Abstract
‘Greening in the red zone’ refers to post-catastrophe, community-based stewardship of nature, and how these often spontaneous, local stewardship actions serve as a source of social-ecological resilience in the face of severe hardship. In this introductory chapter, we provide the reader with the fundamentals needed to understand our argument for why and how greening in the red zone occurs and to what end. We begin with a brief introduction to the terms ‘greening’, ‘red zone’, and ‘resilience’. We then briefly introduce the two types of evidence presented in this book. First are explanations from a large body of research on the impacts of both passive contact with, and active stewardship of, nature, and from a growing network of social and ecological resilience scholars who subscribe to the notion that change is to be expected and planned for, and that identifying sources of resilience in the face of change—including the ability to adapt and to transform—is crucial to the long-term well-being of humans, their communities, and the environment. The second source of evidence are the long and short descriptions of greening in red zones from post-disaster and post-conflict settings around the world, ranging from highly visible and symbolic initiatives like the greening of the Berlin Wall, to smaller-scale efforts such as planting a community garden in a war zone. We summarize the research-based explanations and long and short case descriptions of greening in the red zone in three tables at the end of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
See ‘Earth Summit: Messages from the Mountain of Hope Summit Diary’, The Birmingham Post (England), September 2, 2002.
- 2.
Following from the work of Berkes, Colding, and Folke, social systems of primary concern for this volume include myriad property rights, governance, access and use of resources systems in post-disaster and post-conflict contexts, as well as different systems of knowledge relative to the dynamics of environment and resource use, worldviews and the ethics systems concerning human and nature relationships. Ecological systems refer to self-regulating communities of organisms interacting one with another and with their environment. Our emphasis is on the integrated concept of ‘humans-in-nature’, so we use the term social-ecological systems, and agree that social and ecological systems are inextricably entwined, making delineations between social and natural systems artificial and arbitrary. See Berkes et al. (2003) and Berkes and Folke (1998).
- 3.
For an overview of green political thought, see http://www.greenparty.org/ and http://www.global.greens.org.au/charter/10values(us).html
- 4.
Vincent was tragically murdered in Basra, Iraq while reporting on the increasing infiltration of the Basra police force by Islamic extremists loyal to Muqtada al Sadr. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/international/middleeast/03cnd-iraq.html?_r=1
- 5.
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Tidball, K.G., Krasny, M.E. (2014). Introduction: Greening in the Red Zone. In: Tidball, K., Krasny, M. (eds) Greening in the Red Zone. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9947-1_1
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