What Would Nature Do?
A Guide for Our Uncertain Times
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Not long ago, the future seemed predictable. Now, certainty about the course of civilization has given way to fear and doubt. Raging fires, ravaging storms, political upheavals, financial collapse, and deadly pandemics lie ahead—or are already here. The world feels less comprehensible and more dangerous, and no one, from individuals to businesses and governments, knows how to navigate the path forward.
Ruth DeFries argues that a surprising set of time-tested strategies from the natural world can help humanity weather these crises. Through trial and error over the eons, life has evolved astonishing and counterintuitive tricks in order to survive. DeFries details how a handful of fundamental strategies—investments in diversity, redundancy over efficiency, self-correcting feedbacks, and decisions based on bottom-up knowledge—enable life to persist through unpredictable, sudden shocks. Lessons for supply chains from a leaf’s intricate network of veins and stock market-saving “circuit breakers” patterned on planetary cycles reveal the power of these approaches for modern life. With humility and willingness to apply nature’s experience to our human-constructed world, DeFries demonstrates, we can withstand uncertain and perilous times. Exploring the lessons that life on Earth can teach us about coping with complexity, What Would Nature Do? offers timely options for civilization to reorganize for a safe and prosperous future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Environmental geographer Defries (The Big Ratchet) presents a disappointing treatise on what humans could learn from how the Earth's ecosystems maintain balance. Adopting an off-puttingly scolding tone, she writes that such problems as climate change, public health crises, and global market upsets are "the by-products of an energy-guzzling civilization," and can be tackled using "time-tested tactics" from nature, such as diversification and self-correction. She makes a good case for her contention that humans should learn from nature, and to that end explains how a rejected Cold War era proposal for a decentralized military communication network, modeled on the "loopy" vein structure of plant leaves, later became a model for the internet. Elsewhere, she analyzes "Smokey Bear's Blunder": the National Park Service's misbegotten policy, symbolized by the mascot, of trying to prevent all forest fires, before it was understood that small wildfires help to clear deadwood and "limit damage" from larger blazes. Unfortunately, her anecdotes are marred by a sermonizing tone. ("Continue your experiments... but do so with humility. Expect that your limited knowledge, human foibles, or more likely both will thwart your efforts.") Readers in search of a strong discussion of environmental issues should look elsewhere.
