Greening in the Red Zone - Valuing Community-based Ecological Restoration in Human Vulnerability and Security Contexts
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Presentation given Oct 17, 2012 CUNY Center for Urban Environmental Reform CUNY School of Law 2 Court Square Long Island City, NY 11101 A presentation of the New York City Urban Field Station Quarterly Research Seminar Series A partnership between the USDA Forest Service and New York City Department of Parks and Recreation
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Greening in the Red Zone - Valuing Community-based Ecological Restoration in Human Vulnerability and Security Contexts
- 1. Presentation given Oct 17, 2012 CUNY Center for Urban Greening in the Red Zone Environmental Reform Valuing Community-based Ecological CUNY School of Law 2 Court Square Restoration in Human Vulnerability and Long Island City, NY 11101 Security Contexts A presentation of the New York City Urban Field Station Quarterly Research Seminar Series A partnership between the USDA Forest Service and New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Keith G. Tidball, PhD kgtidball@cornell.edu www.civicecology.org
- 2. Road map for today • Brief Intro to Civic Ecology Lab • Human Security and EJ linkages • Definitions, Context & Study Site • Research Question & Framing • Initial Models • Mining for Mechanisms (results) • What Does It All Mean? • Broader Context & Application
- 3. 3 things to walk away with: – Possible utility of methodology that is pragmatic and well-suited for coupled biophysical/social research – A greening in the red zone process or cycle model • contains fundamental key sequential components • nuanced on a case-by-case basis reflecting landscape, disturbance intensity, and other factors – Five greening in the red zone mechanisms
- 4. …founded on the belief that humans can act to enhance the ecosystems of which they are a part. Urban Community Forestry Community Gardening Habitat & Watershed Restoration
- 5. …the study of the interactions, including feedbacks, among four components of social- ecological systems • community-based environmental stewardship (civic ecology practice) • education & learning situated in these practices (civic ecology education) • people & institutions involved • ecosystem services produced by people, their stewardship, & educational practices
- 6. The Civic Ecology Lab • Environmental Dimensions of Human Security • Community All-Hazards Management
- 7. HUMAN VULNERABILITY & SECURITY CONTEXTS …. + + Population growth Climate Change Resource scarcity Number of armed conflicts 1946 – 99 http://www.newint.org/features/1999/04/01/thefacts/
- 8. Human Security: An EJ lens? “Freedom from want, freedom from fear and the freedom of future generations to inherit a healthy natural environment – these are the interrelated building blocks of human, and therefore national security.” Kofi Annan. “Secretary-General Salutes International Workshop on Human Security in Mongolia.” Two-Day Session in Ulaanbaatar, May 8-10, 2000. Press Release SG/SM/7382. Dodds & Pippard, 2012
- 9. Human Security: An EJ lens? “Human security refers to the quality of life of the people of a society or polity. Anything which degrades their quality of life – demographic pressures, diminished access to or stock or resources, and so on – is a security threat. Conversely, anything which can upgrade their quality of life – economic growth, improved access to resources, social and political empowerment, and so on – is an enhancement of human security .”
- 10. Nature and Human Security • How do the benefits of involvement and interactions with nature improve human security, and conversely, how do these interactions also benefit the environment? • Environmental security not one domain of human security , rather, how the environment and nature permeate all domains of human security. • Focus is upon identifying, documenting, and disseminating “win-win” policies and best management practices for both human security and sustaining and enhancing ecosystem services through applied research and extension.
- 11. Map Check Brief Intro to Civic Ecology Lab Human Security and EJ linkages • Definitions, Context & Study Site • Research Question & Framing • Initial Models • Mining for Mechanisms (results) • What Does It All Mean? • Broader Context & Application
- 12. What is a red zone? “Red Zones” refer to multiple settings (spatial and temporal) that may be characterized as intense, potentially or recently hostile or dangerous, including those in post-disaster situations caused by natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as those associated with terrorist attacks and war. View of Middleburgh Valley from Vromans nose in A tsunami ravages a portion of the Japanese Schoharie County, New York Daily Gazette, August 29, 2011 coast. Credit: Reuters
- 13. What is greening? • “Greening” is an active and integrated approach to the appreciation, stewardship and management of living elements of social-ecological systems. • Greening takes place in cities, towns, townships and informal settlements in urban and peri-urban areas, and in the battlefields of war and of disaster. • Greening sites vary -- from small woodlands, public and private urban parks and gardens, urban natural areas, street tree and city square plantings, botanical gardens and cemeteries, to watersheds, whole forests and national or international parks. • Greening involves active participation with nature and in human or civil society (Tidball and Krasny 2007)—and thus can be distinguished from notions of ‘nature contact’ (Ulrich 1993) that imply spending time in or viewing nature, but not necessarily active stewardship.
