The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

Thank you for buying this

St. Martin’s Publishing Group ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

For email updates on the author, click here.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To Carol L. Grunewald

for giving our fellow creatures a voice

INTRODUCTION

The viruses keep coming. The climate keeps warming. And the earth is rewilding in real time. We long thought that we could force the natural world to adapt to our species. We now face the ignominious fate of being forced to adapt to an unpredictable natural world. Our species has no playbook for the mayhem that is unfolding around us.

We are, by all accounts, the youngest mammalian species on Earth, with only a two-hundred-thousand-year-long history. For most of that time—95 percent or more—we lived pretty much like our fellow primates and mammals as foragers and hunters living off the land and adapting to the seasons, leaving just a skim of our imprint on the body of the earth.¹ What changed? How did we become the despoilers who brought nature almost to its knees but which now has come roaring back to cast us out?

Let’s step back for a moment and look at the now worn narrative regarding our species’ special destiny. During the dark days of the French Revolution in 1794, the philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet laid out a grand vision of the future while waiting to be taken to the guillotine for high treason. He wrote:

No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties … the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite … [the] progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.²

Condorcet’s promissory note provided the ontological foundation for what would subsequently be called the Age of Progress. Today, Condorcet’s vision of humanity’s future appears naïve, even laughable. Still, progress is just the most recent incarnation of the ancient belief that our species was cut from a different cloth from that of other creatures with whom we share the earth. While grudgingly admitting that Homo sapiens evolved from an ancestral pool dating back to the first glimmer of microbial life, we like to think that we are different.

During the modern era we tossed much of the theological world aside, but managed to keep hold of the Lord’s promise to Adam and Eve that they and their heirs would have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.³ That promise, still taken seriously, but without the religious overtones, has led to the collapse of our planetary ecosystems.

If there is a change to be reckoned with, it’s that we are beginning to realize that we never did have dominion and that the agencies of nature are far more powerful than we thought. Our species now seems much smaller and less consequential in the bigger picture of life on Earth.

People everywhere are scared. We are waking up to the hard reality that our species is to blame for the horrific carnage spreading across the earth—the floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes that are wreaking havoc and undermining economies and ecosystems around the world. We sense that planetary forces bigger than us and not easily subdued by the means we have relied on in the past are here to stay, with ominous repercussions. We are beginning to realize that our species and our fellow creatures are edging ever closer to an environmental abyss from which there is no return.

And now, the warnings that human-induced climate change is taking us into the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. Government leaders, the business and financial community, academia, and the public at large are beginning to question, whole cloth, the shibboleths by which we have lived our lives, interpreted the meaning of our existence, and understood the simple realities of staying alive and secure.

Although the Age of Progress is, for all intents and purposes, over and only awaiting a proper postmortem, what’s new and being heard from every quarter and getting louder and more determined is that we—the human race—need to rethink everything: our worldview, our understanding of the economy, our forms of governance, our concepts of time and space, our most basic human drives, and our relationship to the planet.

But the talk thus far is at best inchoate and at worst undefined. What does it really mean to rethink every aspect of our lives? We have a clue. The question being asked in so many different ways is how do we adapt to the havoc that is coming? We hear it around the kitchen table and in our local neighborhoods where we work and play and live out our lives.

Resilience, in turn, has become the new defining refrain heard in countless venues. It is how we are coming to define ourselves in a perilous future that is now at the front gates. The Age of Progress has given way to the Age of Resilience. Rethinking the essence of our species and its place on Earth marks the beginning of a new journey where nature is now the classroom.

The great transformation from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience is already triggering a vast philosophical and psychological readjustment in the way our species perceives the world around us. At the root of the transition is a wholesale shift of our temporal and spatial orientation.

The underlying temporal orientation that directed the entirety of the Age of Progress is efficiency—the quest to optimize the expropriation, consumption, and discarding of natural resources and, by so doing, increase the material opulence of society at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time frames, but at the expense of the depletion of nature itself. Our personal temporal orientation and the temporal beat of our society folds around the efficiency imperative. It’s what has taken us to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and now to the ruin of the natural world.

