Nature's Resilience

Nature's Resilience is about how resilience manifests itself in the natural world, and how such biological resilience may help us understand our own human resilience. The ways that biological organisms survive and thrive within a changing world can tell us a lot about ourselves, our behaviours and our approach to problem-solving. We may not be able to learn directly from the pine tree, the bear or the octopus, but they can reveal activities, behaviours, even chemicals or genes, that can benefit our world. What is more, animals and plants have been at the resiliency game for much longer than people and many have thrived through tumultuous, evolutionary times. The biological world can provide examples of how nature has solved challenges, and we should be humble enough to take note and reflect. The solutions can indeed have relevance for our complex and sophisticated range of human activities such as healthcare and wellbeing, including the sources of valuable drugs that can alleviate human ailments; physical security and national deterrence; crisis management and business continuity; organisational agility and corporate networking. By focusing on ten profiles of specific plants and animals, this book provides a unique window on our understanding of resilience in a broader context and by so doing provides pointers as to how we might improve and save ourselves from worsening the imbalance between the natural world and the human one.