Resilience in Nature is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function, structure, and feedback systems.
“Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being.
Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being.
Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built.
Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself.
In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity. –
Friedrich Nietzsche
Resilience
Resilience usually works within limits. If a disturbance is too great, the effect of that impact will overcome the ability of Nature to make corrections.
Being resilient is about having the ability to recover after disturbances or significant, unpredictable changes in the local environment, such as those caused by a fire, flood, blizzard, or injury.
Diversity, redundancy, decentralization, self-renewal, and self-repair can all enable resiliency in nature and the ability to maintain function despite a disturbance. We can learn so much.
At a systems level, “diversity” refers to the presence of multiple forms, processes, or systems that meet a functional need. Diversity can include a variety of behavioural, physical, or physiological responses to a change in the environment. “Redundancy” means that there’s more than one representative system, organism, or species that provides each function, and that there’s overlap so the loss of or decline in one representative doesn’t destroy the whole system.
“Decentralization” means that the mechanisms maintaining those functions are scattered throughout the system, not located exclusively together, so that a localized disturbance doesn’t remove one or more vital parts of the whole system.
“Self-renewal” and “self-repair” are terms that are more often applied at the cellular or organismal level, but self-renewal can also be applied in ecological contexts. For the former, the terms mean that organisms have the capacity to generate new cells, heal wounds and damaged organs, respond to bacterial and viral threats, and more.
The Covid-19 situation is, in recent times, for this generation the largest most significant test of business & humankind resilience.
Let’s focus deeper on how resilience links to Sustainability & Business and what greater outcomes are possible through intelligent systems that anticipate, respond and thrive through challenges.
Diversity
You3 goes to some sites that have multiple sources of energy on demand. Large scale Marinas that have Solar, Grid and backup generator fuel. They also have future opportunities for Wind and Tidal supplementation due to location and elements.
Multiple sources of energy streams that are risk assessed for continuity and actively managed is essential. ISO22301 that deals with active ongoing business continuity would include all means of ensuring sustainability.
Many businesses right now will be taking a crash course in business continuity management and systematic future change will be needed for them to be successful long-term rather than going back to ‘business as usual’.
Customer diversity is key in economic times, how diversified are you and can you target multiple sectors?
Redundancy
One of natures long-standing puzzles is how so many similar species can co-exist in nature. Do they really all fulfill a different role? Massive data on beetles now provide strong evidence for the idea that evolution can drive species into groups of look-a-likes that are functionally similar. E.g. the world’s 4168 species of diving beetles.
When it comes to production lines, often criticality studies identify redundancy for critical value add components & processes but do you have redundancy for ensuring monitoring requirements are met for your factory stack?
What significant environmental aspects and impacts would be affected if something fails in your processes? Nature is intuitive but also has a system to ensure functionality where problems exists in clusters and responds via having multiple clusters to perform the same function.
Decentralization
Do you really know where your energy actually comes from? How many links in the supply chain do you have? Your fuel may be drilled off shore, shipped to a cavern in Sydney, bottled and sent via freight e.t.c.
Solar independence is becoming a really attractive alternative for many businesses to take control of their own energy supply chain while reducing network losses.
Credit: European Space Agency – Scout project.
Above shows the level that the oil industry is going to (Linking with the European Space Agency!) to ensure continuity management from space and with many monitoring controls on ground also. Many businesses are in the dark about their supply chain risks and have no active management process in place. What small steps can you take to know your supply chain better?
Self-renewal
Looking to nature, fire strongly influences the structure, growth and renewal of many of Canada’s forest and grassland communities. Different species, however, respond differently to fire.
Caption: Jack pine seed cones
After a fire, forest regeneration on burned sites begins with the establishment of pioneer species, notably aspen, white birch, jack pine and lodgepole pine. All of these species require full sunlight to thrive, and all are well adapted to landscapes where fires regularly recur.
Aspen and birch are able to re-establish quickly by sprouting from stumps and roots of burned trees. These species are also able to recolonize burned sites by producing abundant seeds that can be blown by wind over long distances.
Jack pine and lodgepole pine have serotinous cones (protected by a waxy coating) that require the heat of fire to release their seeds. Fire also produces favourable conditions for the seeds of these pines to germinate. Nutrients are released in the soil, mineral soil is exposed, competing species are eliminated and the amount of sunlight on the forest floor is increased. Both jack and lodgepole pine depend on fire to regenerate.
