2003 Starker Lecture Transcripts
From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds
C.S. Holling
University of Florida
Introduction
For me, 2001 was a pivotal year. First came the submission of our book
“Panarchy” to the publisher. Panarchy presents theory and
examples to explain why complex living systems create and also benefit
from crisis. Then on Sept 11 came the terrorist attacks on the two US
Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and unsuccessfully, on the Congress
or White House. Those Sept. 11 events represented a huge financial, military
and governmental attack that has since spawned both conflicting and supportive
responses from governments. It launched the world on a journey whose path
is unpredictable and unknown. It turned the United States government from
an inward reaction of political ideology to an outward reaction of governmental,
industrial and military power. It has taken me a year and a half to begin
to understand how Panarchy, which has an essentially regional focus, can
perhaps explain and offer actions for what is a global, geopolitical phenomenon.
This paper is the result.
“Panarchy” That is an odd name, but one that is meant to
capture the way living systems both persist and yet innovate. It shows
how fast and slow, small and big events and processes can transform ecosystems
and organisms through evolution, or can transform humans and their societies
through learning, or the chance for learning. The central question is
what allows rare transformation, not simply change.
The multi-authored book describing the integrative nature of Panarchy
(Gunderson and Holling 2001) is partly a culmination of 50 years of my
own research work, together with that of a fine group of friends and colleagues
in the Resilience Project. During that project, my ideas expanded and
grew as they interacted with the ideas of others- other ecologists, economists,
social scientists and mathematicians- all co-authors of Panarchy. It was
a process of mutual, creative discovery that then turned personal for
each of us.
For me, over those 50 years the old notion of stable ecological systems
embedded in the equilibrium images of Lotka-Volterra equations, moved
to that of resilience and multi-stable states (Holling 1973, Carpenter
2000), then to cycles of adaptive change where persistence and novelty
entwined (Holling 1986), then to nested sets of such cycles in hierarchies
of diversity covering centimeters to hundreds of kilometers, days to millennia
(Holling 1992) and then to the transformations that can cascade up the
scales, with small fast events affecting big slow ones (Holling et al
2002). Self-organization and natural selection jointly flourish and interact
as a new way to view evolution. In the sciences of biological evolution,
that combination can often be viewed as either an obscure or an excessive
representation! But it is suggestive and provocative, and that has particular
value at times of deep change.
Jargon, yeah. So, we said, why not go “whole hog” and invent
the term “Panarchy” for the ideas, by drawing on the mischievous
Greek God Pan, the paradoxical Spirit of Nature. Join Pan, then, to the
dynamic reality of hierarchies across scales, where nature self-organizes
lumps of living stuff on a more continuous physical template described
by power laws. Physics defines the attributes of the power law. Biology
self-organizes concentrations of opportunity and of species along the
power law relation. Part of that organization is maintained by diversity
within a scale and across scales (Peterson et al 1998 and Walker et al
1999), a uniquely panarchical representation of the role of diversity
in maintaining a sustainable system. For ecosystems and landscapes, all
this is arranged over an interactive scale from centimeters and days to
hundreds of kilometers and millennia. Nothing static- all components flipping
from quiet to noise, from collapse to renewal. Transformation is not easy
and gradual. It is tough and abrupt. .
The technical puzzles that I had accumulated over the years became resolved.
And the fewer, but deeper and more intriguing paradoxes that I had experienced
turned out to provide the foundation for a new understanding of sustainability.
Those paradoxes did not emerge in my science, but did appear in the organisations
I became part of. Not science, therefore, but human experience. In each
case, each organisation had been newly created to capitalise on recent
understanding, scales of perception, and integrative methods. They were
creations of history made by politically sensitive individuals who saw
value in combining integrative scholarship within a context of current
politics. Each generated large advances to understanding critical attributes
of complex systems. Each triggered extensions of collaboration among scholars
of different disciplines and nations. But, as time passed, each became
less responsive to new opportunities.