- 14. RED ZONE-- HURRICANE KATRINA & THE NEW ORLEANS SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM Image by NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite or GOES.
- 16. A FOREST OF SYMBOLS
- 17. LAND COVER & CANOPY IMPLICATIONS Wang & Qu, 2009. Assessment of post-hurricane forest damage using optical remote sensing. Spie. http://spie.org/x35463.xml Chambers, J. Q., J. I. Fisher, et al. (2007). "Hurricane Katrina’s Carbon Footprint on U.S. Gulf Coast Forests." Science 318: 1107.
- 18. NEW ORLEANS CANOPY LOSS AVG -1.8 Photo of New Orleans after Katrina - NOAA Nowak, D. J. and E. J. Greenfield (2012). "Tree and impervious cover change in U.S. cities." Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 11(1): 21-30.
- 19. “A FAILURE OF RESILIENCE” AND OTHER (PREMATURE?) EPITAPHS “All Coherence Gone: New Orleans as a Resilience Failure” (R. Westrum, 2006)
- 20. RETRODUCTIVE RESEARCH QUESTION • General- If greening is happening in red zones, what could the model and theory be that might explain greening’s occurrence ? • Specific- If, despite the dominant discourse of a failed city, tree planting is spreading throughout the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, what models, built of mechanisms, can explain this phenomena?
- 21. A LITTLE MORE ON RETRODUCTIVE MODELS… • Models are built of mechanisms such that, if they were to exist and act in the postulated way, they would explain the phenomenon being examined . • Underlying mechanisms can only be known by constructing ideas (models) about them; and models reveal the underlying mechanisms of reality. • Emphasizes tendencies of things to occur, as opposed to regular patterns of events.
- 22. Map Check Brief Intro to Civic Ecology Lab Human Security and EJ linkages Definitions, Context, & Study Site Research Question & Framing • Initial Models • Mining for Mechanisms (results) • What Does It All Mean? • Broader Context & Application
- 23. Begin action to enhance, restore natural assets, which recovers symbols, rituals and Catalyzes ?? sense of place Recognize in natural assets (trees) a place to start anew, to move beyond loss, grief , helplessness Experience loss, grief, helplessness and turn to nature in form of trees for solace Initial models
- 24. SECOND MODEL… A SEARCH FOR MECHANISMS Tidball, KG & ME Krasny. 2008. “Raising Urban Resilience: Community Forestry and Greening in Urban Post-Disaster and Post-Conflict Contexts.” Paper presentation at meetings of the Resilience Alliance, “Resilience 2008,” Stockholm, Sweden: April. Initial models
- 25. MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS… What Initiates? Repeat & What kind? Expand? How much? Initial models
- 26. WHAT MIGHT INITIATE GREENING? Urgent Biophilia Tidball, KG. 2012. Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience. Ecology and Society, 17 (2):5. PD* Restorative Topophilia Tidball, KG & RC Stedman. Positive Dependency and Virtuous Cycles: From Resource Dependence to Resilience in Urban Social-Ecological Systems. Accepted at: Ecological Economics. Memorialization Tidball, KG, ME Krasny, E Svendsen, L Campbell, & K Helphand. 2010. Mechanism Stewardship, Learning, and Memory in Disaster Resilience. “Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education,” Special Issue of Environmental Education Research, 16(5): 341-357. Social-Ecological Tidball, KG (Accepted; expected 2012). Trees and Rebirth: Social-Ecological Symbols, Rituals and Resilience in Post-Katrina New Orleans. In: Tidball and Symbols and Rituals Krasny, Eds., Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience, and Community Greening. Springer publishing. *Positive Dependency complex What Initiates? Mining for Mechanisms