How can your business thrive legitimately in the face of adverse situations and be agile enough to build in response strategies to renew and thrive while maintaining integrity?
Self-repair
Many natural organisms have the ability to repair themselves. Your skin and bones are miracle self-regenerators that we have all experienced and take for granted.
Some species of Turritopsis dohrnii is often referred to as the Benjamin Button jellyfish. Discovered by Sommer they literally have the reverse life cycle ‘bucking’ natures laws. They get younger and younger and ‘die; and regenerate from an Adult. It is the equivalent of a chicken returning to an egg and then rebirthing a chicken again.
Now, manufactured machines will be able to mimic this property. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a self-healing material that spontaneously repairs itself under extreme mechanical damage.
This soft-matter composite material is composed of liquid metal droplets suspended in a soft elastomer. When damaged, the droplets rupture to form new connections with neighbouring droplets and reroute electrical signals without interruption. Circuits produced with conductive traces of this material remain fully and continuously operational when severed, punctured, or had material removed.
Another excellent example is self-healing concrete. Concrete is one of the most commonly used building materials, and it is prone to cracking. From large crack to very small hairline fractures, cracks weaken the structural integrity of concrete.
Engineers have developed self-healing concrete by mixing bacteria into concrete to create a bio-concrete. The bacteria grow into cracks as they form, releasing calcium carbonate (similar to limestone) as a waste product, which fills the crack. This example is a combination of biomimicry―mimicking the self-healing processes of trees and other organisms―and the use of an organism to perform a function, in this case the bacteria.
Sensitivity and timeliness of communication
Nature has the most amazing energy based communication networks. In this next section we talk about the ability of Acacia trees to send gas signals to within its networks to raise chemicals to stop it being indigestible. Incredible.
Africa has some amazing trees. The giant bulbous baobab lives for thousands of years and the strangler fig kills its own host.
The Acacia tree, so often featured in stunning photographs of African sunsets, is one of the strangest of all. The acacia trees which form a large part of the diet of herbivores are capable of killing off the antelope that eat them. Going a step further, the trees can warn others of its kind that there are browsers in the area who would like to make a meal of them.
Perhaps the stately giraffe has known of the potentially lethal side effects of browsing on acacia for millennia.
Giraffe will stand in a forest of acacia and nibble gently and carefully at the uppermost young leaves and then move away upwind to another tree after a relatively short time, even though there are still lots of leaves left that it could eat.
The secret lethal reason for this is that Acacia trees are able to raise the tannin-C levels in their leaves when browsers start to eat them. Within fifteen minutes of an animal starting to eat, the tannin-C levels can shoot up to a higher than normal level.
While tannin-C on its own is not a poison, it can combine with protein molecules from food in the gut of an antelope and make the leaves indigestible.
If the Animals are confined in a fenced area and are unable to move away to browse in another area, they will literally starve to death on a savannah plain that looks like a benign woodland of plenty. In human terms it would equate to being able to munch on as many of your favourite take-outs as you like and lose weight.
The downside would be the dying of starvation bit at the end of it all.
Professor Wouter Van Der Hoven carried out a number of studies in 1990 after the inexplicable deaths of antelope known as the Kudu in South Africa. Eliminating other sources of the killer elements, he discovered the amazing fact that these acacia trees were capable of defending themselves from over-browsing by literally killing off the animals that ate their leaves.
To top this off, he found that they also release ethylene from damaged leaves which float downwind, and are absorbed by neighbouring trees. The ethylene acts as a warning signal – a kind of chemical SOS. The neighbouring trees then start to produce more tannin-C before they are browsed.
In normal years when there is plenty of foliage, and the animals are not overstocked, there are enough trees for all to have a feed and move on to another area to browse. In the case of commercial game farms which have fenced paddocks, it is more difficult for the animals to find enough leaves to eat that contain safe tannin-C levels
Credit: Jane Flowers.
If your business needs support to navigate through these times for drive down operating or fixed costs, we’d love to talk about out sustainability support services.
Be well.
Edward Foord – Managing Director at You3