The Ecology of Hope: Communities Collaborate for Sustainability

A remarkably upbeat account of a number of communities where collaboration among different factions and interest groups has led to breakthrough consensus on plans for achieving sustainability. The authors reveal the hopeful trend toward unanimous agreement on difficult local resource issues in forestry, rangeland, watershed and fisheries management.

Politics & Social Sciences

Bernard, Ted

Young, Jora M.

Social Sciences

New Society Pub

This is a remarkably upbeat account of a number of communities where collaboration among different factions and interest groups has led to a breakthrough consensus on plans for achieving sustainability. The author reveals the hopeful trend toward unanimous agreement on difficult local resource issues in forestry, rangeland, watershed and fisheries management in which citizens, government, business and even one-time foes form exciting collaborative partnerships.

Business & Money

Young, Jora

Economics

New Society Publishers

More than a dozen years ago, Ted Bernard traveled to nine communities across the United States to meet residents who were working collaboratively to solve natural resource conflicts. While there may have been different perspectives as to process, their common goal was to achieve higher levels of sustainability as vibrant communities. He visited places as diverse as tiny one-mile-square Monhegan Island in Maine and cities as large as Chicago and Chattanooga and, with Jora Young, wrote about his findings in The Ecology of Hope (1997).
Now Bernard has caught up with these communities again, to discover their progress and see what a difference their collaborative conservation has made in fifteen years. Hope and Hard Times chronicles that journey; the successes, the speed bumps, and the remarkable tenacity and persistence of the partnerships and initiatives driving change during exceedingly hard times. Overall, community-based sustainability initiatives have proved resilient, despite the downward-spiraling of the global economy and the looming problems of global climate change. Their quest points to the need for new perceptions of nature and of humankind, more guidance from nature, and less consumption and materialism. They offer advice on how to live on pieces of land without spoiling them.
These narratives offer hopeful roadmaps for other communities who are working toward a sustainable future, and will appeal to community activists, natural resource professionals, educators, and environmentalists.
Ted Bernard is a professor of environmental studies at Ohio University, and co-author of The Ecology of Hope. He lives in the Shade River watershed in southern Ohio.

Hope and Hard Times: Communities, Collaboration and Sustainability

A remarkably upbeat account of a number of communities where collaboration among different factions and interest groups has led to breakthrough consensus on plans for achieving sustainability. The authors reveal the hopeful trend toward unanimous agreement on difficult local resource issues in forestry, rangeland, watershed and fisheries management.

New Catalyst Books

These nine communities pursuing sustainability were first featured in The Ecology of Hope. Now, fifteen years later, Ted Bernard revisits these communities and shares with us their stories of tenacity and courage along the road to sustainability.

Late-K Lunacy

"Panarchy invites us to conceive of the world as a vast interlocking set of interactive systems that pass through phases over time. If we can thoroughly understand the implications of panarchy's dynamic, we can perhaps begin to avoid behaviors that quicken the progression of human and ecological systems toward collapse. That is the challenge before us now." -- Katja Nickleby, "Over the Cliff" in Late-K Lunacy
Dr. Stefan Friemanis arrives at Gilligan University of Ohio with a powerful model called Panarchy. As a young professor, his job is to help his students navigate their way through a precarious stage of planetary history known as Late-K. He and his students are drawn into a protest movement to halt the university's plan to burn fracked natural gas lying beneath a campus nature reserve. 
As the world catapults toward the Late-K cliff, the students occupy the university's central quad. This enmeshes them in national and international energy politics and a labyrinth of blackmail, offshore shell schemes, tax evasion, political corruption, and far-reaching iniquity. Things go sideways and their world unravels as Panarchy and their beloved mentor had predicted. Thirty years later, they regroup in a downsized world stripped of modernity yet brimming with possibility and hope.

