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“Nature is always innovating, creating new mutations as new opportunities arise.”
“Nature is restless, always exploring, inventing, trying, and failing,” adds Tom Lovejoy, university professor in environmental science at George Mason University. “Each ecosystem, and each organism, is an answer to a set of problems.”
Lower plant diversity also leads to greater rates of loss of limiting soil nutrients through leaching, which ultimately should decrease soil fertility, further lowering plant productivity.
“All living things in an ecosystem are interconnected through networks of relationships. They depend on this web of life to survive.
Life, he added, “did not take over the planet by combat but by networking”—one ecosystem to the next.
To be sure, natural systems have no owners, no self-interested managers per se, the way many human systems do.
And the unique set of species of plants and animals that evolve there is said to be of the place, not just in it.
When every niche is being filled by a plant or animal adapted to that niche, it’s harder for any single invasive species to break in and disrupt the whole system—one alien or destructive element can’t pull the whole thing down.
Which is another of Mother Nature’s killer apps—she never confuses stability with stasis.
She understands that stability is produced by endless acts of dynamism.
She would tell us that there is nothing static about stability. In nature a system that looks stable and seems to be in equilibrium is not static. A system that looks static and is static is a system that’s about to die. Mother Nature knows that to remain stable you have to be open to constant change, and no plant or animal can take its position in the system for granted—just as a...
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Still another of Mother Nature’s killer apps in producing resilient ecosystems is that she is very sustainable—through a highly complex circular system of food, eat, poop, seed, plant, grow, eat, food, poop, seed, plant, grow … Nothing is wasted. Everything cycles, a world without end.
Allowing the weak to die off unlocks more resources and energy for the strong. What markets do with bankruptcy laws, Mother Nature does with forest fires.
“Nature kills off her failures to make room for her successes,”
“The unadapted become extinct” and “only the adapted survive.” From the ashes rises new life.
Topsoil on average is usually no more than six to ten inches deep. “And yet the ecosystem that emerges from topsoil is so rich, so plentiful, it’s able to sustain this huge diversity of plant and animal life,” observes Harvey.
Conversely, as Jared Diamond and earlier historians chronicled, almost all failed civilizations collapsed because they didn’t steward their topsoil.
In systems with healthy interdependencies, explains Seidman, “all the component parts rise together. In an interdependent system that is unhealthy, they all fall together.”
What does healthy interdependence look like? It looks like all of Mother Nature’s killer apps working together at once—adaptability, diversity, entrepreneurship, ownership, sustainability, bankruptcy, federalism, patience, and topsoil. In political terms, the United States and Canada have a healthy interdependency—they have risen together; Russia and Ukraine today have an unhealthy interdependency—they have fallen together.
In nature, everything is connected to everything else—in either a healthy interdependence or an unhealthy one.
collaboration—different organisms don’t just feed one another; they also cocreate conditions in which all can thrive together.
“consciously choose.”
We have to translate Mother Nature’s killer apps into human politics deliberately, consciously, wherever possible consensually—and as quickly as possible.
Culture shapes a society’s political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture.
Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable.”
Cultures can change, and they often do—sometimes under the raw pressure of events and the need to survive, and sometimes thanks to political choices engineered by leaders.
the role of a leader is “to help people face reality and to mobilize them to make change” as their environment changes to ensure the security and prosperity of their community.
“We have to surprise them with compassion, with restraint and generosity.”
He created a little more trust and healthier interdependencies between blacks and whites and, in doing so, made that country more resilient. With Mandela’s example in mind, let’s revisit Mother Nature’s five most important killer apps and consider why they are so relevant today.
One of the key differentiators when it comes to the openness of a culture or political system to adaptation is how it responds to contact with strangers. Is your culture easily humiliated by how much it’s been left behind and therefore likely to dig in its heels, or is it more inclined to swallow some pride and try to learn from the stranger?
They know that the one thing they can control is not the bounce of the ball but their own attitude toward hitting it. In that context self-confidence and optimism are powers unto themselves. There are cultures that, when faced with adversity or a major external challenge, tend to collectively say, “I am behind, what is wrong with me? Let me learn from the best to fix it.” And they learn to adapt to change. And there are those that say, “I am behind, what did you do to me? It is your fault.”
Alas, not every culture is able to deal with contact with strangers by swallowing its pride the way the Japanese did and vacuuming up everything they can learn from the stranger as fast as they can.
During this period of national humiliation, one can well understand why the Russian leadership expressed intense concern over the relatively poor performance of Russian athletes in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Some Arab and Muslim nations and terrorist groups have clearly fallen into a “Who did this to us?” mind-set.
Wound collecting serves a purpose, to support and vindicate, keeping all past events fresh, thus magnifying their significance into the present, a rabid rationalization for fears and anxieties within.”
The very same Latin America that produced the dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela produced the dynamic democratic president Ernesto Zedillo in Mexico.
As for embracing diversity, it is more vital than ever today for creating resilience in a changing environment.
“A failure is a circumstance not yet fully turned to your advantage.”)
“mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.”
A society being “pluralistic” is a reality (see Syria and Iraq). A society with pluralism “is an achievement” (see America).
Politically, pluralistic societies that also have pluralism enjoy much greater political stability. They have a much greater ability to forge social contracts between equal citizens to live together equally, rather than have to rely on an iron-fisted autocrat keeping everyone in line from the top down.
At the same time, in the age of accelerations, societies that nurture pluralism—gender pluralism, pluralism of ideas, racial and ethnic pluralism—tend to be more innovative, everything else being equal.
Even countries that are not ethnically or religiously diverse—think Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China—can enjoy the fruits of pluralism if they have a pluralistic outlook; that is, if they develop the habits of reaching out to the best ideas anywhere in the world to adapt and adopt them.
diversity spurs economic development and homogeneity slows it down … The evidence is mounting that geographical openness and cultural diversity and tolerance are not by-products but key drivers of economic progress.
Our film crew came out to America’s wheat-growing farmland to illustrate how the drought that hit wheat farms in central Kansas in 2010 ended up raising bread prices in Egypt and, as we’ve seen, helping to fuel its revolution in early 2011.
Polycultures, by contrast, noted Jackson, provide species diversity, which provides chemical diversity, which
provides much more natural resistance to disease and pests and “can substitute for the fossil fuels and chemicals that we’ve not evolved with.”
It defined polyculture and made the Arab world incredibly wealthy, healthy, and resilient.
They are trying to plow up all the polycultures of the region—think of Baghdad, Aleppo, Palmyra, Tripoli, and Alexandria, once great melting pots of Jews, Christians, and Muslims; Greeks, Italians, Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs—and turn them into monocultures, making these societies much less able to spark new ideas.
I would argue the same thing happened to the Republican Party in America. The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (under Theodore Roosevelt), the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (under Richard Nixon), radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (under Ronald Reagan), cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (under George H. W. Bush), and market-based health care reform (under Mitt Romney when he was governor of
