Another way Mother Nature builds resilience is by being very federal in how she self-organizes. She nests her communities—which are analogous to states, counties, and towns—within a flexible framework that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. That is, she’s built on trillions and trillions of small-scale networks, starting with microorganisms and building into bigger and bigger ecosystems. But each one is a little community, naturally adapting and evolving in order to survive and thrive.
“From microbe to top predator, ecosystems are a community, and they operate like one,” added Lovejoy. And when you have trillions of small-scale networks woven together into ecosystems, the overall system is very hard to break. It’s resilient. As Michael Stone puts it in the Center for Ecoliteracy’s ecological principles handbook: “All living things in an ecosystem are interconnected through networks of relationships. They depend on this web of life to survive. For example: In a garden, a network of pollinators promotes genetic diversity; plants, in turn, provide nectar and pollen to the pollinators. Nature is made up of systems that are nested within systems. Each individual system is an integrated whole and—at the same time—part of larger systems.” Life, he added, “did not take over the planet by combat but by networking”—one ecosystem to the next.
Mother Nature, in her own way, appreciates the power of ownership—and the virtues of belonging to a place. To be sure, natural systems have no owners, no self-interested managers per se, the way many human systems do. There is no Lion King in nature. Humans created the concept of one species managing the entire system for the collective interest—the idea of “dominion.” That said, though, species coevolve with the places and niches best suited for them; each healthy ecosystem has a unique ecological balance of plants, animals, microorganisms, and the underlying processes and “plumbing” that connect them. That ever-evolving combination is what makes each ecosystem unique. And the unique set of species of plants and animals that evolve there is said to be of the place, not just in it. They are at home there, they are rooted, they fit, they belong, because they are in balance—and that balance produces enormous resilience. In that sense they “own” that place. 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.
Still, that ecosystem and its balance have to be reproduced and defended every day; species rise and fall, and compete with one another, every second. 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 durable economy, says the University of Maryland’s Herman Daly, is macro-stable but micro-variable.
“The most resilient ecosystems and countries,” noted Glenn Prickett, chief external affairs officer for the Nature Conservancy, “are those that are able to absorb many alien influences and incorporate them into their system, while maintaining its overall stability.” Think of the United States or India or Singapore.
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.
Mother Nature also believes in bankruptcy. She believes individual plants and animals must be allowed to fail for the whole ecosystem to succeed. She has no mercy for her mistakes, for the weak, or for those who can’t adapt to get their seeds, their DNA, into the next generation. 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,” wrote Edward Clodd, the English banker and anthropologist, in his 1897 book Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley. “The unadapted become extinct” and “only the adapted survive.” From the ashes rises new life.
Mother Nature believes in the vital importance of topsoil—the top layer of soil in which all plants and trees sink their roots and derive their primary nutrients to grow into the world. Think about our planet. It is really just one big rock covered by an incredibly thin layer composed of the subsoil and topsoil. “The most basic thing that sustains any ecosystem is topsoil,” notes the energy engineer Hal Harvey, founder of Energy Innovation. “And the first thing you learn about topsoil is that in most places it is really thin and can easily get washed away. It is just this sliver-like black layer coating the earth,” covering a thousand miles below of lifeless, inhospitable rock. 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.
Mother Nature believes in the virtue of patience. She knows that nothing strong comes from rushing. She’s fine with being late. She is resilient precisely because she builds her ecosystems slowly, patiently. She knows that you can’t rush the four seasons and condense them into two. Just as you can’t speed up the gestation period for a baby elephant or a baby ant, you cannot force the resilient baobab tree to live for three thousand years by rushing its growth.
Finally, Mother Nature, because she practices all of the above strategies for building resilience, understands the virtues of what Dov Seidman calls “healthy interdependencies” versus “unhealthy interdependencies.” 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.
