The old post Habitat Management collected pointers to a number of crumbs that marked a thought trail about the seemingly disparate elements of functioning ecologies, and how experts with highly specialized knowledge in one or another domain tragically failed to grasp the relevant attributes of the whole system, and so supported destructive policies. See the post and its references for detail but this graf is a fair summary:

The large ruminants make habitat for rabbits. The rabbits make habitat for herbs. The nutrient poor subsoil that they pile on the surface when digging their borrows is perfect habitat for "poverty plants". That's their ecosystem role, the niche they exploit, pioneering bare soil resulting from soil disturbance. In time, as they die and decompose, they enrich that soil making it once again suitable for grasses. And so the cycle proceeds. Not stated is that the herbs make habitat for butterflies etc. In a circuitous way cows make rabbits (and gophers and voles etc.), and rabbits make butterflies.

One of the references that prompted this post was Butterfly Effect, which referenced a post at The Uneasy Chair telling of the destruction of a bay checkerspot butterfly population, by Paul Ehrlich, on a preserve he managed for decades specifically for checkerspots.

In 1960, a decade before the first Earth Day, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich began tagging and counting bay checkerspots at the university's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

The butterfly became one of the most studied wild animals in the world -- a sort of lab rat for understanding how populations of animals function, flourish and decline.

Over the years, the scientists closed Jasper Ridge to the public and removed grazing cattle. Yet in spite of all their efforts, by 1997 the preserve's butterflies were gone.

It turns out that removing the cattle may have been a mistake. Cows like to eat European grasses, but leave native plants alone, so their grazing actually helped keep the habitat healthy. . .

One of my speculations based on experience and tacit knowledge was that fire suppression was a factor as well. We now have some evidence beyond the anecdotes of practitioners.

In September and October, large numbers of monarchs pass through the Ouachita Mountains, a largely forested area in Arkansas and Oklahoma where fire suppression, logging, and pine production practices have altered forest structure, leading to a drastic reduction in the quality and abundance of the flowering plants the butterflies rely on for nectar.

"The area was dominated by fire-maintained shortleaf pine forests until the early 20th century," says Rudolph. "The forest was open, with a high mostly pine canopy, sparse midstory, and a diversity of herbaceous plants in an understory dominated by bluestem grass?the kind of habitat enjoyed by the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker."

Typical forests in the area now have a younger and thicker canopy, a dense woody midstory, and a very sparse herbaceous understory. In 1979, to provided habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, the Forest Service began restoring parts of the Ouachita National Forest to the shortleaf pine-bluestem grass ecosystems that existed before European settlement.

SRS ecologists have been involved in a range of studies on the effects of restoration, including ongoing research on butterflies and their nectar resources. For the published study, researchers observed butterflies feeding on flowers during the migration period over four years, finding that they fed most frequently on tickseed sunflower (70 percent), with goldenrod, late boneset, and other asters also used as nectar resources.

Data from monarch counts and plant inventories on both restored and control sites showed that the restored sites supported a higher abundance of monarch butterflies during migration than unrestored, fire-suppressed controls. . . In unrestored areas, nectar resources were found in abundance only in disturbed sites such as fence rows, utility rights-of-way, and road verges.

It seems hard for those far removed from natural settings to grasp the necessary role of destruction. The digging of ground dwelling animals, fire, the herd effect of hooved ruminants which tear up the ground, and even erosion from periodic flood waters are necessary parts of healthy ecosystems. It may look bad to the naive eye, but it looks like continuity to the experienced observer.

In my area there's an endangered wild flower, the Springville Clarkia. Naive regulators cause no end of grief for residents in mistaken efforts to protect them. Clarkias are poverty plants, pioneers that only grow on disturbed sites. The last thing you want to do is protect them. A stand left alone will wither away and disappear in a couple of years. . . unless the site is further disturbed. You find it along recently graded roadsides where heavy equipment has recently been, or where natural erosion or land falls have exposed the subsoil. Locals who want some Clarkias will cut a trail in a hillside with a tractor and a blade. The stand will only last two or three years, but can be renewed by tearing up the soil again. Are they actually endangered? Yes, regulators are trying to destroy them . . . for their own good.

The problem isn't, as evidence suggests, that these people are stupid. The problem is that they are experts, and so immune to knowledge. They already know everything from books and papers, and see reality filtered through that impoverished lens. Paul Ehrlich's doltish management that destroyed the checkerspot butterfly population isn't just another stupid Paul Ehrlich story, he's representative of the state of practice among biologists and ecologists, and so a poster child for the blundering prescriptions of environmental activists.

