1
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
2
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.
3
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
4
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)
5
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,
6
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
7
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
8
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.
9
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).
10
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
11
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:
i. 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.
ii. Reduce inhibitions to change, common when systems get so locked up.
iii. Protect and communicate the accumulated knowledge needed for change.
iv. Encourage discourse amongst the full range of parties to try to understand where
we are going and how to achieve it.
v. 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.
vi. 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"
12
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
13
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
14
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
Berkes Fikret, Johan Colding and Carl Folke , 2003. Navigating Social-Ecological
Systems. Cambridge University Press.
Berkes, F., C. Folke and M. Gadgil. 1995, Traditional ecological knowledge,
biodiversity, resilience and sustanability. In C, Perrings, K.-G. Maler, C. Folke
C.S.Holing and B.-O Janssen (eds) Biodiversity Conservation. Kluwer Academic
Publishers , Dordrecht.
Brand, Stuart, 1999, The Clock of the Long Now. Basic Books, New York.
Carpenter, S.R. 2000. Alternate states of ecosystems. Evidence and its implications for
environmental decisions. In, M.C.Press, N.Huntley and S. Levin. (eds).
Ecology: Achievement and Challenge, Blackwell, London.
Carpenter, S.R. 2003. Regime Shifts in Lake Ecosystems: Pattern and Variation. Volume
15, Excellence in Ecology Series, Ecology Institute, Oldendorf/Luhe. Germany.
Available on the Internet. URL: http://limnologu.wisc,edu/regime
Gunderson, L.H, Holling, C.S and Light, S.S (eds) (1995) Barriers and Bridges to the
Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. Colombia University Press, New York.
Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds) (2002) Panarchy: Understanding Transformations
in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, Washington and London.
Holling, C.S. and A.D. Chambers. 1973. Resource science: the nurture of an infant.
Bioscience 23(1): 13-20.
Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Ann. Rev. of Ecol. And
Syst.4: 1-23.
Holling, C.S. (ed.). 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. John Wiley
and Sons, London. 377 pp.
15
Gunderson, L.H., C. S. Holling and S. S. Light. 1995. Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of
Ecosystems and Institutions. Columbia University Press, New York.
Holling, C.S. 1986. The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change.
In: W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn (eds.). Sustainable Development of the Biosphere.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. Chap. 10: 292-317.
Holling, C.S. 1992. Cross-scale morphology, geometry and dynamics of ecosystems.
Ecological Monographs. 62(4):447-502.
Holling, C. S., Lance G. Gunderson and Garry D. Peterson. 2002. Sustainability and
Panarchies. In. Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds) (2002) Panarchy:
Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press,
Washington and London, Chapter 3,, 63-102.
Lee, K. 1993. Compass and the Gyroscope. Islnd Press, Washington, D.C.
Levin, S.A 199. Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons. Perseus Books,
Reading MA.
Ostrom. E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective
Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , UK.
Peterson, G., C. R. Allen,C. S. Holling. (1998). Ecosystem Resilience, Biodiversity, and
Scale. Ecosystems 1: 6-18.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Harper Books, New
York
Walker, B.H., Kinzig, A., and Langridge, J. 1999. Plant attribute diversity, resilience,
and ecosystem function: The nature and significance of dominant and minor
species. Ecosystems. 2: 1-20.
Walker B, Carpenter S, Anderies A, Abel N, Cumming C, Janssen M, Lebel L, Norberg
J, Peterson G D, and Pritchard R. 2002. Resilience management in social-
ecological systems: A working hypothesis for a participatory approach.
Conservation Ecology 6(1): 14. [online] URL:
http://www.consecol.org/vol6/iss1/art14
Walker BH and Janssen MA. 2002. Rangelands, pastoralists and governments:
interlinked systems of people and nature. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London. B (2002)
357, 719-725.
Walker and Holling 2003. Resilience, adaptive capacity and transformative capacity. In
prep.
16
Walters, C.J. 1986. Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources. MacMillan, New
York.
Walters, C.J. 1997. Challenges in adaptive management of riparian and costal systems.
Conservation Ecology 1 (2): online at http://www.consecol.org/vol1/iss2/art1.
Westley, F. 2002. The devil in the dynamics. Adaptive management on the front lines. In,
Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds) (2002) Panarchy: Understanding
Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press, Washington and
London, Chapter 13: 333-360.
Westley, F., Steven R, carpenter, William A. Brock, C.S.Holling and Lance H.
Gunderson. 2002.. In, Gunderson, L.H and Holling, C.S (eds) (2002) Panarchy:
Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press,
Washington and London, Chapter 4: 103-120.
Whitaker, J.K. 1987. Alfred Marshall. In. J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds).
The New Palgrave: a Dictionary of Economics. Macmillan Press, London.
Volume 3.
For more information on the Resilience Alliance refer to http://www.resalliance.org