Purpose

What’s distinctive about working at the landscape scale, and how do we go about cultivating resilient landscapes?  Trained in participatory action research and political ecology, I’ve spent the past decade facilitating and mediating interagency and stakeholder-driven resource management processes throughout California that foreground these two questions.  I am foremost a practitioner, secondarily a scholar.

The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences with practically applying the concept of “social-ecological resilience” to rural, urban, and interstitial landscapes; to provoke discussion of your comparative experiences; and to together develop new awareness of and insights into our work.  I aim to do this by drawing partly on my historical casework at the Center for Collaborative Policy; partly on a “live stream” (if you will) of the week-to-week work I do for the California Tahoe Conservancy; and partly on my emerging work around the intersection of urban resilience and urban permaculture (I recently completed basic certification with the Urban Permaculture Institute of San Francisco, for example).

The overarching prompt for this blog came from my ongoing work as the vice-chair for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature‘s (IUCN) Resilience Thematic Group, a network of around 200 global practitioners and scholars that are part of IUCN’s Commission on Ecosystem Management.  Completed in the spring of 2017, our quadrennial work plan calls out the creation of a resilience blog as a communication and engagement tool.  My hope is to not only have fun writing, but strengthen the RTG’s network relationships as well!

For the proximate prompt for this blog, well, read my first post — Distinctive Promises!  🙂

Unless otherwise noted, the information presented herein does not represent IUCN’s or the Commission’s position on the matters presented.