pressures can come from the inside as well as the outside. And so that is the use of the word that I am at least proposing in this particular case because it actually is systemically formulated, does not focus on an individual but focus on a whole society. Now, why did we get to the point where we are now? When you look back with what are my eyes, and that is here about 450,000 years BP, yeah, that's right, you see that climate changes dramatically all the time. It's the area of ice ages and then hot periods and so on and so forth. But what is the interesting thing about it is that societies during that whole period stayed essentially the same. They didn't change structurally. They actually lived with that climate change because they had a structure in which they actually adapted, as I said about the Australians in the Inlands, every day and every moment to whatever was happening. And that is a very different situation than where we are now. That situation is characterized by a few elements here. One of them is that human beings in that period never intervened in the environment. They only plucked its fruits. They plucked what was ripe, the animals they saw around, but they didn't have the capability or the wish or whatever to actually intervene in the environment. So they were harvesting it. They used many, many different resources. They basically ate whatever came in front of them. And whenever they didn't find anything else, they moved around and they started somewhere else, a new. So that is a strategy that demands permanent change, but is actually very adapted to a very rapidly changing environment. And at any time they stayed in doing so below what we call the carrying capacity of the environment, which is sort of the total resource load that the environment has as its disposal for a population that lives there. And so without much change in behavior, people sort of managed for the very long time to live that, to live with change and risk at the order of the day at all kinds of temporalities, daily risks, seasonal risks, multi-annual risks, and so on. So resilience in the way I used it in the first slide was actually the basis for survival. Now what happens at about 10,000 years ago? We then see climate evening out, and this graph needs to be read from right to left because that is the tradition in this particular discipline. And it shows that the environment is very stable, but also we know that from 10,000 years ago, our social systems exploded, exploded to where we are now, with eight or nine billion in the near future. And so the question becomes, well, what changed at that particular point that enabled that very rapid expansion, and what might be the complications that that brought about? And that's what we get into next. So what we see is a very fundamentally different way of life. It's a way of life in which humans start investing in the environment. They start clearing forest. They start taking out all the leftover tree trunks after the fire. They start putting seeds in the ground. So there is a different relationship with time and with resources. And that element of investment is one that we have retained until the present day, and which is something that I'm going to get back to. What we see as part of that is a whole set of new technologies, new ways of conceiving space, for example, villages mean houses. Cities mean that you exclude some space from the surrounding environment. You get larger groups of people living together, not just 25 or 50, but several hundred, which also puts other stresses on the system. And there is a different perception of space and time. And I can maybe get into that as a propo of a question, but there are some really interesting points there that are a bit complicated to explain. So what we get is a society that goes from mobile harvesting to semi-sedentary investing. Now why did that happen? Because the old system could, of course, have continued with less climate change. We actually argue that that's something that I've deliberately excluded from this talk, that there is actually an evolution in our cognitive capability that allows us to make those changes. And again, that is something I can get into at another point. What becomes, from that moment, a crucial issue is because we don't anymore go with the punches, we start solving problems. We start seeing things in the environment that we don't like, and we start doing things about that. And that makes also for a very different kind of society. And I'll get that in this slide. So we get for the first time a reciprocal relationship between environment and climate and society. Climate can change society, and society can change climate. Of course, initially, those climate changes are not noticeable in our record, but from the Bronze Age, and particularly in the Roman period, we have, for example, around the Mediterranean, the first case of anthropogenic climate deterioration in the second century AD, which is something that has sort of escaped notice. We're not really, for the first time, up against this kind of dilemma that we are right now. So we see a growing interventionism in nature. And technique begins to play a role, because techniques are part of those solutions, and so techniques get to be changed in order to achieve those solutions. Now what that does is that every intervention in the environment, every new technique, brings with it its own unintended consequences. And those unintended consequences are playing a very major role in whatever leads up to any crisis that any society has had, and I'll get back to that in a moment. So what do humans do? They simplify the environment, they optimize it, and they diversify technically. One society in one place will use irrigation. In another place, it will not use irrigation, because there is no need for that. So what you now get is a completely different way of getting our human system or keeping it going. You get an exchange in which