- 27. MECHANISM 1 = URGENT BIOPHILIA URGENT BIOPHILIA • Attraction humans have for the rest of nature (and the rest of nature for us?) • Process of remembering that attraction • Urge to express it through creation of restorative environments • restore or increase ecological function • confer resilience across multiple scales Based on Biological Attraction Principle (Agnati et al. 2009) Analogous to Newton’s Law of Gravitation Biological activities, processes, or patterns are all deemed to be mutually attractive Biological attractive force is intrinsic to living organisms and manifests itself through the propensity of any living organism to act (Holling and Gunderson 2002) Tidball, KG. 2012. Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience. Accepted at: Ecology and Society. Mining for Mechanisms
- 28. MECHANISM 2 = RESTORATIVE TOPOPHILIA • Topophilia = love of place (Tuan, 1974,1975,1977) • Emphasizes attachment to place and the symbolic meanings that underlie this attachment • Base for individual and collective action that repair and/or enhance valued attributes of place • Not only attachment, but also on meanings (Stedman, 2003,2008) • Urgent biophilia & restorative topophilia together comprise “positive dependency” • Positive dependency is resource dependence that enhances resilience, rather than eroding it Tidball, KG & RC Stedman. Positive Dependency and Virtuous Cycles: From Resource Dependence to Resilience in Urban Social-Ecological Systems. Submitted to: Ecological Economics. Mining for Mechanisms
- 29. MECHANISM 3 = MEMORIALIZATION • spontaneous and collective memorialization of lost ones through gardening and tree planting • community of practice emerges to act upon and apply these memories to social learning about greening practices • confers SES resilience, through contributing to psychological–social resistance and resilience and to ecosystem goods and services production Tidball, KG, ME Krasny, E Svendsen, L Campbell, & K Helphand. 2010. Stewardship, Learning, and Memory in Disaster Resilience. “Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education,” Special Issue of Environmental Education Research, 16(5): 341-357. Mining for Mechanisms
- 30. MECHANISM 4 = SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYMBOLS & RITUALS http://candychang.com/sexy-trees-of-the-marigny-2011-calendar/ Tidball, KG (Accepted; expected 2012). Trees and Rebirth: Social-Ecological Symbols, Rituals and Resilience in Post-Katrina New Orleans. In: Tidball and Krasny, Eds., Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience, and Community Greening. Springer publishing. Mining for Mechanisms
- 31. MECHANISM 4 = SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYMBOLS & RITUALS II N = 34 Mining for Mechanisms
- 32. MECHANISM 4 = SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYMBOLS & RITUALS III N = 36 Mining for Mechanisms
- 33. HOW DOES THE CYCLE REPEAT & EXPAND? Desired system Virtuous cycle Undesired system Vicious cycle barriers to change (bifurcation zone or ridge) potential for action potential for actions perpetuating virtuous cycle perpetuating vicious cycles Repeat & Expand? Mining for Mechanisms
- 34. “GREENING” VIRTUOUS CYCLE MECHANISM 4. Ecosystem services 3. Natural capital “VIRTUOUS” Feedback “primes” virtuous cycle to repeat and expand 2. Individual & family well-being 1. Greening activities commence Repeat & Expand? Mining for Mechanisms
- 35. RED ZONE VICIOUS CYCLE Feedback “primes” cycle to repeat and expand 5. Depletion of social capital 4. Loss of 1. Red Zone community ecosystems services “VICIOUS” 2. Rioting, looting, etc. undermine individual and family well-being 3. Natural capital Repeat & eroded Expand? Mining for Mechanisms
- 36. QUANTIFYING TREE PLANTING EFFORTS How much? Mining for Mechanisms
- 37. ROAD MAP FOR TODAY Brief Intro to Civic Ecology Lab Human Security and EJ linkages Definitions, Context & Study Site Research Question & Framing Initial Models Mining for Mechanisms (results) • What Does It All Mean? • Broader Context & Application
- 38. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? FINDING 1 -- There appears to be a “greening in the red zone process or cycle” that contains fundamental key sequential components, but that likely is nuanced on a case-by-case basis reflecting landscape, disturbance intensity, and other factors .
