The Forum Resilience: A Survivor's Guide to Adversity
Jun 6, 2016
Johan Rockström, sustainability scientist exploring planetary limits; Frank de Cotter, historian of modern China who studies survival under Mao; Richard Forty, palaeontologist fascinated by living fossils. They debate resilience across time: tipping points and food systems; how people preserved culture under political pressure; why some species endure mass extinctions.
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Resilience Works Across Time Scales
- Resilience spans scales from individuals to deep geological time and ecosystems.
- Richard Forty contrasts species survival through mass extinctions with individual woodland persistence over thousands of years to show continuity at different scales.
Private Life Persisted During Political Persecution
- Frank de Cotter shows resilience often hides behind outward compliance during dictatorships.
- Party archives reveal many people only acted compliant while maintaining private cultural practices and underground markets.
Scholar Hid Research In A Wall During Cultural Revolution
- Richard Forty recalled a professor in China who hid research papers in a wall to survive the Cultural Revolution.
- The professor later retrieved and published the work after being sent to the countryside for nearly a decade.