Of late, voices are being raised for the very first time from the academic community and even corporate boardrooms and government, challenging this once-sacred value of efficiency, suggesting that its ironclad hold over society’s temporal bandwidth is literally killing us. How, then, do we rethink our future?

If the Age of Progress marched in lockstep with efficiency, the temporal choreography of the Age of Resilience strides with adaptivity. The temporal crossover from efficiency to adaptivity is the reentry card that takes our species from separation and exploitation of the natural world to repatriation with the multitude of environmental forces that animate the earth—marking a repositioning of human agency on an increasingly unpredictable planet.

This realignment is already affecting other deep-rooted assumptions about how our economic and social life ought to be conducted, measured, and assessed. The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society including the shift from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small- and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.

The emerging third iteration of the industrial revolution that is taking the world from analog bureaucracies to digital platforms enveloping the whole of the earth is re-embedding our species back into the planet’s indigenous infrastructures—the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. This new infrastructure takes our collective humanity beyond the industrial era. In the emerging economic paradigm, it’s likely that finance capital, the heart of the Industrial Age, will be surpassed by a new economic order primed by ecological capital as we move further into the Age of Resilience in the second half of the 21st century and beyond.

Not surprisingly, the new temporality rides alongside a fundamental spatial reorientation. In the Age of Progress, space became synonymous with passive natural resources and governance with managing nature as property. In the Age of Resilience, space is made up of the planetary spheres that interact to establish the processes, patterns, and flows of an evolving Earth.

We are also just beginning to understand that our own lives, and those of our fellow creatures, exist as processes, patterns, and flows. The idea that we are autonomous beings acting on one another and the natural world is being rethought by a new generation of physicists, chemists, and biologists on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry. They are beginning to unearth a different story about the nature of human nature and, in the process, challenging the belief in our autonomous selfhood.

All living creatures are extensions of the earth’s spheres. The elements, minerals, and nutrients of the lithosphere, the water of the hydrosphere, and the oxygen of the atmosphere are continually coursing through us in the form of atoms and molecules, taking up residence in our cells, tissues, and organs as prescribed by our DNA, only to be continuously replaced at various intervals during our life. Although it may come as a surprise, most of the tissues and organs that make up our bodies continuously turn over in our lifetime. For example, one’s near entire skeleton is replaced every ten years or so. A human liver turns over approximately every three hundred to five hundred days; the cells that line the stomach turn over in five days; and intestinal Paneth cells are replaced every twenty days.⁴ A mature adult, from a strictly physical point of view, may be ten years old or younger.⁵

And even then, our body does not belong to us alone but is shared by many other forms of life—bacteria, viruses, protists, archaea, and fungi. Indeed, more than half the cells in the human body and the majority of DNA that make us up are not human but belong to the rest of the creatures that reside in every nook and cranny of our being. The point is, the earth’s species and ecosystems do not stop at the edge of our bodies but, rather, continuously flow in and out of our bodies. Each of us is a semipermeable membrane. We are of the planet literally and figuratively—which ought to shatter the cherished notion that our species is somehow separate from nature.

Our inseparability from nature’s flows is even more nuanced and intimate. Like every other species, we are made up of a multitude of biological clocks that continually adapt our internal bodily rhythms to the circadian day and the lunar, seasonal, and circannual rhythms that mark the daily rotation of the earth and its annual passage around the sun. Of late, we are also learning that endogenous and exogenous electromagnetic fields that crisscross every cell, tissue, and organ and permeate the planet also play a critical role in establishing the patterns by which our genes and cells line up and take form and assist in maintaining bodily functions.

We are of the earth, to the very sinew of our being. Like the rethinking of our temporality, our emerging understanding of our extended spatiality as a species is also forcing a reevaluation of our relationship to our fellow creatures, and our place on the earth.

With this comes fresh thinking about the nature of governance and how we see ourselves as a social organism. In the Age of Resilience, governance transitions from sovereignty over natural resources to stewardship of regional ecosystems. Bioregional governance, for its part, becomes far more distributed, with local communities taking on the responsibility of adapting to and stewarding their nineteen kilometers of the earth’s biosphere that encompass the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere—the region of Earth where life unfolds.