- 39. 1, Individuals gravitate toward available green assets 2. Use available green assets 3. Clusters form- for therapeutic benefits- different paths/pace communities of practice 4. Restore and create new green assets 5. Larger greening movement emerges 7. New sites recruit new individuals; expand cycle 6. Greening activities Social-ecological system recover & restore sense of recovery & resilience processes place
- 40. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? FINDING 2 -- Within this “greening in the red zone process” there are at least five important mechanisms that explain how the system functions from one sequential frame to the next: • Urgent Biophilia Positive Dependency • Restorative Topophilia • Memorialization • Symbol & Ritualization • Expansive Virtuous Cycles
- 41. 2. Use available green 1, Individuals gravitate toward available green assets assets; experience 3. Clusters form- for therapeutic benefits- different paths/pace therapeutic benefits communities of practice 4. Restore and create new green assets 5. Larger greening movement emerges Memorialization SES Symbols & Red zone commences Urgent Biophilia mechanism Rituals mechanism mechanism Virtuous Cycle Restorative Topophilia mechanism mechanism Social-ecological system 6. Greening activities recovery & resilience processes recover & restore sense of place
- 42. IMPLICATIONS & APPLICATIONS Are there examples of this besides the New Orleans case? What can we learn from Greening in the Red Zone Application for DNR? How do weregarding issues of social justice and environmental go about “…maximizing biodiversity, enhancing and sustaining ecosystems, mitigating landscape? justice in the urban or peopled climate change, and managing natural resources in partnership with local groups, state agencies, andcan policyand How national makers and planners include Greening international environmental organizations...” in ephemeral,in their work? in the Red Zone concepts perturbed social-ecological systems like red zones?
- 43. CONCLUSIONS Things to walk away with: • Possible utility of methodology that is pragmatic and well-suited for coupled biophysical/social research • A greening in the red zone process or cycle model • contains fundamental key sequential components • nuanced on a case-by-case basis reflecting landscape, disturbance intensity, and other factors • Five greening in the red zone mechanisms Thank you!
- 44. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Northern Research Station New York City Urban Field Station
Editor's Notes
- The Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University is founded on the belief that humans can act to enhance the ecosystems of which they are a part. In enhancing local ecosystems through such practices as community forestry, community gardening, and watershed restoration, humans also can enhance the human social systems nested within larger ecosystems. Humans acting to restore and steward local ecosystems, and in so doing enhancing social well-being, can and often does occur under the harshest of conditions, including in cities and after disasters
- In a broad sense, civic ecology is the study of the interactions, including feedbacks, among four components of a social-ecological system:community-based environmental stewardship (civic ecology practice);education and learning situated in these practices (civic ecology education);the people and institutions involved; andthe ecosystem services produced by the people, their stewardship, and educational practices.
- Let me continue by telling you about my work within the lab, and where I am conducting this work:CIVIC ECOLOGY LAB*My work is focused on the interactions between humans and nature in the aftermath of natural disasters and war. I am particularly interested in how these interactions relate to social-ecological system resilience, or in other words, how humans and their interactions with nature are related to a system's ability to bounce back after being disturbed.I approach this work as a hybrid anthropologist/ ecologist and draw heavily from fields such as ecological anthropology, social-ecological systems resilience theory, and international relations theory. Sub-disciplines and areas of interest include Community Forestry, Community-Based Natural Resource Management, Ecological Engineering, Cultural Anthropology and Symbolism, Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management, SSTR (Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction), and the Human Security paradigm. In 2002 the Commission on Human Security articulated the concept of human security with a view to formulating a new agenda for UN- based global action. The report, called Human Security Now, defines human security as protection against threats to the vital cores of all human lives.
- There won’t be less of these any time soon.
- The idea of Human Security arises in opposition to traditional notions of security, such as national security, collective security, and so on. If you look at this quote from Kofi Annan, you can see that the Human Security paradigm and the field of Environmental Justice share a lot of common ground.Human and Environmental Security: An Agenda for Change Dodds & Pippard 2012
- So for me, I find human security to be compatible with notions of environmental justice, and human insecurity for me indicates environmental injustice.
- From the stand point of research, then, studies on the environmental dimensions of human security explore in greater detail the “interconnectivities” between various threats to people’s lives using a social-ecological systems approach. How do the benefits of involvement and interactions with nature improve human security, and conversely, how do these interactions also benefit the environment? We emphasize that Environmental security is not one domain of human security , rather, we try to demonstrate how the environment and nature permeate all domains of human security.Our focus is upon identifying, documenting, and disseminating “win-win” policies and best management practices for both human security and sustaining and enhancing ecosystems and their services through applied research and extension
- Now, getting back to Greening in Red Zones, and the relationships between Greening in Red Zones and human security or environmental justice, Before I go much further, I need to make sure we are clear on some definitions--
- 2005The hurricane damaged the components of thesocial-ecological system at a variety of spatial and temporal scales.More than 1800 people dead53 levee breaches125 billion in damagesMore than 200,000 homes destroyedEstimates of up to one-third of the population of the city moved away following the storm.