I asked Russ Mittermeier of Conservation International to give me his most vivid example of healthy interdependencies in nature enabling an entire ecosystem to rise together. He offered up the ecosystem around spider monkeys and woolly monkeys in the tropical rain forests of Central and South America.
These primates survive, he explained, largely by eating fruits that grow on hardwood trees. Mother Nature, through evolution, learned to brightly color the shells to make them easy to find and attractive to frugivores. The monkeys crack them open and inside they find the seed, which is covered in aril, a sweet, sugar-rich layer that nature generated as monkey bait and bird bait. The monkeys don’t have the time or dexterity to just suck off the aril, so they pop the whole seed in their mouth, enjoy it, and digest the sweet part and then pass the rest through their guts. (Some seeds actually won’t germinate unless they have passed through the gut of such animals, whose bacteria secrete enzymes that crack the seed coat.) A few hours later they excrete out the seeds, nicely covered with their feces, which serves as fertilizer when the seed hits the rain forest floor. Those seeds eventually grow into what? More dense hardwood trees, so the monkeys are, in effect, creating gardens for their favorite food. But hardwood trees are also one of nature’s most efficient tools for vacuuming up carbon out of the air and sequestering it. “Large birds, such as toucans, curassows, and guans, and even forest-dwelling tortoises play a similar role to the monkeys in eating and disper
sing the seeds of the hardwood trees,” Mittermeier explained.
But this resilient interdependent ecosystem can easily become unhealthy. Many of these same species that keep the tropical forest in a healthy interdependency—the spider monkeys and woolly monkeys, tortoises and toucans—“are often the most heavily hunted animals, to the point that they have been exterminated from many otherwise intact forests,” noted Mittermeier. So then what happens? Kill too many spider monkeys, tortoises, and toucans and before you know it you’ve lost your seed dispersers and you end up with fewer hardwood trees, so you have a less dense forest and less carbon sequestration. And then before you know it you have more global warming and, in a few decades, you end up with a few additional inches (or, in time, many feet) of sea level outside your beach house. In nature, everything is connected to everything else—in either a healthy interdependence or an unhealthy one.
While there is much we humans can learn from Mother Nature, “one should never idealize nature,” argued Mittermeier. “Nature is brutal. It is a system of conflict, stresses, and adaptation, where different species of plants and animals are beating the hell out of each other 24/7/365 in a dynamic struggle to reproduce themselves. The very engine of nature is each plant and animal’s drive for reproductive success and its ability to adapt in ways that best enable them to produce offspring or seeds that go into the next generation”—all while other species try to eat them or oust them so they can procreate instead.
When you have a highly diverse system of plants and animals all striving to reproduce their genes at once, it may not be healthy or resilient for any one species or seed that gets eaten each day. Even so, the overall symphony when in balance can be very healthy and resilient—healthy in the sense that its parts thrive together and healthy in the sense that the whole is more resilient to any sudden changes in climate or development that get thrown its way. And this resilience comes from the melding of competition with collaboration—different organisms don’t just feed one another; they also cocreate conditions in which all can thrive together.
Culture and Politics
So let’s stop for a moment and review what all of this discussion about Mother Nature has to do with our own societies. The answer can be found in Megginson’s dictum: “The civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which it finds itself.” It’s my contention that in this age of accelerations, the countries, cultures, and political systems that will be the most adaptive will be those that consciously choose to mimic Mother Nature’s killer apps for producing resilience and propulsion. But the key words here are “consciously choose.” Mother Nature evolved her adaptive skills over billions of years unconsciously, with utter moral indifference. We humans cannot be so brutal, or morally indifferent, as we look to build our resilience—nor do we have millennia to figure out how to perfect these tools. We have to translate Mother Nature’s killer apps into human politics deliberately, consciously, wherever possible consensually—and as quickly as possible.