In this very different world where we break down the walls between civilization and naturalization, representative democracy, long held in high regard as the fairest and most inclusive governing model, is perceived as increasingly removed from the hands-on engagement with nature required of every member of our species. Already, representative democracy is beginning to make way, in bits and pieces, for distributed peerocracy, as a younger generation becomes active players in the governance of their bioregions.

In the emerging era, the industrious and efficient citizen bystanders to governance—whose only responsibility is to vote for a small coterie of elected officials to represent their interests—gives over, in part, to active peer-led citizen assemblies dedicated to stewarding their bioregions. There is already precedent for this as nation-states have traditionally established citizen juries who are called upon to assess the guilt or innocence of their peers in criminal and civil court cases.

These are just a smattering of developments that are only now rearing their head as our species makes a historic pivot from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience. Other developments will emerge as we rethink our sense of agency in a highly animated planet that is evolving in unfathomable ways to which we will need to adapt if we are to survive and flourish.

The pages that follow are a walk-through of where we’ve come since our first Adam and Eve stood upright and ventured out from the Rift Valley of Africa onto the open savannas and from there trekked across the continents.

Our species is the great wayfarer of the world, in search of more than our daily subsistence. Something deeper and more restless churns inside us—a feeling no other creature possesses. We are in a relentless search, whether acknowledged or not, for the meaning of our existence. It’s what moves us.

But somewhere along the journey, we lost our way. For most of our time on Earth, our species—like all others—found means to continually adapt to the larger forces of nature unfolding around us. Then, ten thousand years ago, with the ending of the last Ice Age and the beginning of a temperate climate—christened the Holocene—we steered a promethean new course, forcing nature to adapt to our species. With the rise of the hydraulic agricultural empires five thousand years ago and, more recently, the protoindustrial and industrial revolutions of the late medieval and modern age—what we have come to call civilization—our journey has been marked by increasing domination over the natural world. And now our success—if we can call it that—is measured by a startling statistic. Although Homo sapiens makes up less than one percent of the earth’s total biomass, by 2005 we were using 24 percent of the net primary production from photosynthesis, and current trends project that we might use as much as 44 percent by 2050, leaving only 56 percent of the net primary production for the rest of the life on the planet.⁶ This is obviously untenable. Our collective humanity has become the outlier of life and is now taking our fellow creatures along with us to a mass geological graveyard in the emerging Anthropocene.⁷

Ironically, our species, unlike our fellow creatures, is of a Janus face. If we are the spoiler species, we are also potentially the healers. We have been blessed with a special quality wired into our neurocircuitry—the empathic impulse—that has shown itself to be elastic and capable of infinite expansion. It’s this rare and precious attribute that has evolved, only to fall back and resurface again and again, each time reaching new plateaus before another slippage. In recent years, a younger generation has begun to extend the empathic impulse beyond our own species to include our fellow creatures, all of whom are part of our evolutionary family. This is what biologists call biophilia consciousness—a hopeful sign of a new path forward.

Anthropologists tell us we are among the most adaptive species. The question is whether we will use this defining attribute to assimilate back into nature’s fold wherever it takes us with a sense of humility, mindfulness, and critical thinking that will allow our species and our extended biological family to flourish once again. The great turnaround from adapting nature to our species to adapting our species back to nature will require abandoning the traditional Baconian approach to scientific inquiry with its emphasis on wresting nature’s secrets and seeing the earth as a resource and commodity for our species’ exclusive consumption. In its stead, we will need to take hold of a radically new scientific paradigm—what a new generation of scientists call complex adaptive social/ecological systems modeling, or CASES. This new approach to science views nature as a life source rather than a resource and perceives the earth as a complex self-organizing and self-evolving system whose trajectory is ultimately unknowable in advance, and therefore requires a science of anticipation and vigilant adaptation rather than forced preemption.

A rewilding planet will test our collective mettle. Hopefully, the journey we are now embarked on in the Age of Resilience will steer us to a new Garden of Eden, but this time not as master but as kindred spirit with our fellow creatures with whom we share our earthly home.