- CRP- NOPI backgroundNeighborhood ecology group- looking for evidence re gardening
- Rather than gardening showing up as a kind of recovery strategy, it was the trees.Trees themselves, tree planting, and tree planting communities of practice
- So what happened to the trees?Left-The devastation of southern Gulf Coast forests by Hurricane Katrina was documented in before-and-after images from the Landsat 5 satellite. The Interstate 10 "twin-span" bridges that cross Lake Pontchartrain east of New Orleans is seen here pre- and post-Katrina. Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge is the large patch of forest (green) the lower left portion of the LEFT image, which suffered heavy tree mortality (seen in red in the RIGHT image after the storm)“Right- Severity of forest damage caused by hurricane Katrina. Each pixel represents 1km2.
- 9 other major cities there in the US, avg 1.8 % loss, compared to 9.6 % loss
- All of the above. Commensurate with the damage to the urban forest, and all of the homes and neighborhoods, was the damage caused to the reputation of New Orleans, the morale of the city and of the people living in it, by the news media reporting of post-Katrina New Orleans.But despite media reports of “failure of resilience”, I was beginning to see a movement towards using trees as a way to both express resilience and to enhance it. Began to suspect tree planting was the beginning of a counter narrative regarding the failure of New Orleans, a REBIRTH narrative. This lead me to the logic that has driven this work-
- This question, reflects an ontology, epistemology and methodology that are neither extremely positivist nor extremely constructivist, but rather highly pragmatic and “in the middle.”
- These kinds of “models” reflect the framing of this study, not to be confused with population dynamics models, spatial statistical models, or other work done in this department.This kind of modeling requires a willingness to refine the model, or rework it, over and over again.
- Once social-ecological symbols, rituals, and sense of place are being recovered through greening, really interesting things begin to happen in the systemobservation driven retroductive hypothetical model. This model was quickly replaced by a model that opened up questions about mechansims, but as a sequential process model, maintained its usefulness over the years of this study.
- Consistent with the methodology employed, my model generated more questions than answers… so I began to go MINING FOR MECHANISMS.
- Propose mechanisms and positioning (later repositioning)
- URGENT BIOPHILIA IS: the affinity we humans have for the rest of nature, the process of remembering that attraction, and the urge to express it through creation of restorative environments, which may also restore or increase ecological function, may confer resilience across multiple scalesSo, whenfaced with a disaster, as individuals and as communities and populations, we seek engagement with nature to summon and demonstrate resilience in the face of a crisis, we are demonstrating an urgent biophilia.urgent biophilia represents an important set of human-nature interactions in SES characterized by hazard, disaster, or vulnerability, often appearing in the “backloop” of the adaptive cycle (Holling and Gunderson 2002).Builds upon contemporary work on principles of biological attraction as well as earlier work on biophilia while synthesizing literatures on restorative environments, community-based ecological restoration, and both community and social-ecological disaster resilienceSo this is one explanatory mechanism derived from the retroductive model and consequent inquiry.
- This mechanism is yin to the yang of urgent biophilia. Here,drawing upon Tuan’s notion of topophilia (literally ‘love of place’), I am emphasizing a social actor’s attachment to place and the symbolic meanings that underlie this attachment. In contrast to urgent biophilia, restorative topophilia is conceived and operationalized as more experiential and ‘constructed’ rather than innate, and suggests that topophilia serves as a powerful base for individual and collective action that repair and/or enhance valued attributes of place. These restorative greening actions are based not only on attachment—people fight for the places they care about as Rich says—but also on meanings, which define the kinds of places people are fighting for.
- REMIND OF RETRODUCTION– KEEP GOING BACK TO SYNTHESIZING LIT, CHECKING FIELD DATA REVIEWING OBSERVATIONS, ETCA memorialization mechanism begins right after a crisis, when spontaneous and collective memorialization of lost ones through gardening and tree planting happens. Then a community of practice emerges to act upon and apply these memories to social learning about greening practices. This, in turn, may lead to new kinds of learning, including about collective efficacy and ecosystem services production, through feedback between remembering, learning, and enhancing individual, social, and environmental well-being. Map of Living memorials project. 667 greening memorialization sites re 9-11. major spikes in September each year.
