The dirty fork: Consequences of lost resilience
Small things ultimately matter when social and ecological systems are pushed to the edge
In tightly connected systems, small events can bring big crises. In a classic Monty Python skit, it only takes a dirty fork to ripple catastrophe through a restaurant. When a customer complains of soiled cutlery, things quickly and hilariously spiral: From apologetic server through shaken head waiter to explosive chef and deadly consequences.
In our interwoven world, it’s not always the size of the insult that brings calamity. Small remarks spark family feuds. Minor rate hikes spook markets. In these moments, it is not so much the event that brings big change but rather the reactivity of a system primed for change. There’s a spring-like tension in the air. From this tension, crisis comes when each reaction and overreaction drives the situation past a critical point and into unpredictable territory.
While embellished for TV, the dirty fork tale tells a powerful story - that small insults ultimately matter when social and ecological systems are pushed to the edge.
Resilience: A dwindling resource
Our fictitious restaurant is a tragicomedy example of lost resilience. Canadian ecologist CS Holling coined ‘resilience’ to mean how well a system weathers disturbance without meaningfully changing. Dirty forks don’t usually unleash chaos in eateries. But things can fall apart when personal hardships, quirks of personality and emotions combine to turn a fine establishment into a tragic scene. When placed under stress, restaurants, ecosystems and more may become systems that can weather no more.
In the Earth system, there is growing evidence of “dirty fork” events where small changes are amplified to have large consequences. Take a sampling of recent “uh-oh” discoveries pointing to intensifying global change:
Permafrost melt in the Arctic is accelerating, unleashing long dormant greenhouse gases that aren’t well accounted for in climate scenarios. The change is also afoot in the massive yet forgotten permafrost stores under coastal seas.
The Earth has become measurably dimmer from space with the weakening of albedo, a key process of dissipating heat energy from the sun back into space.
·Major ocean currents are showing the first signs of predicted change, threatening to disrupt a vital moderator of global climate.
Many forests – long the ultimate carbon sinks – are flipping to become sources of greenhouse gas due to wildfires, insect outbreaks and warming trends. The massive Amazon appears close to a tipping point that would turn it into fire-prone savanna.
What ties these phenomena together is the speedy growth of large changes from small beginnings. These are feedbacks and runaway ecological changes - like the growing mismatch of plants and pollinating insects with seasons – that make one thing unmistakable: In the Anthropocene, the biosphere is losing resilience and the capacity to absorb change.
The hidden erosion of resilience
Losing resilience is a subtle and erosive process that’s easy to overlook at the scales of human experience. Ecologically-vital wetlands get lost in increments, cities expand and industries grow but we do not scream crisis. Without really seeing these signals, we fail to act.
There are four aspects of the human experience that make it harder - but not impossible - for us to see the erosion of resilience:
The blur of time: Environmental change seems to be just slow enough to not register danger in our here-and-now brains. Shifting baselines mean that each generation has a new idea of what constitutes a pristine environment even though it may have changed markedly. Younger generations, for instance, have no knowledge of the extirpated forest animals their parents knew.
The spill of space: Environmental change is further invisible when impacts spill over into previously untapped areas. Chinese sea cucumber fisheries, for example, expanded into 48 new countries over fifteen years in part to make up for failing stocks on traditional fishing grounds. Such leapfrogging props up supply while masking the costs of local environmental change.
The pidgeonholing of risk: Research shows that people consider a problem in at most four dimensions. So we tend to weigh risks one at a time. We separate our concerns into buckets of climate, biodiversity and pollution to name a few. But the collective and interactive impact of all of these risks together is always more hazy. Threats to freshwater ecosystems, for instance, can add to, amplify or even weaken each other making it difficult to know how close a given ecosystem is to a lethal combination. We may therefore underestimate the systemic risk posed by multiple factors, such as the perfect storm of human activity and (natural) climate change that decimated Australian predators five thousand years ago.
The mirage of linear change: The Covid-19 pandemic has shown we are rather poor judges of nonlinear change, with public health measures typically lagging periods of explosive growth. This happens, in part, because we expect proportional and incremental change – e.g., 10 percent more cases with 10% more social contact. But nature’s events often follow the “hockey stick” shape such that increases or decreases are abrupt and jarring when they come. Fully two-thirds of fisheries failures, for example, are either sudden collapses or chaotic churns. But since we tend to expect linear change, small environmental changes will look to us more like the beginning of a trend than the edge of a cliff.
The result of our perceptual biases is that resilience is lost in secret before changes are fully noticed. When we look for symptoms of system breakdown to act - from restaurant meltdowns to warming patterns – we are already past critical. A “seeing is believing” paradigm will never recognize the subtle changes that precede seismic shifts in many social and ecological systems. But other approaches may work, like early warning signals of patterns that systems exhibit close to critical points. However, they must be acted on quickly enough. As a paradigm in my grandmother’s wisdom: “A stitch in time saves nine.”
Stepping back from the brink
Resilience may be the planet’s most precious commodity. It is not easy to see, publicly traded or on Amazon but needs to be preserved as the glue holding a system together. Its value is not measured in currency but rather in loss prevention when disturbances rock a socioecological system. When resilience is lost, crises come and with only three basic strategies for navigating them:
Insulating: When damage looms and unavoidable, we insulate ourselves and our interests from impacts. For example, attention is now turning to growing food in the climate-controlled indoors where crops are shielded from climate extremes. Yet insulating offers only local protection, leaving the rest of a system exposed.
Interrupting: We also avoid damage by interrupting chains of reaction after they have already begun. The worst of harmful algal blooms, for instance, can be avoided by interrupting nutrient supplies to waterways within a critical window of time. But turning back a change-in-progress is dicey business: Systems on the verge often have a feedback-driven momentum that resists interventions.
Rebuilding: The only way to altogether prevent damage from environmental crises is to rebuild the resilience which has been lost. Rebuilding resilience is painstaking because it involves restoring the machinery of a complex system, complete with the checks and balances that let it withstand disturbances. It takes a bevy of social, economic and ecological efforts to turn back the clock. Tackling wildfires, for instance, depends on restoring fire-damaged ecosystems, changing engrained habits of land use and engaging the public.
When we trace the options, there is no doubt that it’s easier to protect resilience as a valued asset than to rebuild it or shield ourselves from environmental crises. Stewarding something is always simpler than rebuilding from its rubble. This means we must use all the tools at our disposal to protect as critical the natural capital and biogeochemical services supplied by the planet - from protected areas and green infrastructure to net-positive financial and social models.
If we do not nurture resilience in our changing world, we open ourselves to a humbling realization about systems on the edge - that small insults eventually have fast and furious consequences.
Don’t let a dirty fork be our undoing.