Cab stand at Madison Square, New York City
Ilargi: A happy new year for all of you from us at the Automatic Earth. May you spend every minute of it in the best of health and the greatest of company. We strongly recommend you pay increased atttention to both; chances are you're going to need them more than ever this year. Worth more than pieces of gold, as the man says.
Stoneleigh opens 2010 with a reflection on patterns that emerge throughout the living world, including the way we organize our economic systems, and how they organize us in return.
Stoneleigh:
Fractal Adaptive Cycles in Natural and Human Systems
Adaptive cycles are the foundation of both natural ecological and human socio-economic systems, and have been investigated independently from very different perspectives by ecologists and financial analysts who have almost certainly never heard of each others' work. It is interesting then to look at the strong correspondence of the self-similar hierarchical patterns, best described as fractals, which emerge from both fields. This form of organization seems to be a fundamental dynamic in many areas.
The bewildering, entrancing, unpredictable nature of nature and people, the richness, diversity and changeability of life come from that evolutionary dance generated by cycles of growth, collapse, reorganization, renewal and re-establishment. We call that the adaptive cycle. Holling, 2009
Holling, Panarchy and Resilience
Arguably the most significant thinker in the field of ecological cycles has been Buzz Holling, who refers to the conceptual model he derived from the study of forest ecosystems as Panarchy. Holling observed that ecosystems developed in adaptive cycles of exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization which could be described in three dimensions - ecological 'wealth', connectedness and resilience. These cycles provide a framework for the opposing forces of growth and stability versus change and variety.
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