Though this is current practice, that is slowly changing. It's not quite a funeral-by-funeral transition but there's a great deal of unlearning to do since it is not only that there are unknowns, it is also that which is known that ain't so. Part of the problem is that ignorance defends itself. By that I mean that a given insight can be used by those with divergent points of view to confirm their existing biases rather than expand understanding. Consider this interview of Thomas Homer-Dixon in which he speaks of catagenesis, in a metaphorical sense, drawing on an archaic term from evolutionary biology to mean a change that can be seen as a regression though it is a functional response to changed conditions, and thus provides continuity and resilience.

In the first part of the book, I talk about people's desire to hold on, to keep things the same. But we can't always keep things the same, since we don't have as much control over reality as we think we do. This is very different from being fatalistic. The whole idea of the prospective mind is to develop a new set of customs - proactive, anticipatory, comfortable with change, and not surprised by surprise.

Institutionally, we could build in tax incentives and subsidies for people to make households more resilient. For example, if we have an energy grid that's unreliable, maybe we shouldn't build condo apartments that are totally dependent on electricity for elevators, water, and air conditioning. In some business towers, the windows don't even open without power. This kind of housing is fundamentally reliant on large-scale centralized power production.

But what if our economy provided tax incentives for residents and commercial centers to have autonomous power production? If these kinds of incentives were incorporated into everyday policy - whether transportation, electricity, food or water - our systems would evolve to be more capable of withstanding shocks.

While it is desirable for societies to be resilient that can't be achieved by fiat. Fiddling with government policy couldn't help to achieve it, and if it had any effect at all would make societies less resilient, the exact opposite of the stated intention. Resilience comes from the behavior of members of society unconstrained by, and independent of, governments. Dixon doesn't understand resilience though he has some suspicion that it is a good thing, and so he tries to force it into existence using the same tired methods that made society brittle in the first place.

If autonomous power production is possible then it doesn't need subsidies or incentives. It is its own incentive. Subsidies can produce Potemkin villages but not actually improve society for all. That is disheartening, and destructive for the objective of resilience. A better approach would be to assure that the system isn't distorted by subsidies for any power system, so that the best methods aren't masked.

Perhaps more importantly, a mature understanding of the power grid is necessary. Society is necessarily networked and power is one part of that. The completion of the system is analogous to internetworking in that the old broadcast model is inferior to a distributed production/consumption model, where each node can be both a producer and consumer. As the late Marty Bender notes, paraphrasing, the purpose of the renewable energy technologies is to reduce dependence on fossil fuels but not dependence on local energy systems. The very idea of energy autarchy is not only uncivic, it is a fantasy that this could be done except by a small number of free-riders that take advantage of the world's systems without contributing their proper share. Those who argue for becoming energy hermits in effect argue for harming the world to achieve what in the last analysis is a spurious objective. It isn't regression to a pre-grid reality, metaphorical catagenesis, that provides resilience, it is distributed production as well as consumption. This doesn't eliminate failure, it isn't fail safe, but it is what some call fail-soft: the scope and scale of failure is distributed too, a checkerboard effect rather than the blue screen of death.

Things are changing fast by historical standards. Resilience under these conditions requires loose coupling and flexibility. Systems are necessarily heterogeneous during times of change since the changes can't be made in one swell foop. Nor can the future be predicted: winners can't be chosen. The proper policy for these conditions is a withdrawal from tinkering, not redoubled tinkering. It may be galling for priggish meddlers but they have no useful role at this time. All they can do is play the spoiler, though it would be far better if they withdrew gracefully to wait for more settled times when gains can be consolidated.

Not surpisingly the most resilient approach to social systems is much the same as for any natural system such as a grassland or a forest. To be resilient disturbance is required. Fires must burn, rodents must dig, predators must take their prey. Death and destruction are not optional and the attempt to eliminate them destroys the whole system. To be useful system interventions must observe the logic of the system rather than attempt to alter that logic. If you want more clarkias then send the cowboys out to cut roads to their remote ranges. If you want more butterflies them let the forests burn now and then. And if you want more resilient power systems then stop subsidizing champions and let real winners have an even chance, even if the winner isn't your darling.

I know that none of this will happen - not soon at any rate. We still have a lot of momentum from the 20th century which went in the exact opposite direction, and many still cling to obsolete ideologies of control. New insights are twisted to old purposes by those who are untouched by wisdom, who didn't learn from those mistakes. It's still early days. It seems possible that ICT can help, that distributed production of ideas can accelerate dissemination of useful information even when the moribund broadcast systems of existing institutions still trumpet obsolete views. It won't be easy since those old institutions have a greatly dimished role and they resist that change, even though it harms society. Perhaps another post would be useful, one that dredges up old ideas about sunk-costs and intentional down-sizing to avoid collapse. To be continued . . . perhaps. Winter is coming.