humans organize their environment in order to get to the energy and raw materials that they need for their society. In that process, they discover about a lot of challenges. And in order to deal with those challenges, they bring together more and more people to actually effectuate the changes that are needed. So you see three things happening at the same time. More information processing, more invention, more energy, more resources, and more population. And those three feed into each other and create the starting point for where we are now in our current societies. So from that moment on, resilience is no longer enough. Why? Because societal problems are beginning to crop up in this, and no longer only environmental problems. So little by little, we find ourselves in a balance between resilience on the one hand and control on the other hand. If we lose control, we lose control over the society. If we lose resilience, we can no longer deal with our environmental circumstances. So those two things in the current situation have to be at any time balanced out. And so we need to navigate essentially between those two. And the resilience theorists see that as a sort of pendulum effect that is here being put out in a slightly different illustration. They basically argue that initially when there are plenty of resources, you actually start exploiting those resources. That creates a structure, a societal structure that leads in the end to a situation where in what they call the K phase or the conservation phase, you have very slow change because the resources begin to be limited. And then at a certain point, they aren't enough anymore, and you actually get a crash, and this is the crash. That completely destroys this structure and creates little by little a reorganization into a new structure. And what you have here in blue are sort of components from the social science point of view that are part of that. The first system, the move up, is what you call a negiliterian system with a perspective in unstable precarious circumstances of reorganization. Then the system begins to change slowly. The system locks up. So you get a hierarchy because you need to mediate the conflicts that are there. Then after the crash, people become, in this idea, fatalist. The world is out of control, and life is a game of chance. And then they reorganize themselves in smaller groups until you get, yet again, the capability of building a very large group. So last slides, what is the relevance here? And it is all in those unintended consequences. When we do something in our environment, I think this is the last slide, so I think you're OK. When we do something, we do it on the basis of partial knowledge. We never know all the factors that play a role in what is happening around us. Because we do it on partial knowledge, we have a simplified view of the processes that we intervene in. Our intervention, however, affects all those processes. So you have a difference in dimensionality between what we have in our minds, which is that simplified idea, and a real world which has many, many, many more dimensions. If you play that out over the long-term time, what you will see is that the effects that our actions have create those unanticipated consequences. And if you do that over a long stretch, it is my contention that that leads to crises because there are then so many unanticipated consequences that we can no longer deal with them or handle them. And so what I'm arguing here is that whether it's greenhouse gases, the financial crisis, any societal crisis, we actually simply don't deal enough with the unintended consequences of what we're actually doing. And to my mind, a really interesting example of that was indeed in the financial crisis because people admitted at that point that their models had been equilibrium models that took in some of the short-term dynamics, but that never looked at the possibility that the nature of the dynamics itself would change towards the future. And so my fundamental point is that we need to start thinking in a different way about the future in a way that takes into account that we need a degree of social control but we also need a degree of flexibility to actually get ourselves back into a resilient mode. And now then really last one, I think this is simply to say that we're at the limits and this is of a paper that we published a few years ago in Nature which deals with environmental crises and shows how in many domains we're beginning to exceed the limits of what is possible, the limits of the carrying capacity of this earth and that the effect of that is that at a certain point, because it is all one earth system, all these things are going to start interacting on each other and that then we even know less than we already know about the system and that that creates problems. And this is what we can do. We have to start accepting it. This is particularly important in this country because to some extent it goes against the American dream. We have to accept that resources are not limitless. This is one of the big differences between why in Europe environmental movements have created changes that haven't happened here yet. We have to find a new balance between that stability and that resilience and that becomes all the more important because our current technology changes so fast that I think there's lots of problems in having society accept that and then to my mind, very, very important, but that's why I'm in a university, we have to revamp our education system and in particular, very early education. Every teacher is faced with the dilemma, am I stimulating the child as an individual or am I socializing the child? And it is very often much easier for the teacher to socialize and normalize their behavior than it is to deal with all the individual behavior. Yet I think we need to do just that to promote thinking in alternatives and in options rather than in single solution trajectories.