User:Ryan.Salisbury/Resilient Systems

"The theories implicit in these examples ignore multi-stable states. They ignore the possibility that the slow erosion of key controlling processes can cause an ecosystem or economy to abruptly flip into a different state that might effectively be irreversible.  In an ecosystem, this might be caused by the gradual loss of a species in a keystone set that together determine structure and behavior over specific ranges of scales.  In a resource-based economy, it might be implementation of maximum sustained yield policies that reduce spatial diversity, evolve ever-narrower economic dependencies, and develop more rigid organizations. [...]	It increasingly appears that effective and sustainable development of technology, institutions, economies, and ecosystems, requires ways to deal with not only near equilibrium efficiency but also with the reality of more than one possible equilibrium.  If there are multiple equilibria, in which direction should the finger on the invisible hand of Adam Smith point? If there is more than one objective function, where does the engineer search for optimal designs? In such a context, a near-equilibrium approach is myopic. Attention should shift to determining the constructive role of instability in maintaining diversity and persistence and to management designs that maintain ecosystem function despite unexpected disturbances. Such designs maintain or expand the ecological resilience of those ecological "services" that invisibly provide the foundations for sustaining economic activity and human society."

"Birth, growth, death, and renewal cycles transform hierarchies from fixed static structures to dynamic adaptive entities whose levels are sensitive to small disturbances at the transition from growth to collapse and at the transition from reorganization to rapid growth. During other times, the processes are stable and resilient.  They constrain lower levels and are immune to the buzz of noise from small and faster processes.  It is at the two phase transitions that the large and slow entities become sensitive to change from the small and fast ones."