I at last understood why IIASA, Austria, ultimately could only grudgingly
and partially change and had to reduce and stabilise in a changing political
world. Why the Institute of Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia,
closed after great successes and despite huge opportunities. Why the University
of Florida could only form a partial “horizontal” College
of Natural Resources to integrate across a wide spectrum, a College that
became isolated despite original dominant faculty support and trivial
costs. Why Everglades restoration has such an extraordinary cost, distorted
history, but momentarily happy present. Each was, at stages, a frustrating,
fun and challenging place for change and transformation embedded in panarchies
that both encouraged novelty at some scales and fought it at others. The
Santa Fe Institute is another such place where a group of physicists,
biologists and computer specialists created both a new organisation and
a new field of enquiry in complex systems. Novelty, persistence and evolution
were all grists for the mill. It now is trying to restructure in an effort
to recapture some of the original magic that has become partially lost
in its own traditions. They are and were all rare and wonderful places
for learning and experiment whose benefits then moved elsewhere.
Fig. 1. A stylized representation of the four systems functions and the
flow of events among them. (from Gunderson and Holling 2002)
That is a big lesson. That is, major learned benefits need not, and generally
do not stay in the place where they were created. But they flourish elsewhere.
Can we facilitate that spread? Can they return? That is a kind of globalisation
that we want to encourage.
It seemed to become clear why and how persistence and extinction, growth
and constancy, evolution and collapse entwined to form a panarchy of adaptive
cycles across scales. Hierarchy and adaptive cycles can combine to make
healthy systems over scales from the individual to the planet. Over days
to centuries.
The panarchy shows that we benefit from local inventions that create
larger opportunity while being kept safe from those that destabilise because
of their nature or excessive exuberance. When innovation occurs we can
sense its fate. When collapse looms we can judge its likelihood. And the
timing and kind of responses to this swinging, turbulent process can be
designed as an act of strategic decision. Sustainability both conserves
and creates. So does biological evolution.
A Brief Summary of Discoveries
The book Panarchy (Gunderson and Holling 2001) describes our effort
to integrate theory and example from ecology, economics and social systems.
It started with the results of decades of examination of ecosystems and
the effects of management on the ecological and social components. That
led to an image of change that recognised, across all examples in living
systems, the existence, at some scale or scales, from cell to biome, of
four principal phases that elements of a system can cycle through- i.e.
entrepreneurial exploitation (r), organisational consolidation (K), creative
destruction (omega) and re- or de-structuring (alpha). A stylised example
is shown in Figure 1.
When the final, third axis of resilience is added, the diagram appears
as in Fig 2,
Fig. 2. Resilience is another dimension of the adaptive cycle, and, when
added, shows that the figure 8 of Fig. 1 is seen as the consequence of
a 2 dimensional projection of a 3
dimensional object. (from Gunderson and Holling, 2002)
For an ecosystem like a forest, think of the century or centuries long
cycle of succession and growth from pioneer species, r, to “climax”
species, K, followed by major disturbance like fire, storm or pest, omega.
Such disturbances occur as wealth accumulates and the system becomes gradually
less resilient, i.e. more vulnerable. As a consequence, a disturbance
is created to release accumulated nutrients and biomass that then allows
their reorganisation into the start of a new cycle, alpha. That reorganisation
can then exploit the novelty that accumulates but is resisted or lies
latent during the forward loop. Or for a wetland, like the Everglades,
think of a fifteen year succession from open pond to floating and suspended
vegetation, to accumulating peat to sawgrass, again followed by major
disturbance and a reorganisation of the cycle.
Each phase of those cycles creates the condition for the next phase.
A pattern of two phases of growth is generated, followed by two
phases of reorganization. These two form a familiar slow, fairly
predictable “forward loop” pattern of growth and a less familiar,
unpredictable and, or in ecosystems, a more rapid “back loop”
pattern of reorganisation.
It is the two together that make the cycle adaptive. Novel elements
can accumulate, largely unexpressed, during the forward loop. Then, in
the back loop, they can become the seeds for novel combinations that launch
the next cycle. But the ecosystem cycle is embedded among a set of those
cycles that cross scales in space and time from leaves, to trees, to patches,
to stands, to forests, to biomes.
