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

184National Energy Securitypopulation dynamics between one subregion and the next, the populationcycle of outbreak and collapse will be out of step among different subregions.Thus even if a type of mite becomes temporarily extinct in a particular subregion,other mites can recolonize it from nearby subregions where they stillsurvive. This recolonization from surplus to deficit areas ensures that someplacein the enclosure, both species will survive.This experiment—amply confirmed by studies of extinction and colonizationon isolated islands 27 —illustrates an important conclusion. What enables themites to recolonize is that the area of disaster is small; the damage is isolated andlocal, so it can be repaired. More generally, then, if domains of stability aresmall—if a system is fragile—it will benefit from being fine-grained and heterogeneousin space, 28 having many differing components that vary from one place to another.Failure then does not propagate, and can be repaired from areas that are stillfunctioning. Local back-up, local autonomy, and a preference for small over large scale andfor diversity over homogeneity all increase resilience in such cases. The scale of theheterogeneity need only be finer than the scale of the disruption, so that anundamaged periphery will remain as a source of repair and regeneration.There is a possible view precisely between the extremes of supposing natureto be infinitely brittle and infinitely resilient. This is the view that the behaviorof ecosystems is neutral, tending toward neither stability nor instability, and neitherendangered nor protected by their own general structure. The mathematicalformulas (called coupled differential equations) commonly used to representthe interactions between two populations embody this view: they assume thatthe populations can fluctuate without limit, influenced only by each other.This view, again, is mathematically convenient but greatly oversimplified.If it is refined by adding any kind of negative feedback (for example, that populationoutbreaks will be constrained by crowding effects), then collapsebecomes—according to mathematical theory—impossible. On the other hand,adding any kind of positive feedback, or time lags in responding to events, createsinstability. According to the mathematical theory, collapse then becomesinevitable. Yet both negative and positive feedbacks actually exist in real ecosystems,leading to a mix of stabilizing and destabilizing properties whose relativedominance varies in time and space. It is the balance of these stabilizing anddestabilizing forces that enables ecosystems to regulate themselves into a semblance of stability—providedthey are not pushed too far, into a region of behavior where the instabilitiesdominate and cause collapse.Multiple, shifting domains of stability In all but perhaps the simplest ecosystems,these mathematical properties create (as both theory and experimentconfirm) not just one domain of stability, or region of equilibrium behavior,