Tag: resilience
Resilience: The Adaptive Cycle
This infinity loop is called the Adaptive Cycle. It was first developed to explain the life cycle of forests, and is the most powerfully simple way to describe resilience.
More than just bouncing back from adversity, resilience is a loop – constant and in multitudes. Once you see it this way you’ll see it everywhere – in life, relationships, career, industry, projects, and nature.
There are four phases (sometimes referred to as: r, K, Ω, and α) to the Adaptive Cycle.
Let’s start with perhaps the most pleasant one. This is a young forest, a true love, a growing scale-up, a newly elected government, the beginning of a new job. It’s the phase where we’ve found something special and want to run with it.
We then progress up the front loop. It’s on the front loop that we’re strongest, happiest, and most constructive. Life is beautiful on the front loop.
The next phase is success, maximized and extended by standardization and optimization. There’s comfort with the status quo, but also some signs of complacency and decay. This is an industry’s best quarter, an athlete’s top performance, a lifetime achievement award, a mature forest.
We like this phase so much that we often do everything we can to avoid moving beyond it. We lose adaptive capacity and fall into the Rigidity Trap. It’s here that we see big corporate bail-outs, Blockbuster ignoring Netflix, in-it-for-the-kids marriages, climate change denial.
All good things eventually come to an end – one way or another. There comes a moment of disruption, often not of our choosing. Injury, death, break-up, divorce, disaster, downturn, revolution, even good things like invention, retirement, or winning the lotto. A before and after.
Next comes the release phase, when everything just falls apart (unless you’re the disruptor). There’s a period of denial and mourning, of coping and confusion. What was isn’t and what will hasn’t. Uncertainty abounds.
Then, following some acceptance of a new reality, we try to make sense of our place in it. This can move surprisingly fast or painfully slow, but regardless – beware – the beast is in the back loop. This climb can be very difficult, lonely, and hopeless.
The fourth phase is where we begin to regain hope. Exciting possibilities emerge – often many of them! Vegetation pushes through the burnt forest floor. Individuals date, create, and try new things. Startups start up. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
The most promising of those possibilities go on to where we started, where winners get the nourishment they need to thrive. But if they don’t, those ideas risk falling into the Poverty Trap. Startups need capital, relationships need time, books need editing, forests need water.
Adaptive Cycles can be micro and personal, like writing a new song or grieving the loss of a pet. Or they can be macro and global, like the birth of cryptocurrency or the extinction of species. They can move slowly like human rights movements, or quickly like an improv scene.
Humankind is here, at the convergence of multiple disruptive events caused by late-stage capitalism, major political/cultural shifts, and climate change. There was a before and there will be an after this macro moment in time.
We are immersed in uncertainty and we should know to expect some difficult times ahead before seeing the hopeful light of new order at the end of the tunnel. As they say, the only way out is through.
What makes the Adaptive Cycle such a powerful visual is that the front loop crosses the back loop. It’s the intersection of the strong and capable with the weak and vulnerable – positions everyone is in at various times – that makes community an x-factor for resilience.
Resilience isn’t just bouncing back to normal. It’s ensemble sense-making. It’s an assortment of emerging adaptive cycles – from hopeless to hopeful, creative to confused, weakness to strength, helper to helped. Resilience is a knowing embrace of the emerging uncertain.
Adapted from a Twitter thread originally published on April 19, 2020.
Pictured: New growth emerging from ground charred the previous summer by the 5992 hectare Trozzo Creek wildfire in 2021.
Fire Break
Old-timers in the Kootenays sometimes refer to June as “Juneuary,” a month with cooler, wetter weather. But June 2021 definitely didn’t resemble anything they would have seen before. It was record-shatteringly hot.
Just as, earlier this year, the jetstream had parked a cold weather system over Texas, it contorted to form a stagnant heat dome that baked much of western North America.
For several days, temperatures across BC reached into the 40s (Celsius) before settling into weeks of 30-degree temperatures, with no rain. Perhaps nice for the beach, but not so good for temperate rainforests.
On July 9th, lightning struck a peak east of Winlaw and started a fire. It quickly grew out of control into a “Fire of Note” and began spreading to the backcountry behind us.
An evacuation alert was issued on July 21st. We raced to remove fuels (both gasoline and dry foliage), set up sprinklers, and collect essentials. Groundworks crews, which had finally mobilized just a week earlier, packed up and rolled out. Safety crews visited every property in the alert area to ensure that everyone was accounted for and was aware of the possibility of an evacuation order. Meanwhile, overhead, we could actually feel the drops falling from the water buckets under a constant cavalcade of helicopters. It was surreal.
The winds picked up that night and the alert was upgraded to an order, blocking us from our new property and kicking off a few smoky weeks of intense worry. The fire was once again upgraded, but this time to an “Interface Fire”, indicating structures (homes) were threatened. At one point, Big Calm was just a few hundred metres from going up in flames.
Fortunately, the persistent efforts of BC Wildfire Service crews, with ground support from the region’s forestry service, Sifco, and others, held the fire from jumping the ridge and into the Valley. The order was downgraded 12 days later and the alert rescinded on August 18th, following some much needed rain.
We moved to BC knowing that wildfire is an annual risk. Though Big Calm already has extensive fire breaks, we had consulted experts early on about further firesmarting the property. We knew that, at some point in the future, our region could be affected by fire–we just didn’t expect it to be so soon. We mourn for the loss of forest and the wildlife it sustained.
But, a silver lining can be found: the fire has effectively added an impressive 6000 hectare fire break around us, which will provide a buffer for many years ahead (and perhaps some morel mushrooms next year).
We moved here to be closer to nature. It’s been a true joy to experience more fully the comings and goings of the seasons…
The squirrels, the bears, the flowers, the trees, the birds, the bees, the worms, the weeds… everything in its time.
But it’s also been disconcerting to experience a heatwave that breaks records by double digits; to see robins standing over, rather than sitting their eggs; and to see an inland temperate rainforest thirsting for water. Even coastal Vancouver went 46 days without rain.
The effects of the global climate emergency are becoming more evident, everywhere. Every part of the world, both urban and rural areas, will experience the impact, whether it’s ice storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts, or wildfires. There is no safe haven.
So what are we to do? We choose to focus on what we can do at Big Calm – and that’s empowering. Ongoing fireproofing, installing an emergency water tank, and planting fire-resistant plants and trees. But we have a vision that goes far beyond that: a community whose strength is greater than that of each individual combined, so it’s better able to withstand whatever shocks the future holds.
And we saw that kind of cooperation last month: the community opened a resiliency centre for those affected by the fire, so all their needs were provided for. In addition to the designated intake centres set up throughout the region, people offered their spare bedrooms and RVs as a place for evacuees to stay. The community hosted a large BBQ for the firefighters as a gesture of gratitude.
We learned a lot from this experience: being prepared is not only wise, it’s empowering, and the cooperation of a community is integral to its resilience. And, while we cannot control the climate, we can find comfort and meaning in collectively caring for our own little piece of this fragile planet.
Photo: Jon Miller