Finally, an important aspect of the adaptive cycle concept lies in the
“pan” part of the panarchy – the cross-scale effects
(Holling et al., 2001). That is, adaptive cycles in ecosystems occur in
scales ranging from leaves to biomes in a panarchy of increasing scale
from centimetres and days to hundreds of kilometres and millennia. And
the structures along that hierarchy affect one another by opening up the
possibility for small scale novelty appearing during a back loop, to cascade
to larger scales. At the same time, persistence is encouraged by the memory
of large scale properties such as seed stores, biotic legacies, and institutional
structures that influence renewal of a smaller scale cycle as suggested
in Fig. 3.
Specifically, backloop reorganisation at one smaller scale can trigger
changes at larger, slower scales above. That is when novelty can be generated
and sustained. And organisational consolidation of higher level scales
can provide a ‘memory’ that influences the recovery of system
dynamics at finer scales below. That is what sustains repetition of adaptive
cycles.
Those adaptive cycles and their relationships not only represent the
dynamics of ecosystems. I even see them in my own life. I happen to have
had a pattern of 7-10 year cycles of unplanned intellectual growth, frustration
and renewal that has been both great fun and provided a great sense of
discovery and passing frustration. Frances Westley (2002) describes her
interview of an outstanding resource manager in Wisconsin, showing how
his successes and failures were very much part the phases of cycles of
change- his own personal one, that of interorganisational groups, formal
organisations and political. His plans and interventions both paced the
vulnerability in each cycle of that hierarchy of cycles and, in some instances,
created the vulnerability needed for change.
They also occur in societies where slow and fast, big and small structures
interact. For institutions, Ostrom (1990) calls them operational rules,
collective choice rules, and constitutional rules, each having different
speeds of function and scale and generality of relevance. For Whitaker
(1987) those three structures in economies are fast individual preferences,
slower and larger markets and still more conservative and extensive social
institutions. Frances Westley (1995) sees decision in human societies
working through processes of allocation, within social norms and cultural
myths. Again these three occur at distinct scales, and the interaction
among them involve the same processes of revolt and memory, that can,
paradoxically, both sustain and innovate. And old resilience colleagues
Berkes in northern Canada, Folke in Sweden and Gadgil in India (Berkes
et al, 1995), see knowledge systems persisting and adapting in endemic
societies within structures of local knowledge, potentially modified by
management practice, within a larger world view. Each of those sets of
triplets, together with ecosystems ones, could be represented as specific
system labels in Fig. 3.
Now all that is well structured, but it appears static. Where are the
dynamics? Where does the transformation and persistence arise? Those are
the elements that challenge every part of our lives from the individual
to the set of nations. That concerns questions of growth but, as well,
questions of collapse.
Growth is important, but even more so are the forces in a healthy system
that dominate during episodes when growth is halted or reversed, when
deep uncertainty explodes, when several alternative futures become suddenly
perceived. Suddenly, the resulting unpredictability stifles informed action
or triggers ignorant reaction. It is a time of back loop crisis, but also
of opportunity. During a back loop, unexpected interactions can occur
among previously separate properties that can then nucleate an inherently
novel and unexpected focus for future good or ill in the next cycle.
At such times, the future can also be suddenly shaped by external events
such as those we now anticipate globally from slowly changing climate,
from entrants of invasive species, from surprising diseases like AIDs
and SARS, from human immigrants driven by geopolitical changes or from
unexpected terrorist events. Such apparently external events can launch
a path of future development along an unpredictable course. During such
times, uncertainty is high, control is weakened and confused, and unpredictability
is great. But space is also created for reorganization and innovation.
It is therefore also a time when individual cells, individual organisms
or individual people have the greatest chance of influencing events. In
societies, there is opportunity for exploratory experiment if the experiments
are designed to have low costs of failure. The future can then be mapped
by experiments that fail and succeed, rather than by long term plans.
It is the time when a Gandhi or a Hitler can use events of the past to
transform the future for great good or great ill.
Fig. 3 Key connections between three levels of a Panarchy, showing when
small and fast cycles can affect larger and slower ones (revolt), or when
large and slow ones can control renewal of smaller and faster ones (memory)
(from Gunderson and Holling 2002).