- Tree symbols everywhere – THREE SLIDES
- Graphic depiction of concepts, themes, connectivity, and relevance from initial interview data of Parkway Partners Tree Trooper class (n34). Note the closeness of concepts of trees and tree with New Orleans, homes, and neighborhood, indicating strong symbolic significance in trees and ideas of place.The Leximancer system is a relatively new method for transforming lexical co-occurrence informationfrom natural language into semantic patterns in an unsupervised manner. It employs two stages ofco-occurrence information extraction—semantic and relational—using a different algorithm for eachstage. The algorithms used are statistical, but they employ nonlinear dynamics and machine learning.
- Refers back to meanings described in Restorative Topophilia and memorialization mechanismmultiple symbolic meanings of trees in different contexts. three broad families of symbolic meanings of trees: (A) trees themselves as symbols (their presence, their absence, their status); (B) tree planting as a kind of symbol or symbolic action; and (C) both trees and tree planting explicitly combined in the discourse. 20 general categories of symbolic meanings of trees and tree planting, representing more than 70 specific and nuanced types of symbolic instances. further separated into positive meaning and negative meaning groups based on textual analysis of interview data. The presence of tree symbols, the social-ecological memories that define them and that inform the rituals that perpetuate them, and the resulting social-ecological relationships between people and trees or forests, as expressed through symbols and rituals, reveals a possible mechanism within the greening in the red zone system, and a source of resilience in this kind of SES undergoing rapid change.
- Another mechanism that began to take shape through this iterative modeling approach was the mechanism of feedbacks, which seems to appear at different points in the greening in the red zone cycle, depending on a number of factors. To understand this mechanism, I borrow from stability landscapes and basin of attraction models to create explanatory metaphors that can be thought of as descriptive of the feedback mechanisms at play in the greening in the red zone system
- Rudimentary version of a greening virtuoys
- I TRIED TO ACCOUNT FOR NUMBERS OF TREES IN THREE WAYS inventories of total trees palntedMapping distributionsGIS canopy and impervious surface anlaysisKNOW THAT THOUSANDS OF TREES HAVE BEEN PLANTED, REPLACING LOST TREES– BUT HAVEN’T YET CAPTURED THIS IN CANOPY ANALYSISConverted Parkway Partners’ Ten‐for‐the‐Hood address data from plantings between January 2006 and March 2010 to GIS coordinates. Addresses of locations where Parkway Partners “Ten for the Hood” trees were planted were converted to GIS coordinates using the University of Southern California’s (USC) web GIS Services laboratory’s free software service . Those coordinates were then plotted on maps
- 5 important mechanisms of the greening in the red zone system
- GRZ book 35 chapters, mostly examples of this process and these mechanisms.Quote from DNR web page …
- In this presentation I have shared with you the phenomena of greening in the red zone from social science perspectives (via symbols, rituals, and sense of place) and from social-ecological systems resilience perspectives (via identifying mechanisms and potential sources of social-ecological resilience, detecting virtuous cycles and resilience conferring feedback), with post-Katrina New Orleans as my primary case study and field site. I have also briefly presented an integrated systems theory and critical realist epistemology and methodology to pursue a retroductive logic which asked “if these were the observations, then what could the model and theory have been?” As such, I presented models that featured mechanisms in such a way that, if they were to exist and act in the postulated way, they would provide an explanation for the phenomena being examined. Of particular interest were tree symbols, tree planting rituals, and the relationship between these social-ecological symbols and rituals and the recovery or reinterpretation of sense of place, especially in terms of resilience conferring feedbacks and virtuous cycles.I have asked “Why do humans turn to greening in the wake of conflict and disaster?” This question invites us as humans to revisit our relationship with the rest of nature, and to ask ourselves what we may learn from ourselves, given our behaviors in urgent or dire circumstances. Second, I have asked “Of what use might greening in human vulnerability and security contexts be in managing social-ecological systems for resilience?” This question alludes to application, in planning and policy making fields, in natural resource management, and in fields of disaster preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. The answers to these questions seem to be timely given continuing worries about conflict over access to resources, climate change, and overpopulation and the red zones that will inevitably emerge. The ways in which we as humans reorganize, learn, recover and demonstrate resilience through remembering and operationalizing the value of our relationships with elements of our shared ecologies in the direst of circumstances such as disaster and war hold clues to how we might increase human resilience to new surprises, while contributing sources of social-ecological resilience to ecosystems.