Author Archives: Steve Carpenter

Dead Ahead: Similar Early Warning Signals of Change in Climate, Ecosystems, Financial Markets, Human Health

What do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth’s climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common? According to a paper published this week in … Continue reading

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A Novel for the Long Now

Imagine that we wanted our descendants to persist for 10,000 years. How could we help that to happen? This question motivates most of the research on resilience, as well as initiatives such as Clock of the Long Now < http://www.longnow.org/> … Continue reading

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Scenarios and Resilience

People or organizations can focus their effort on a narrow goal, or they can diversify the uses of resources to explore and innovate. It is hard to do both at the same time. This pattern arises in politics as well … Continue reading

Posted in Adaptation, Greenlash, Scenarios | Tagged | 1 Comment

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

The closing words of Darwin’s Origin of Species are probably the best known passage in all of biology: “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or … Continue reading

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Punctuated Equilibrium in Environmental Policy

Readers familiar with panarchy theory will find a rich set of relevant examples in a new book edited by Robert Repetto, Punctuated Equilibrium and the Dynamics of U.S. Environmental Policy. In Chapter 2, Frank Baumgartner explains how U.S. environmental policy … Continue reading

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Tremors and Tipping Points

Tipping points cause some important ecosystem surprises.  Examples include collapses of rangelands, water quality, and some fisheries.  The trouble with tipping points is that they are hard to anticipate in advance.  However, tremors may provide an advance warning of some … Continue reading

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Self-Organization of Ecosystem Lumpiness

We have growing evidence that ecosystems are lumpy. Along an axis such as body size, for example, we find clusters of similar-sized species separated by intervals of body size in which no species are found. Multiple explanations exist for lumpy … Continue reading

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Greening of Cost-Benefit Analysis

The use of economic discounting for environmental decision analysis is often criticized. Discounting refers to the method of weighing present versus future benefits. Customarily, discounting has been calculated at a constant exponential rate, analogous to the interest rate on a … Continue reading

Posted in Ecological Economics | 1 Comment

New Journals

Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy is a new peer-reviewed, open access journal that provides a platform for the dissemination of new practices and for dialogue emerging out of the field of sustainability. According to the journal’s web site, “The e-Journal … Continue reading

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Positive Steps for Resilient Ecosystem Services

Although much of the mainstream press attention to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (see State of the World’s Ecosystems posted 31 March 2005) has emphasized the losses of ecosystem services and the adverse trends, a substantial fraction of the MA technical … Continue reading

Posted in Big Back Loop, Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios | 4 Comments