In a biological evolutionary setting, it is a time where mammals can
replace dinosaurs as the dominant life form. The back loop is the time
of the “Long Now” (Brand 1999) where we each must become aware
that we are participants.
That is what the editors of another book of the Resilience Project present
(Berkes, Colding and Folke, 2002). In the specific social and ecological
systems they describe, the essence of sustainability is defined by processes
that evolved on the back loop, processes that respond to novelty, memory
and instability. They reverse existing traditions of exploration and analysis
by focusing on the back-loop of collapse and reorganization, rather than
on the front-loop of growth and predictability. They therefore focus on
foundations for change. They focus on forces of evolution from biology,
ecology, society and culture.
I came to these conclusions in a process that mixed alternate periods
of working on theory with more applied work. Each period persisted on
its own for a time, and generated ideas that were resolved by the other,
for a time. Carl Walters was my partner, friend and engaging provocateur
for the fundamental applied work. The work led to constructive ways to
engage colleagues and stakeholders in novel analysis and synthesis of
systems and issues (Holling and Chambers, 1973). That has led to deep
programs of specific discovery (e.g. Walker and Janssen, 2002) and has
launched a broad collaborative study and design of regional systems by
the Resilience Alliance www.resalliance.org
(Walker, et al 2002). Those dips into application, too, covered a fairly
long period of about 35 years, and were launched by the invention of Adaptive
Management that in a variety of forms has become important in regional
scale management internationally. That progress in application and its
connections with developments in theory and method has been summarized
in a sequence of books (Holling, 1978, Walters 1986, Lee 1993, Gunderson
et al 1979).
But all these studies were regional in character. That is, all emerged
from places where people, government and ecosystems related tightly together.
Forest management in New Brunswick, fisheries management and recreational
development in British Columbia, alpine village progression in Austria,
rangeland development in Zimbabwe, wetlands, city and agricultural development
for the Everglades of Florida. All these, plus others, were chosen with
colleagues simply because they were there. Not because they covered a
spectrum of politics, or of environment, or of economic developmental
stage. Though they did. But only because they were places made timely
because they all were places facing or imbedded in a back-loop of change,
opened to fresh exploration and imagination. They were, therefore, places
where individuals could discover deep insights collaboratively.
But is Panarchy a framework for first thought and then action in a potential
phase of geopolitical transformation post-September 11, 2001? Not just
regional, but global and international? Are we in another period of such
change as we experienced in the 1930’s and 40’s? Are we in
a “deep back loop” that opens the same opportunities and crises
as the regional back loop studies that we have described?
From the Science of Change to the Politics of Change in a Complex World
Some of the events we experience in society are small, and incremental
but are accumulative. They slowly accumulate experience and wealth. That
is when we are becoming progressively more economically efficient. But
if we look more widely at that economic, spinning process of incremental
change, we occasionally, like now, encounter the paradox that accumulated
increases in wealth and efficiency also combine with an increased narrowness
of view, and a rigidity, to make it difficult to achieve agreement on
how to respond differently to new challenges. . We become separate from
the poor, the distant and those different. But they can act and that can
generate instability and surprise. Witness now the turbulence released
by protest in the Middle East and the responses of the US and Europe that
interact with it and each other.
Can that instability be part of a process of creative destruction? Is
it part of the larger, more spasmodic cycle of transformation that can
lead to a new phase of opportunity? If so, how do we act to help or even
understand? How do we act to turn the destructive events into a process
of creative renewal? That process is a phase in a slower and larger part
of a cycle of change that includes incremental growth in efficiency and
wealth as only one, different, faster phase.
It creates an opportunity for fundamental transformation of rules guiding
the relations between nations and cultures, rather than simply change
of national structure or of events.
Since the Berlin Wall fell, the world has been on an internationally expanding
sequence of national and international exploration, some collapses and
some hesitant, partial recoveries. Think of the collapse of the USSR,
of the recovery efforts in Eastern and Central Europe, of collapse and
partial economic recovery in SE Asia, of economic instability in Latin
America, of economic, ecological and social disaster in Africa. Of September
11.
