From the ‘nothing new under the sun’ department:
Once again, our friends at WorldChanging.com got there first (to the Resilience Alliance, that is), in this case with Nicole-Anne Boyer’s piece on The Panarchy Cycle.
In a long and thoughtful and illustrated poster, she quotes ‘path-breaking’ ecologist C.S. Buzz’ Hollings’ From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds:
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.
(Emphasis added)
Truth.