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

190National Energy Securityare at least two design possibilities for living with surprise. First, the institutionmay attempt to design some means to stabilize system outputs without stabilizingsystem states, by finding some way to store up outputs and release them in amore or less steady stream. Individuals hedge against uncertainty by storingmoney in savings accounts; dams store water for release in dry periods…Thisdesign approach is the most promising, in terms of social acceptability, that wehave uncovered so far. Finally, the institutions may attempt to spread risks bydisaggregating the system into “operational units,” each with a relatively low cost of failure[and minimally interdependent on each other]…For example,…the energy plannermust be able to design parallel development…options…such that failure ofone does not drag the others down also. 49These two approaches—smoothing, and disaggregating into modular units—are indeed among the “most promising” approaches for making tolerablethose surprises that cannot be reduced to expectations.Toward a design science for resilienceLiving systems evolve automatically if slowly towards resilience. Applyingthe same principles to human affairs, however, requires the integration of biologywith engineering. Unfortunately, few engineers know much about biology.This is partly because systems behave differently in biology than in engineeringtextbooks. Engineers tend to be trained in a mechanistic, Newtoniantradition in which most systems are linear (responding smoothly in proportionto the stimulus), reversible, and predictable. Living systems, on the otherhand, are full of delayed, nonlinear, threshold-before-crash behavior, withresults as irreversible as the scrambling of an egg. And yet living systems, inall their vast complexity, have survived eons of rigorous environmental stressby virtue of a carefully evolved capacity to bend, adapt, and bounce backeven more resilient than before. More precisely, those living systems, and onlythose, which are observable today can be inferred, from their very survival, to bemasterpieces of resilience. The brittle systems became extinct. One mighttherefore expect that such challenging areas of engineering as civil aeronautics,naval architecture, military hardware, nuclear reactor design, andtelecommunications would draw heavily on the insights that biologicalresilience has to offer.The literature of those and similar disciplines suggests that only a handfulof designers have consciously sought to learn from biology. However, thebest engineers have long sought to achieve at least passive resilience—toavoid the brittleness of systems that shatter if stressed beyond narrow limits.In this quest they have empirically evolved some interlinked design prin-