The world seems to be currently moving towards a major transformation.
Part, but not all of that transformation is the same as that seen in the
inherent rhythms of natural systems summarised earlier. Complex natural
systems work in rhythms - with a front-loop phase of slow, incremental
growth and accumulation, and a back-loop stage of rapid reorganisation
leading to renewal, or, rarely, to, collapse.
The front-loop phase is more predictable with higher degrees of certainty.
In both the natural and social worlds, it maximises production and accumulation.
We have been in that mode since World War II. The consequence of this
is an accumulation and concentration of wealth, but also emergence of
greater vulnerability, due to the increasing number of interconnections
that link that wealth, and those that bear it, in efforts to sustain it.
Little time and few resources are available for alternatives that explore
different visions or opportunities. Emergence and novelty is inhibited.
This growing connectedness leads to increasing rigidity in its goal to
retain control, and the system becomes ever more tightly bound together.
This reduces resilience and the capacity of the system to absorb change,
thus increasing the threat of abrupt change. We can recognise the needs
for change but become politically stifled in our capacity to act effectively.
Should abrupt change occur, there is a move to the back-loop stage. I
argue this started in our international world of nations with the fall
of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Communism following the earlier
defeat of Fascism. Both the communism and fascism of the last 70 years
fell to the slow evolution of modern democratic systems of governance.
Wealth and broadening wealth accumulated to lead to our present vulnerability
on a world stage. We are entering the back loop of re-organisation that
entails the collapse of accumulated connections, the release of bound
up knowledge and capital. But it also opens a creative potential and the
opportunity for ‘creative destruction’, as described by Schumpeter
(1942).
The creative aspect of this destruction is bound up with the release
of knowledge and the appearance of new or latent elements which can then
be re-associated in novel and unexpected ways to trigger re-growth or
reorganisation into fundamentally new front-end learning loops. That has
already been occurring through the major opportunities opened by easy
universal use of computers and telecommunication. Terrorists can use the
internet as well as “dot-coms”, and scientists and citizens.
This back loop phase is inventive, inherently unpredictable and uncertain.
One can observe this process of birth, growth and change in front-loop/back-loop
cycles in all systems - from a cell in the body, to an individual in his
or her phases of life, to the operations of management agencies, or to
society itself.
Natural ecological and individual cycles inevitably open brief opportunities
to flip to new organisations between slow periods of growth. But social
systems incorporate an additional factor. Clever human beings have learned
to look forward and create the future before it happens. But these innovations
are often local. Others have identified ways to persist within existing
structures, avoiding the need for change – witness the brilliance
of some leaders in preserving existing institutions when change and transformation
is needed. However, the longer the system is “locked in”,
the greater the vulnerability and the bigger and more dramatic its collapse
will be.
That has been the pattern we saw earlier in examining resource agencies,
ecosystems and society and the way they interrelate. For resource management
agencies that operate outside the discipline of a market, this results
in a pathology- industries that become dependent, ecosystems that lose
their resilience and management that becomes myopic and defensive. That
encourages a loss of trust in governance that can provide the crisis needed
for organisational change as part of a democratic process. There are good
examples of that triggering new approaches to forest fire management,
flood management, control of lake eutrophication and pests. Typically,
management becomes somewhat more complex, more open and more integrative
across scales of variables (Gunderson, et al 1995).
For whole societies that lack a democratic process of periodic evaluation
and revision, we have seen, historically, examples of the full extreme
- periods of social/economic collapse so profound that only the family
remains as social support to the individual. It can result in a poverty
trap, where in the generation of deep collapses and cycles, the emergence
and renewal that will take place usually shifts elsewhere. The novelty
develops in one place and then typically shifts elsewhere, expanding,
extending, testing and deepening the work as it moves. The intellectual
area or topic becomes the evolving entity, not the organisation or society
that nurtured its early phases.
The developed world has been in a phase of extraordinary wealth accumulation.
The proportion of people in the world labelled as poor has dramatically
declined in half between 1980 and 2000. But pockets of poverty deepen
and extend in Africa. Parts of South America balance on economic collapse.
