Ted Pavlic (he/him)Sep 2, 2023

New #NYTimes opinion piece from #BradStulberg appeals to taking an allostatic perspective (advertising his new book?). Stulberg should have dug deeper to CS Holling's Adaptive Cycle from #ecology. Same idea but older and with theoretical framework to support it.

"Stop Resisting Change" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/opinion/how-to-accept-change.html?smid=tw-share

Opinion | Stop Resisting Change

With the right mind-set, adapting to change can be a force for growth.

The New York Times
Show threadTed Pavlic (he/him)
This is fundamental work in the area of resilience thinking that we teach in 200-level courses in sustainability. Holling viewed the goal of sustainability is not to resist or prevent change but to anticipate inevitable change and make small changes early to mitigate the damage of eventual larger changes.
Sep 2, 2023 at 6:36pmWeb
Show threadTed Pavlic (he/him)Sep 2, 2023
The Adaptive Cycle describes how all systems will grow and diversify, use up resources, become conservative and efficient under scarcity, and then collapse when newfound interdependencies from efficiency seeking are unable to cope from an exogenous shock, which starts the process again.
Show threadTed Pavlic (he/him)Sep 2, 2023
Although this was put together to describe consistent patterns in community ecology, it also describes other community dynamics in human society - from companies to cities to political movements. Diversity leads to growth then to scarcity then to efficiency and then collapse.