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

24Brittle Powerent events but to past ones as well, they show an historical quality. By respondingto events at more than one point in space, they show a spatial interlockingproperty, and through the appearance of lags, thresholds, and limits theypresent distinctive non-linear structural properties.... [E]cosystems are characterizednot only by their parts but also by the interactions among those parts.It is because of the complexity of the interactions that it is so dangerous totake a fragmented view, to look at an isolated piece of the system. By concentratingon one fragment and trying to optimize the performance of thatfragment, we find that the rest of the system responds in unexpected ways. 13These biological insights have even been applied to urban renewal, rent control,and freeway construction, where they have predicted and explained phenomenathat had long baffled analysts of urban socioeconomics. For example,this approach shows why building freeways decreases anticipated travel times,changes land-use patterns, generates more traffic, thus increases anticipatedtravel times, and so creates an apparent need for still more freeways. 14Similarly, in societies as diverse as the United States and Sri Lanka, dams andlevees to protect flood plains tend to encourage building in those high-riskareas, vastly increasing the damage when an extraordinary flood sooner orlater overwhelms the defenses—precisely the opposite of what was planned. 15These unexpected, paradoxical properties of natural and social systems—propertiesderived from their very complexity—are precisely those thatare critical to the conceptual basis of effective energy preparedness. For example,viewing security as solely an outgrowth of military strength would be asmisleadingly narrow a view as supposing that cotton can be grown profitablyin the Cañete Valley only by using more and more pesticides—and that usingthem will in fact have the desired effect.But it is impossible to do only one thing: every sword has at least twoedges. Thus a purely military conception of national security dangerouslyneglects (for example) the energy vulnerabilities described in this book—anddoes nothing to guard against the economic, ecological, and social instabilitieswhich can destroy the very country one is seeking to defend. Similarly, if wesuppose that the answer to the Arab oil embargo is simply to expand thedomestic supply of all forms of energy, we may merely substitute one class ofvulnerabilities for another. Defining a problem too narrowly can “solve” theenergy problem, for a time, by making it into a problem of insecurity, inflation,climate, nuclear proliferation, inequity, etc. Whether in energy, military,or biological terms, focusing on only one aspect of security at a time ignoresthe interactions among all aspects. Subtle, higher-order interactions can be agreater threat to stability than direct, first-order consequences. Where causeeffectrelationships are too complex to understand intuitively, attempted solu-