And in all situations, good and bad, there are implicit assumptions that
the critical, hidden ecological processes that sustain economic development
persist. Inevitably, it has made society blind to the many signals of
vulnerability and resistant to possible solutions. There is growing instability:
Inequity between rich and poor and new physical and global impacts stemming
from its actions, lead to global vulnerabilities such as global economic
instabilities, climate change, biodiversity loss, unexpected diseases
and geopolitical instability. These are large in scale and consequence.
They are new enough in extent that we lack the institutions to manage
the transitions. They suggest a stage of vulnerability that could trigger
a rare and major pulse of social transformation.
The world of man has witnessed only three or four such major 'pulses',
or periods of transformation, in its evolution – agricultural settlement
by the first hunter-gatherers, the industrial revolution and, now, the
global interconnected communications-driven revolution. Society is now
at a stage in history of this major pulse – the end of one pulse
and the beginning of another. The immense destruction that a pulse signals
is both frightening, and creative. It raises fundamental questions about
transformation. The only way to approach such a period - where uncertainty
is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds - is not to
predict, but to act inventively and exuberantly in diverse, adventures
in living and experiment.
That leads, then, to a strategic sense of how to proceed. Not plan the
details, but invent, experiment and build. Sounds easy, but at such times
existing centers of local power resist larger opportunity because the
threats that the unknown suggests. So a sequence of goals needs to be
seen and encouraged:
- Encourage innovation: a rich variety of experiments and transformative
approaches that probe possible directions. It is important to encourage
experiments with a low cost of failure to individuals, to the environment
and to careers, as many of these experiments will fail.
- Reduce inhibitions to change, common when systems get so locked up.
- Protect and communicate the accumulated knowledge needed for change.
- Encourage discourse amongst the full range of parties to try to understand
where we are going and how to achieve it.
- Encourage new foundations for renewal that build and sustain the
capacity of people, economies and nature for dealing with change, and
ensure that these new foundations consolidate and expand understanding
of change.
- Allow sufficient time. This pulse is a global phenomenon –
the United Nations, war in Iraq, global economic vulnerabilities, etc.
– and it could potentially affect all levels of hierarchy, all
the way up the chain, from the individual/family, to national and global
systems.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a catalyst for emerging, spreading deep
transformative change which has been continued with the events of 9/11.
How to respond in a “Big Back Loop”
The present responses of the world community at large have been at best
adequate or bad. The question is how to tip more towards adequately good
and achieve a better balance in the world - improving the lot of poverty-stricken
populations, achieving a reduction in extremes of population growth and
collapse, or nurturing inventive solutions. What I observe is that the
good approaches are less in ascendance at the present, while narrow, powerful
military and protectionist economic approaches take precedence. In the
late economic bubble of the 90’s, business and government has linked
to dangerously usurp the balance provided by government. That does threaten
the breadth of influence needed in democracy. There is a tendency to greater
extremism, ignoring the broad inequities within society, or to narrow
approaches that preclude any concerns for addressing diversity. The scale
of the issues is such that they are beyond the reach of any one company,
sector of the economy, or government. There is a need for co-operative
international effort - a major contribution to transformation by people
of vision or groups of people thinking deeply about the nature of risk,
and finding novel ways to approach it.
That is why the internet is such a positive force at this time. It is
a place for inventing the creative experiments that cover scales and that
can fail safely as new possibilities are created and tested. It can be
inherently international.
We can act as nested sets of communities and then scale upward, trying
to engage people functioning at all levels. Those are communities of citizens,
really- but ones with different roots in scholarship, business, government
and non-governmental enterprise. If Shell Oil can invent ways to open
their visions of the future, and British Petroleum can begin strategic
subsidy of untraditional energy supplies, surely small groups of scholars
and government and citizen groups can invent experiments with them outside
each of their own organisational constraints. We only need a mechanism
that can encourage, evaluate and communicate that. Our Resilience Alliance
<www.resalliance.org>provides
just one specific example. Not just local, but global as well.
