The current crisis of the Euro emphasizes some basic lessons from the study of resilience of dynamic systems. Attributes of complex systems that enhance resilience are diversity, redundancy and modularity. There is a cost of maintaining resilience. The decision to have one currency among different countries in Europe was based on a focus of efficiency. This could be reached as long as economies would grow steadily and the countries kept their budgets in check.
Unfortunately, some countries did not so. Also Germany and France have broken maximum governmental budget shortages, and no actions were taken. It sounds as if the basic principles of institutional design were not met. Meaning that there was no proper monitoring and were no proper enforcement mechanisms. Surprisingly there are not even regulations how countries may leave the EU or Euro.
By creating a tightly connected system without proper enforcement it is no surprise that the resilience of the European, and global, economy has been decreased. The budget crisis leads now to a spiral of distrust among participants in the action arena of the global financial system. It does not help either that the USA is not able to reach to any solution to their own budget problems.
If there was more modularity we could afford countries to fail. But in the tightly globalized financial system, a failure leads to a cascade of dominos falling. A short-sighted focus on efficiency has led to a costly endeavor and likely collapse of the euro. We can learn from long-lasting biological systems and the importance to develop system features that enhance resilience. Hopefully during the recovery after the pending transformation more emphasis will be given to design system properties to enhance resilience.
William F. Ruddiman pose an interesting hypothesis by arguing that humans have had a measurable impact on the climate system for 8000 years. In his book “Plow, Plagues and Petroleum”, the emeritus environmental science professor shows interesting anomalies in the trends of atmospheric CO2 concentration (since 8000 years) ago when Europeans start cutting down forest in Middle and Eastern Europe for agriculture, and CH4 concentration (since 5000 years) when irrigated rice farming started at large scale. This has led to an temperature increase of 0.8 degrees Celsius before the industrial revolution started which led to a similar amount of emissions, but in a much shorter period. Ruddiman argues that instead of heading to a cooler climate, as was expected from traditional climatology (due to regular orbital changes) increased human-induced emissions avoided this cooling down, and may lead to a brief warming period (on geological scale). There is also an interesting chapter where brief declines of CO2 concentrations are related to major pandamics (like black plague), which led to a temporarely regrowth of forests. If Ruddiman’s thesis is true humans have unconsiously entended the K-phase of preferable climate before a dramatic reorganization phase (in the coming years?) occur. 