Part One

EFFICIENCY VS. ENTROPY

THE DIALECTIC OF MODERNITY

1

MASKS, VENTILATORS, AND TOILET PAPER

HOW ADAPTIVITY TRUMPS EFFICIENCY

There is a quote known by virtually everyone in the business community that captures the spirit of how we have come to define ourselves during the Age of Progress. Adam Smith, the first modern economist and founding father of the discipline, in his opus, The Wealth of Nations, wrote the following words—now immortalized—which capture what has been considered the essence of human nature adhered to by successive generations for the past two centuries.

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.… He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.… By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.¹

Smith viewed effectually as virtually synonymous with efficiently, and the very goal to which Homo economicus strives, and to which society bends.

On May 14, 2021, The New York Times published a guest essay with the wonkish headline Your Car, Toaster, Even Washing Machine, Can’t Work Without Them. And There’s a Global Shortage.² The article was written by the economist Alex T. Williams.

The story it tells foreshadows an economic disruption and eruption at the very heart of the capitalist system of sufficient magnitude to implode and take down the economic order by which we’ve structured commercial life for the past two centuries. Buried in the article are faint hints of the kind of system that is likely to replace it.

The article starts blandly enough, pointing to a global shortage in the supply chain of semiconductors. These are the tiny microchips embedded in the numerous processes and manufactured products that constitute the digitalized smart world. Semiconductors are a half-trillion-dollar industry. To get a handle on how serious the problem is, let’s zero in on just one Fortune 500 company, Ford Motor Company. The company announced that the current shortage of semiconductors used in the manufacturing and workings of its vehicles has forced it to forecast a $2.5 billion drop in profits over the coming year.³ Magnify these losses across the entire global economy dependent on semiconductors—from medical equipment to electricity transmission lines—and we begin to understand the gravity of the crisis.

Behind the scenes, President Joe Biden quietly held a high-level meeting with executives from Ford Motor Company and Google to assess the economic fallout and national security risk of a shortfall of semiconductors, most of which are manufactured overseas. Executives from Verizon, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia, among other corporate giants, have formed an industry coalition to push for urgent federal government funding of semiconductor research and development (R&D) and the underwriting of funds to establish semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the United States. The coalition wants a massive $50 billion set aside in the proposed federal government infrastructure plan—at the get-go—citing the shortages around semiconductors and the security risk that could shut down the U.S. economy.

The problem extends beyond just a short-term lapse in the global supply chain. Further along in the article, readers will find reference to two words that define the very nature of the crisis, and deeper still, foretell a fundamental contradiction in capitalism itself—that is, the unavoidable trade-off between efficiency and resilience.

The enormous expense that goes into erecting giant manufacturing facilities to produce complex semiconductors leads to lower profit margins. Only a handful of the most efficient companies have risen to the top by investing in what is called lean logistics and supply chains and lean manufacturing processes that eliminate costly buffers and other redundancies in the system that might be necessary to operationalize in case of an emergency. For example, storing surplus inventories; provisioning additional backup manufacturing facilities that can be booted up at a moment’s notice; retaining an auxiliary workforce that could be quickly deployed were there a disruption anywhere along the line; and having available alternative supply chain options that can be operationalized to avoid disruptions and a slowdown in the logistics system.

These extra expenses take away from operational efficiency and reduce the revenue stream, eating into the bottom line. For these reasons, such backups are eschewed by management and shareholders because they shrink margins and profit. What the world is left with is a handful of giant corporate heavyweights in the semiconductor market that command the industry. These market leaders have survived the competition by cutting costs across their operations with lean logistics and manufacturing processes, making them increasingly efficient but at the expense of being less resilient and vulnerable to unexpected events. Williams points out the obvious pitfall, asking, What good is such a hyper-efficient, super-lean factory if, say, a natural disaster knocks it out of commission and there’s no backup supply of the chip it makes?⁴ The bottom line is that efficiency rules, but at the expense of resilience.

The semiconductor shortage is not the first event to cast public doubt on the resilience of the economy in the wake of escalating natural and man-made disruptions. The first inkling of fissures in the capitalist system came unexpectedly in the spring of 2020. Stunned by the fast spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus, countries were caught off guard as their medical facilities were unprepared for the pandemic and their populations found themselves exposed, unprotected, and without recourse in providing the necessities for their families.