People need to pay greater attention to the sustainability of the organisation
in which they operate: many organisations are driven by short timeframes,
by the fast variables. . Probably the greatest difficulty is to communicate
the issue of time - the key feature of a sustainable, adaptive system
is the need to recognise the sustaining properties of slow variables.
As a system changes, it will trigger observable changes in the fast dynamic,
but the slower ones often will not give any indication of observable change.
People who are most effective and active often have great skills in dealing
with faster variables, but not the slower ones. They tend to focus on
short-term issues such as return on investment. It is the rare person
who for a time defends and transcends that and organises the turbulence
for a new transformation. For me, in the past, that has been a Churchill
or a Roosevelt.
But both cultural attitudes and ecosystems change slowly. For example,
the basic vegetation cycle in wetlands from ponds to sawgrass to fire
takes a few decades to develop – while its sustainability depends
on the accretion of the peat that occurs over hundreds of years –
a long-term, slow variable that is not as easily recognised. In societies,
the fast variables are economic ones and the slow variables are educational
and cultural. The questions are how to recognise and communicate the importance
of investment in the slower variables, and how to combine the advantages
of encouraging fast variables without threatening the slow variables (Carpenter
2003).
There are now some business leaders already thinking about longer-term
issues and co-operation, thinking outside the business envelope. There
are always some companies and industries that understand that long-term
change can lead to short-term scarcities, which would create new profitable
markets. There is tremendous power in facilitating the growth of this
understanding.
But cells and societies also reproduce and reinvent in the process of
cyclic transformations. That is when evolution and deep changes are created.
The bewildering, entrancing, unpredictable nature of nature and people,
the richness, diversity and changeability of life comes from that evolutionary
dance generated by cycles of growth, collapse, reorganization, renewal
and reestablishment.
And what is the role for science in the midst of this back loop of change?
On substance I’d argue for novel integrative work, on ecosystem
scales but very much integrating economic and social with the ecological;
multi-scale, searching for the simple features of complex systems that
occur in the interaction between fast and slow processes, small and big
ones. These are fundamentally non-linear in their dynamics and therefore
generate occasional surprise that is the challenge for policy and for
politics. We need an emphasis on a search for generality, which needs
cooperative works with others expert in other fields but ones who share
the curiosity and fun of mutual discovery. We need development and testing
of a range of methods and a disbelief in any of them. And we need a wedding
of theory, empirical examples and application. That is the emphasis and
the process that led to the book Panarchy (Gunderson and Holling 2001).
A recent paper by Walker and Holling (2003) uses the panarchy to suggest
the significance of the three modes of learning and of discovery. The
first mode is the gradual accumulation of skills and techniques in the
r to K phase (see Fig 1). That is incremental, front loop learning. The
second mode is the mode of learning on the back loop from omega to alpha.
This is more profound, but still only tests the existing system, opening
it to novel combinations that have accumulated from r to K. Some of those
can nucleate a new cycle that is a variant, perhaps an appropriate variant,
for the next cycle of change. It is very much natural selection in the
Darwinian sense, but it does not transform the system. Pursuing the Darwinian
metaphor, it involves some novelty in the form of cross-overs and recombinations
of existing options/ideas but it does not involve real mutations –
that belongs to the third mode.
The third mode of learning is transformational and does concern self-organization
that can transform the system into truly novel strategies and processes.
This is where transformative capacity lies. It represents true invention,
that can become reality in the kind of situation where the system is deeply
responsive (vulnerable) to change or where change is desperately needed.
The consequences are inherently uncertain and unpredictable. We see those
new beginnings now in the possible transformations created by the opportunities
and fears opened by the internet, by genetic engineering of crops, by
novel computer and communications technology. It is the transformative
capacity of the world and how to nurture it, that now comes most vividly
to mind. It creates new panarchies.
I show my biases for our science and scholarship, by arguing for a combination
of the best of multi scale synthesis, complexity theory, evolutionary
biology and human history as the foundation to understand and manage our
complex transforming world. And I argue for a host of safe-fail experiments
to test new ways of communicating, living and sustaining our foundations.
References
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