And to start with I would focus on five of these killer apps that have immediate application to governing today: (1) the ability to adapt when confronted by strangers with superior economic and military might without being hobbled by humiliation; (2) the ability to embrace diversity; (3) the ability to assume ownership over the future and one’s own problems; (4) the ability to get the balance right between the federal and the local—that is, to understand that a healthy society, like a healthy tropical forest, is a network of healthy ecosystems on top of ecosystems, each thriving on its own but nourished by the whole; and, maybe most important, (5) the ability to approach politics and problem-solving in the age of accelerations with a mind-set that is entrepreneurial, hybrid, and heterodox and nondogmatic—mixing and coevolving any ideas or ideologies that will create resilience and propulsion, no matter whose “side” they come from.
Of course, the speed at which any society embraces these strategies will always be a product of the interplay between politics, culture, and leadership. Culture shapes a society’s political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture. What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary.com: culture is the “pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group’s history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are considered the correct way to perceive, feel, think, and act, and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable.”
One of the worst mistakes you can make as a reporter is to underestimate the power of culture in how societies respond to big changes. Another is to conclude that culture is immutable and can never change. 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 late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
That is why I also like the definition of leadership offered by a Harvard University expert on the subject, Ronald Heifetz, who says 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. Since the age of accelerations involves a change in the physical, technological, and social environment for so many people, leadership today is about nurturing the right cultural attitudes and specific policy choices that best enable the mimicking of Mother Nature’s killer apps.
The power of a visionary leader to help a society and culture navigate its way through big moments requiring adaptation is beautifully depicted in one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. The film Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela, in his first term as president of South Africa, enlists the country’s famed rugby team, the Springboks, on a mission to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup and, through that, to start the healing of that apartheid-torn land. The almost all-white Springboks had been a symbol of white domination, and blacks routinely rooted against them. When the post-apartheid, black-led South African sports committee moved to change the team’s name and colors, President Mandela stopped them. He explained that part of making whites feel at home in a black-led South Africa was not uprooting all their cherished symbols.
“That is selfish thinking,” Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, says in the movie. “It does not serve the nation.” Then, speaking of South Africa’s whites, Mandela adds, “We have to surprise them with compassion, with restraint and generosity.”
I love that line: We have to surprise them. There is no better way to change a culture than having a leader who surprises supporters and opponents by rising above his history, his constituencies, and his pollsters, and just doing the right things for his country. Through his enlightened leadership, Mandela did a lot to change the culture of South Africa. 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.
Being Adaptive When Confronted with the Stranger; or, The Need to Change
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? In an age when contact between strangers is happening more than ever, this is a critical issue. Why some leaders and cultures are more adapti
ve than others when faced with big changes in their environment is one of the great mysteries of life and history, but it is impossible to ignore the differences. All I know is that since becoming a reporter in 1978, I have spent a lot of my career covering the difference between peoples, societies, leaders, and cultures focused on learning from “the other”—to catch up after falling behind—and those who feel humiliated by “the other,” by their contact with strangers, and lash out rather than engage in the hard work of adaptation. This theme has so permeated my reporting that I have been tempted at times to change my business card to read: “Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times Global Humiliation Correspondent.”
There is a simple but well-known golf story that carries a deep truth about how cultural dispositions shape attitudes toward adaptation. In the September 2012 issue of Golf Digest, Mark Long and Nick Seitz wrote a story called “Caddie Chatter,” in which Long related the following story told by Tom Watson’s longtime caddie Bruce Edwards. Edwards had caddied for Watson for many years, then briefly for Greg Norman, and then went back to Watson. Edwards described how differently Watson and Norman would react if they each hit a perfect drive down the middle of the fairway but it ended up in a divot: “Years ago I asked Bruce Edwards how it was being back with Tom Watson after a couple of years with Greg Norman. Back then Greg was the man, but they’d gone a couple of years without a win together. Bruce said, ‘Let’s say you’re three under for the day but you drive it in a divot at 16. Norman would look at me and say, ‘Bruce, can you believe my bad luck?’ Tom would look at the ball, look at the divot and say, ‘Bruce, watch this!’”
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