Summary
Crawford Stanley "Buzz" Holling was the Director of IIASA from 1981-1984, he is the founder of the Resilience Alliance and past Professor of Ecological Sciences at the University of Florida. He returned to IIASA in the summer of 2010 as an invited speaker of the Young Scientists Summer Program.
In this interview Professor Holling discusses how the rules of adaptive management, as they apply in ecological systems, can inform the evolution of social systems and their potential to succeed or fail. He also discusses how innovations in systems theory can help society live with major transformations and become more resilient.
About the speaker
Crawford Stanley "Buzz" Holling is a Canadian ecologist. He is Emeritus Eminent Scholar and Professor in Ecological Sciences at the University of Florida, one of the conceptual founders of ecological economics and was instrumental in establishing the Resilience Alliance, an international science network. He was the Director of IIASA from 1981-1984. He was founding editor-in-chief of the open access journal Conservation Ecology, now known as Ecology and Society. He was received two prestigious awards from the Ecological Society of America, the Mercer Award and the Eminent Ecologist Award for "outstanding contributions to the science of Ecology" in 1999. He received the Kenneth Boulding Memorial Prize in 2000, an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Guelph in 1998, and the Volvo Environment Prize in 2008. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a foreign Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and has been awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Arts and Science. In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for his pioneering contributions to the field of ecology, notably for his work on ecosystem dynamics, resilience theory and ecological economics.
