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

Chapter Thirteen: Designing for Resilience 183pens if temperature drops below a critical boundary. We see, therefore, evenin this simple system, that stability relates not just to the equilibrium pointbut to the domain of temperature over which true temperature regulation canoccur. It is [the breadth of] this domain of stability that is the measure of resilience. 21More complex systems with more variables also have their domains of stableself-regulation or “bounded stability” 22 beyond which they break down.Regardless of the degree of complexity, successful (i.e., surviving) ecosystems “arethose that have evolved tactics to keep the domain of stability, or resilience, broad enoughto absorb the consequences of changes.” 23 These systems do not attain the absolute pinnacleof biological efficiency in capturing the energy available from their environment.But by avoiding the extreme specialization this would require, they alsoavoid the risk of reducing their margin of adaptability to environmental change—in Hardin’s language, the risk of “contraction of the boundaries of stability.”Holling describes several possible ways to view these “domains of stability”and hence to judge the resilience of an ecosystem. 24 For example, onemathematically simple and politically comforting view, widely held by nonbiologists,is that the domains of stability are infinitely large—that nature isinfinitely resilient, tolerant, and forgiving. In this view, no matter how drasticallya system is disturbed, it will always bounce back.The value of heterogeneity An opposing view holds that nature is so delicatelybalanced that the domains of stability are infinitely small, so that anyslight disturbance will lead to extinction. If this were literally true, hardly anythingwould by now be left alive. But this view is more reasonable if appliedonly loosely and locally, not strictly and globally, because then temporaryextinction in one place can be made up by recolonization from adjacent areas.In this way, the World Health Organization parachuted cats into Borneo toreplace those killed by DDT (Chapter Three); American grapes replenishedEuropean vineyards devastated by the phylloxera blight in the 1860s; andstocks of disease-resistant seed corn prevented disaster when a 1970 epidemicof mutant fungus destroyed fifteen percent of the U.S. corn crop. 25Some classical experiments in population biology illustrate this process. Forexample, 26 if two kinds of mites, one that eats plants and the other that eatsthe first kind of mite, are confined so that they can freely move only within asmall area, populations of both the predator and the prey will oscillate interactively.The species can be chosen, and the enclosure can be small enough,so that the oscillation becomes unstable and both populations crash to zero asthey outrun their respective food supplies. But partitions can be introduced todivide the enclosure into subregions between which either kind of mite canmove with some delay and difficulty. Because of slight random variations in