Figure 1
The “ball-in-well” metaphor for resistance and resilience, as applied to hurricane disturbance in the coffee system. The two wells represent alternative production syndromes along the productivity gradient, emerging from the “dynamic background”, which is to say all of the ecological, economic and social forces that determine the farm productivity. This metaphorical representation is commonly employed in the resistance/resilience literature1, and is adapted here for the specific application to hurricane disturbance. The actual position of the system is represented by a ball that tends to fall to the bottom of one of the wells. The hurricane is thought of as a force pushing the ball upwards (the shaded arrows represent the force of the hurricane, moving the ball from the dark shaded part of the arrow to the light part of the arrow). A “resistant” system is represented as a larger (heavier) ball which, in consequence, does not respond much to the hurricane. A less resistant system is represented as a smaller (lighter) ball, which responds strongly to the perturbation (i.e. the hurricane). The general expectation is that the hurricane is likely to “encourage” the system to move from a healthy productive system to a low production system and perhaps abandonment. However, if the system has either strong resistance and/or strong resilience, it will go back to the healthy system, while if resistance and resilience are weak, the system will move to a low production system, an alternate state (or “regime” or “syndrome”). The larger heavily shaded ball represents a strongly resistant system while the light shaded ball represents a weakly resistant system.