The economic firestorm ignited unexpectedly in March 2020 with an opinion piece written by William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, who formerly served as deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton. The lead-in to his article read: Efficiency Isn’t the Only Economic Virtue. Galston said he had been reflecting on the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the fallout from the pandemic was worrying, it was accompanied by an especially eye-opening surprise. America was totally unprepared to meet the need. Night after night on the news, governors, medical professionals, and the public at large were asking, where were the N95 masks, personal protective equipment, ventilators, et cetera? Why are there shortages of antibacterial soap and even toilet paper and other basic necessities?

A PUBLIC REPUDIATION OF EFFICIENCY

It struck Galston that something was askew with a global economic system that could not meet the most basic needs of the American public during a once-in-a-century health crisis. He dared to ask the question that had lain hidden behind the commercial screen—the dirty little secret that underwrites modern capitalism—What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?⁵ Galston noted that the very success of globalization depends on dispersing the production of goods and services that make up daily necessities to those regions of the world best able to create efficient economies of scale by cutting labor costs and forgoing environmental protection protocols. These products are then transported by container ships and air freight to America and the far ends of the earth.

While Galston said he understood that the efficiencies brought on by globalization were a trade-off and unavoidable, the inevitable result is that as efficiency increased, resilience declined. He concluded by warning his business audience that in the relentless quest for increased efficiency, which remains a key source of competitive advantage, the decisions made by individual market actors will produce, in the aggregate, a less-than-optimal supply of resiliency, a public good.⁶ It was difficult for the business community to hear such a message. After all, by drawing attention to this unassailable downside of efficiency in a global capitalist system long touted as the best of all possible worlds, Galston stepped on the Achilles’ heel of the entire system by which modern society operates.

Had the Galston piece been a single shot across the bow, it might have passed unnoticed. But just weeks later, on April 20, Senator Marco Rubio, a political conservative and a leader of the Republican party, chimed in with a second frontal attack aimed at the heart of the capitalist system, in an opinion piece published in The New York Times entitled We Need a More Resilient American Economy. Rubio took an even more aggressive stance, warning that over the past several decades, our nation’s political and economic leaders, Democratic and Republican, made choices about how to structure our society—choosing to prize economic efficiency over resiliency, financial gains over Main Street investment, individual enrichment over the common good.⁷

Rubio faulted the American business community for offshoring its manufacturing base to developing countries while putting its experience to building up a financial and service-based economy. He writes that it produced one of the most efficient economic engines of all time, but it lacks resiliency, which, he pointed out, can be devastating in a crisis. Rubio struck a deeper, more philosophical note, suggesting that the country needed to come to grips with the consequences that flow from a hyperindividualistic ethos by pursuing a renewal of the American spirit of resilience that made the country a beacon to the world.⁸

Galston and Rubio’s critique of America’s love affair with efficiency at the expense of its earlier resilient roots was already beginning to bubble up to the surface. The difference is that the toll it had been taking on the American economy and society didn’t become real to most Americans until they came up against empty shelves in supermarkets and pharmacies during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even before COVID-19, voices were being raised from deep within the capitalist establishment. In January 2019, Harvard Business Review ran a lengthy essay with the controversial title, The High Price of Efficiency. Its author was Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The article was part of a series that was introduced with the following conundrum: Beginning with Adam Smith, business thinkers have steadfastly regarded the elimination of waste as management’s holy grail. But what if the negative effects from the pursuit of efficiency eclipse the rewards?⁹ Martin, like others in the rarefied world of business management, is stepping forward for the very first time in the 250-year history of the profession to challenge the ruling truisms of their discipline. Lest doubters fail to recognize the overriding importance of efficiency as a centerpiece of neoclassical and, more recently, neoliberal economics, Martin sets the record straight:

The unalloyed virtue of efficiency has never dimmed. It is embodied in multilateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization, aimed at making trade more efficient. It is ensconced in the Washington Consensus via trade and foreign direct-investment liberalization, efficient forms of taxation, deregulation, privatization, transparent capital markets, balanced budgets, and waste-fighting governments. And it is promoted in the classrooms of every business school on the planet.¹⁰

Martin takes another route in critiquing capitalism’s obsession with efficiency. He argues that at the onset of new technological breakthroughs that spur accompanying entrepreneurial opportunities, the early pacesetters quickly consolidate their control over the emerging market potential by increasing their efficiencies across all of their potential value chains and vertically integrating them into their operations to create economies of scale. But becoming a first mover and market leader comes with a negative externality not anticipated in the rush to the top.

