We built a fragile society
Modern society has optimised for efficiency at the expense of resilience
Petrol hit NZ$3.40 a litre (US$7.40 per gallon) in Aotearoa this week. If that moment at the pump didn’t feel like a warning signal, I don’t know what would.
Recent events have made one thing abundantly clear. And once you see it, it’s hard to un-see.
We’ve focused so much on efficiency that we’ve made our society fragile.
Fewer people hold more wealth. Fewer companies supply goods and services. Fewer resources control more and more. Fewer species underpin the calories we consume.
Think about it.
The steak in your supermarket might look simple. But behind it sits a system of fuel, refrigeration, transport, labour, processing plants, and just-in-time delivery. And for it to reach your supermarket’s shelves, all of these elements need to work more or less on schedule. The same drive for efficiency often extends back to production, where animals are fed grains grown in monoculture elsewhere and supported by antibiotics in high-density factories.
Similarly, the furniture you’re sitting on, the oranges in your fruit bowl, even the shoes on your feet. Each of these could well have travelled halfway across the world, passed through a series of ports, warehouses, and suppliers in a highly efficient system to find their way to you.
These efficiencies have fuelled human progress. And progressed it has.
If you told me 20 years ago that we’d be able to video call someone across the other side of the world while walking down the street with something we pulled out of our pocket… well, I’d have said you’re nuts — that’s science fiction stuff right there.
But here’s the thing. These same efficiencies — the ones we celebrate — are also what make our systems brittle. They work brilliantly until they don’t. We’ve built a house of cards founded on being able to buy more, travel further, build faster, scale bigger.
Sometimes efficiency isn’t the answer. And recent events are making that painfully clear.
Do ecosystems hold the answer?
Ecosystems can be highly efficient. Species fill niches and divide up resources. They coexist. Some plants specialise on tapping resources feet below the surface, others gobble up resources at the surface. In doing so, they can pack tightly together. They also store up the good times to see out the bad, and in doing so they also segregate themselves in time. Even critters living in streams time-share the same place — some specialising on winter conditions, others on summer low flows. Species are finely tuned to these rhythms.
But ecosystems are also highly inefficient. As energy moves up a food chain, most of it is lost. More importantly, many species do very similar things. When one species is lost from an ecosystem, its functions like nutrient processing or pollination aren’t necessarily lost. They’re most likely replaced by another species that’s already there. This redundancy seems inefficient at the surface level. But it’s a key part of what makes natural systems so resilient to shocks.
And diversity itself, as I’ve written before, is what enables ecosystems to bounce back. Whether that’s the number of species in a community, the diversity of genes with in a population, or the variability in habitat conditions across a landscape, each buffers natural systems from shocks like droughts, floods, and heatwaves. And in places where disturbances are frequent and unpredictable, species hedge their bets by spreading risk between different ways of making a living. Just like a sensible investor, ecosystems have natural risk mitigation built in.
After all, biodiversity is insurance.
But when society focuses on efficiency at all costs, cracks begin to appear. The costs of these cracks are playing out in real time… in our own pockets.
We’ve designed many human systems to minimise redundancy, variability, and slack. Yet, these are the very features that underpin resilient ecological systems.
Recent events reveal society’s fragility
The crisis in Iran is revealing modern society’s dependence on tightly optimised systems. This single disruption has sent shockwaves through the entire network of society.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has led to supply chains unravelling. Panic buying has at times mirrored those of COVID times. Energy shocks have had major geopolitical implications. And flight disruptions have caused chaos around the world. The cascading regional impacts of this event reveal how tightly coupled modern society is.
Many of these systems are run with so little slack that they’re on the precipice of failure at all times. And when a shock hits — whether geopolitical, environmental, or economic — these systems fail in spectacular ways.
We’re optimising for the wrong variables — cost, speed, scale. Ecosystems optimise for fitness and resilience across different time horizons.
Stripping out redundancy, diversity, and slack in the name of efficiency makes society brittle when shocks arrive.
Perhaps it’s time we took a lesson from ecosystems: slow down, support local industry and food production, invest in community, and diversify rather than putting all our eggs in a single brittle basket. And as always think in long time horizons, not short.
Human societies are not ecosystems. But ecology offers a useful lesson: systems that eliminate redundancy look efficient right up until they fail. Maybe it’s time to stop treating inefficiency as a problem and start seeing it for what it is.
Resilience isn’t free — but it’s necessary.
Where have you seen fragility show up in systems you’re part of — communities, workplaces, infrastructure, politics?
And in other news…
Speaking of rhythms, I’m excited to get this preprint out into the world. This started as a nice lab retreat project and turned into something exciting. Population and community responses to the fast, slow, and seasonal components of environmental variation. Note, preprints are not yet peer-reviewed. It’s a way of sharing research ahead of peer-review, which deals with some of the issues I highlighted over the past couple of weeks.
Speaking of resilience of society and short-term thinking, Tom Logan highlights Rather than short‑term fixes, communities need flexible plans to prepare for a range of likely climate impact. This is NZ centric, but the lessons apply everywhere.
“…following disasters, communities often demand visible action that appears decisive. Yet, these reactions can create more problems than they solve.
When high-impact weather events drive long-term policy decisions, we risk implementing changes that seem protective but actually increase the risk of future disasters or misallocate limited resources.”
And it turns out apparent efficiency reductions in food systems may not be so. We all know that increasing crop diversity can reduce pests and pathogens and help plants use nutrients more efficiently. But many have argued that crop rotations can reduce outputs, threatening food security. Well, this paper finds that crop rotations actually increase calorie and macronutrient outputs across Europe. What a great result!
Global human population has surpassed Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity. Soon after the passing of Paul Ehrlich, Corey Bradshaw published this co-authored paper. Something has to give — we’re using more of Earth than it can sustainably provide.
"The Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources"
Restoration cannot be scaled up globally to save reefs from loss and degradation. A somewhat depressing dose of reality for coral reefs. Coral gardening won’t be enough given the constraints to scale it. But alternative strategies may help:
“Considering the constraints facing current restoration methods, our findings underscore the importance of exploring indirect interventions to support coral resilience while addressing CO2 reduction on a broader scale. For instance, combined approaches targeting both sea- and land-based stressors such as marine protected areas and water quality remediation could create synergistic benefits for reefs while also supporting local human communities with incentives for conservation.”
Despite the doom and gloom of the above few points, positive environmental stories abound. You just have to look for them. Here’s a beautiful story of the chestnut mining bee being discovered in New York after a gap of 119 years. Amazing. And if you follow my Notes, you’ll know I I couldn’t agree with the following point more. We don’t have to go into pristine ecosystems to get the benefits of nature. It’s on our doorstep.
“I am of the belief that every place has something interesting; it’s just a question of whether we spend the time looking right under our noses. We often forget about small creatures when they are not flashy. We have to stop working on the assumption that super-pristine habitats are the only things that have great things left in them.”
From the archives: Don’t forget non-forest carbon-rich ecosystems! Non-forest carbon-rich ecosystems need to be conserved and restored for biodiversity and climate benefits.
Thanks for that. Redundancy and insurance, very well put. Human like to run the show and like to ignore other species along the way. I am soon to be a senior and have campaigned on environmental issues for decades. It hurts a lot that yet another war was started for the oil, and the global economy goes into free fall. alternative energy resources have been around for decades too, but the fossil fuel industries still direct humanity for now.
Very insightful. Thank you.