International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

C. HOLLING states: "The resilience and stability viewpoints of the behavior of ecosystems can yield very different approaches to the management of resources. The stability view emphasizes the equilibrium, the maintenance of a predictable world, and the harvesting of nature's excess production with as little fluctuation as possible. The resilience view emphasizes domains of attraction and the need for persistence" (1976, p.87).

There is however a serious criteria problem with the definition of "nature's excess production". It is coming evermore obvious that our lineal view of natural systems is flawed and that our appreciation of global ecological stability is therefore quite dubious (when it exists!). As a result: "The very approach… that assures a stable maximum sustained yield of a renewable resource might so change these deterministic conditions that the resilience is lost or reduced, so that a chance and rare event that previously could be absorbed can trigger a sudden dramatic change and loss of the structural integrity of the system" (Ibid).

Consequently, HOLLING proposes two complementary strategies for resources management: "The first would lead to the design of highly optimal systems in which fluctuations were minimized and explicit efforts were made to minimize the probability of failure – in short, a fail-safe strategy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that if, accompanying that strategy, is an explicit ability to maintain a stability region of a size large enough to contain any unexpected perturbation the system might receive" (p.89-90).

However the unexpected is, by its nature, very difficult to define and predict. Moreover, human systems tend generally to maximize growth and resist any regulation until slowed down, blocked or even destroyed by the consequences of its own abuse, as shown by numerous historic examples.

In HOLLING's opinion, it is "almost inevitable that an attempt to reduce fluctuations would, at the same time, cause a shrinkage of the stability region through the action of cultural or natural selection" (Ibid).

As a solution, HOLLING proposes a safe-fail strategy, that should "… optimizes a cost of failure and even assures that there are periodic "minifailures" to prevent evolution of inflexibility" (Ibid).

As an example, let us capture periodically a lesser number of whales, in order to have still whales around in a more or less distant future… Or suffer frequent small tremors in order to avoid the great destructive earthquake.

→ "Power laws".