Martin uses the example of the few companies that control virtually the entire global almond market. At the time the industry was ratcheting up, the Central Valley of California was considered perfect for almond growing and currently more than 80 percent of the almonds produced in the world come from that region.¹¹

Unfortunately, centralizing almond production in one spot because of ideal weather patterns ran up against unanticipated environmental triggers. California’s almond blossoms require a very narrow seasonal window for pollination and necessitate the transporting of beehives to the region from all across America. In recent years, however, the bee population has been dying in droves. More than one-third of America’s commercial bee colonies were wiped out in just the winter of 2018–19—a record.¹² There are many theories about the environmental cause of the bee die-off, but it is enough to say that the monoculture of the almond industry, while initially efficient, has proven to be more vulnerable to externalities and less resilient.

What Martin failed to mention is that almond trees are also voracious consumers of water. Every almond produced requires a gallon of water. Add it all up and almost 10 percent of all the water consumed by agriculture in California annually goes to quenching the thirst of the almond trees in the Central Valley—that’s more water than is consumed by the entire populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco in a year.¹³

To make matters worse, climate change has turned the once fertile Central Valley into a drought-stricken region, threatening the future viability of what was a highly efficient place to locate almond orchards. The short-term efficiencies of locating 80 percent of the almond trees that make up world trade in one region came up against the unexpected environmental threats that the industry did not consider … what was regarded as a highly commercial business proved not to be resilient.¹⁴ The lesson is monoculture in any commercial enterprise—putting all of one’s almonds in one basket—while efficient, lacks sufficient resilience against unknown future events.

THE UNRAVELING OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

While efficiency is a temporal value, resilience is a condition. It is true that increasing efficiency often undermines resilience, but the temporal value that serves as an antidote is not more efficiency, but rather adaptivity. We’ve come to realize over the past half century or so that the earth acts like a self-organizing system in which all forms of life are continually adapting moment to moment to the energy fluxes and flows of the planet and to the evolution of the earth’s spheres. Adaptivity bears a close resemblance to the concept of harmonizing in nature that is a unique characteristic of Eastern religions and philosophies.

Efficiency is about eliminating the friction, a code word for getting rid of redundancies that might slow the speed and optimization of economic activity. Resilience, however, at least in nature, is all about redundancy and diversity. For example, the monoculture of a specific crop variety might be more efficient in terms of speed of growth to maturity, but were that particular monoculture to be subject to blight, the losses can be irreparable.

The discovery in the business community and business schools that efficiency, which has long been heralded as the operating arm of capitalist theory and practice, is largely at fault in increasing the risk and accompanying vulnerability of the economy and society—all of which undermine our collective resilience—seemed to jump out of nowhere. But now, with this realization, comes a heady reassessment of how we should proceed.

If our attachment to efficiency has begun to sour, what then do we do about productivity, its twin, and the other critical agency by which our economy lives and breathes? While efficiency is a temporal value, productivity is a simple ratio of outputs produced by the inputs used, especially those associated with technology and accompanying innovative business practices. Both efficiency and productivity are strictly linear processes and limited in time to the production chain and market exchange, with little attention to or accounting of the negative side effects that may extend beyond the moment the good is exchanged and the service delivered. But of course, it’s denying these very negative externalities, created by the increased efficiencies and productivity, that allows companies to increase their profit.

Biological systems are organized around a very different operating regime. While adaptivity, rather than efficiency, is the temporal signature of biological systems, regenerativity, rather than productivity, is the measure of performance. Adaptivity and regenerativity are inseparable in all biological organisms and ecosystems. Consider, for example, the process of autophagy in biology.

Yoshinori Ohsumi is a seventy-six-year-old Japanese cell biologist who has spent a lifetime studying autophagy. The term comes from the Greek words meaning self-eating. Autophagy is the cell’s waste disposal system. It’s the process by which cellular junk is captured and sealed in sack-like membranes, called autophagosomes … [and] transported to another structure called the lysosome. Biologists long