This past summer, there did not seem to be a week without news about another natural disasters or extreme weather event somewhere on the globe. Hurricane Irma (www.cbc.ca/news/world/irma-hurricane-tropical-depression-florida-georgia-1.4285148) and the wildfire that was engulfing Waterton Lakes National Park and surrounding communities (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/waterton-kenow-fire-pincher-creek-evacuations-1.4285153) are just two examples. Disturbances such as hurricanes and wildfires are a normal and essential part of natural systems. Without these disturbances ecosystems do not follow their natural dynamics, they lose diversity and become prone to even larger disturbances at some later time. But problems come in with scale mismatches and when we throw peoples' values into the mix. We have built our world to be static; we do not want things to move around or to change. We want our world to be predictable and it is best when everything stays the same, always. But this is not how nature works. Nature is fairly predictable at larger scales, but pretty messy at smaller scales. Unfortunately, this messiness is increasing with climate change, as is the lack of fit between human ways to organize our affairs and natural dynamics. It has long been claimed that individual events cannot be attributed to climate change. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that climate change is already driving more extreme weather events and the frequency and intensity of some events can be attributed to climate change (science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6293/1517). The world is unlikely to end tomorrow; not even with climate change. But the social and economic systems that we have created are not resilient; they are vulnerable and brittle. We would do well to learn from nature and modify our human systems to flexibly respond to change. Some useful concepts to think about include redundancy, diversity, and resistance. Systems that have no backups, that are too homogeneous, and that are too connected, set us up for widespread failure.
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