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Petra Books

"Panarchy invites us to conceive of the world as a vast interlocking set of interactive systems that pass through phases over time. If we can thoroughly understand the implications of panarchy's dynamic, we can perhaps begin to avoid behaviors that quicken the progression of human and ecological systems toward collapse. That is the challenge before us now." -- Katja Nickleby, "Over the Cliff" in Late-K LunacyDr. Stefan Friemanis arrives at Gilligan University of Ohio with a powerful model called Panarchy. As a young professor, his job is to help his students navigate their way through a precarious stage of planetary history known as Late-K. He and his students are drawn into a protest movement to halt the university's plan to burn fracked natural gas lying beneath a campus nature reserve. As the world catapults toward the Late-K cliff, the students occupy the university's central quad. This enmeshes them in national and international energy politics and a labyrinth of blackmail, offshore shell schemes, tax evasion, political corruption, and far-reaching iniquity. Things go sideways and their world unravels as Panarchy and their beloved mentor had predicted. Thirty years later, they regroup in a downsized world stripped of modernity yet brimming with possibility and hope.

Through the lives of university students, readers gain an in-depth understanding of how the complex interconnections of industry and environment impact us globally and individually. In a book-within-a-book, Professor Katja Nickleby’s provides a comprehensive explanation “panarchy”: collapsing social and ecological systems. Her “adaptive cycle” comprises rapid growth (r), conservation (K), release (Ω) and reorganization (α). Late-K denotes the point of vulnerability. The rising consciousness of the students and the threatening socio-economics forces them to defend local forests and the future of the community. The students’ activism in response to the unfolding events challenges the reader to face their own ability to react to issues. How far would one go to force leaders to change their policies? And when our lives and homes are destroyed by escalating events, such as extreme weather, power failure, epidemics, fuel and food shortages — how do we rebuild a sustainable community that survives to the next generation? Late-K Lunacy is disturbingly prophetic, and its complexity is mirrored in events around the world today. In the end the author remains hopeful that communities will have the resiliency to rebuild in a world stripped of modernity. **** “Panarchy invites us to conceive of the world as a vast interlocking set of interactive systems that pass through phases over time. If we can thoroughly understand the implications of panarchy’s dynamic, we can perhaps begin to avoid behaviors that quicken the progression of human and ecological systems toward collapse. That is the challenge before us now.” — Katja Nickleby, “Over the Cliff” in Late-K Lunacy **** “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring opens with a dystopian portrait of a fictitious town dying from pesticides. Mocked by corporate agribusiness, her non-fiction best-seller became the generative force for the modern environmental movement. Late-K Lunacy follows in this tradition with fiction,this time the threat to human and ecological life being a climate change-induced pandemic. It will frighten the complacent and arm climate justice advocates. Ted Bernard has an engaging and imaginative gift for ecology-based fiction. — H. Patricia Hynes, retired Professor of Environmental Health, author of The Recurring Silent Spring (Pergamon) **** “A devastatingly truthful work of ecology-based fiction and a gripping story of the coming-of-age of a group of post-carbon Millennials. Much more than an ecological dystopia, Late-K Lunacy is a splendid evocation of the world going into – and eventually coming out of – an ecological crisis, as Holling’s ecological cycles are characterized by both collapse and recovery, like a never-ending Möbius strip.” — Fikret Berkes, author of Sacred Ecology (Routledge) ****

Late-K Lunacy: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

BEYOND LATE-K: Stories of Collapse and Rebirth

Short Stories & Anthologies

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Books by Bernard, Ted

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bernard, Ted. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Ecology of Hope: Communities Collaborate for Sustainability

The Ecology of Hope: Communities Collaborate for Sustainability

Hope and Hard Times: Communities, Collaboration and Sustainability

The Ecology of Hope: Communities Collaborate for Sustainability

Hope and Hard Times: Communities, Collaboration and Sustainability

Late-K Lunacy

Late-K Lunacy

Late-K Lunacy: A Novel

BEYOND LATE-K: Stories of Collapse and Rebirth