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

Chapter Thirteen: Designing for Resilience 189increasing areas, and—if spraying stops—high vulnerability “to an outbreakcovering an area and of an intensity never experienced before.” Thesprayers’ mental model has one element—that spraying kills budworms,which eat trees, which are worth money—whereas even the simplest successfulsimulation models of the system have thousands of variables.•Protecting and enhancing salmon spawning on the west coast of NorthAmerican triggers increased fishing to profit from the larger harvest. But havingbuilt more boats, the fisherman must pay for them by catching more fish. Thisextinguishes the unenhanced (less productive) stocks and leaves fishing “precariouslydependent on a few enhanced stocks that are vulnerable to collapse.”• Suppressing forest fires in U.S. National Parks succeeds in the short term,but also allows unburned fuel to accumulate. This leads sooner or later to“fires of an extent and cost never experienced before.”•Transforming semi-arid savannah into productive cattle-grazing systems inparts of the U.S., Africa, India, and Australia also changes the grass compositionso as to cause an irreversible switch to woody vegetation. The resultingaltered ecosystem is highly susceptible to collapse triggered by drought.• Some malarial eradication programs have succeeded only long enough toproduce DDT-resistant mosquitoes and human populations with littleimmunity, leading in turn to greatly intensified outbreaks.In each of these examples, like the Cañete Valley spraying mentioned inChapter Three, a problem was made worse by defining it more restrictivelythan was consistent with the interactive nature of the ecosystem. Interventionshrank, shifted, or destroyed the original ecosystem’s stability domains, makingbehavior “shift into very unfamiliar and unexpected modes.” 48 Some disturbedsystems “forgot” their previous history and became “more sensitive tounexpected events that previously could be absorbed.”When ecosystems turn out to be unexpectedly complex, leading to apparentlyunpredictable side effects, the institutions responsible tend to respond inone of three ways:First[,] they may try to design away the variability by deliberately simplifyingthe system and/or its environment [e.g., by seeking to eradicate predators,“pests,” or “weeds”—often leading to even more intractable side effects].Second, they may try to extend the boundaries of definition of the natural system,so as to include “all relevant factors” in their analyses [via elaborate modelsand large interdisciplinary research groups: an approach equally doomed tofailure—because the systems are too complex to analyze—but slower to appreciateit]…Third, they may simply try to find ways to live with high variability. There