Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

182National Energy SecurityIt is because of this tendency to resist transformation that efforts to changecomplex ecosystems often have the opposite effect of the one intended.Biological systems have the resilient learning and corrective process builtin, centered not on ability to predict or avoid stress but on ability to cope withstress. This provides the adaptability that has carried these systems throughseveral billion years in which environmental stresses were so great that alldesigns lacking resilience were recalled by the Manufacturer and are thereforeno longer around to be studied. To understand active resilience so that we canapply it to the design of energy systems—to understand how resilient systemsuse stress and uncertainty as an essential tool for more fully achieving theirultimate potential—we need to examine the architecture of biological systemsthat have survived the exacting test of evolution.This is a central theme of several provocative articles by the CanadianEcologist Professor C.S. Holling. He describes many instances in which thelearning qualities of an ecosystem, not just its passive “safety margins” or itsredundancy (like having an extra kidney), enable it to emerge strengthened byhaving experienced stress. Holling’s arguments about biological resilience aresometimes framed in the language of abstract mathematics, 20 but at the cost oflosing some of his subtler insights, they are summarized here in ordinary terms.Resilience in biological systemsChapter Three noted that when the Borneo and Cañete Valley ecosystemswere disturbed, unforeseen interlinkages within them were also unwittinglydisrupted, causing them to lose their ecological stability. “Stability” in thissense does not mean a static equilibrium, but rather the ability of a system toregulate itself so that normal fluctuation in its populations of plants and animalsdo not reach the point of either extinction or plague. The system doesnot remain exactly the same—it is free to vary—but it varies only within onegeneral mode of behavior that is recognizable and coherent.Self-regulation that works only up to a point is common in biological systems.As the biologist Professor Garrett Hardin has pointed out, our bodies regulatetheir own temperature at about ninety-eight and six-tenths degrees Fahrenheit.If through sickness or…dramatic changes in external temperature, the bodytemperature begins to rise or fall, then negative feedback processes bring [it]back to the equilibrium level. But…this regulation occurs only within limits.If the body temperature is forced too high…the excessive heat input defeatsthe regulation…[increasing] metabolism which produces more heat, whichproduces higher temperatures, and so on. The result is death. The same hap-