WHAT WOULD NATURE DO?

Countless pundits warn that civilization is in crisis and then write books that often serve little purpose beyond self-promotion. This one delivers useful, rational advice.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has joined numerous threats to global stability, including terrorism, pollution, climate change, and the rise of autocrats. According to DeFries, an environmental geographer, Columbia professor, and MacArthur fellow, the news isn’t necessarily catastrophic provided we take lessons from nature, which has been overcoming crises for more than 4 billion years. Following an introduction, the author discusses four of nature’s tools that humans would do well to adopt: circuit breakers, diversity, networking, and bottom-up decision-making. “As the clockwork world of the twentieth century recedes into the rearview mirror,” she writes, “these strategies hold the keys to our prosperity and persistence in our dynamic, interconnected, complex world.” No one tells ants how to build their amazingly complex nests. It’s a bottom-up process during which individuals follow simple signals from the local environment. Veins in the earliest plants supplied leaves directly from a central source. The process of evolution produced leaves with complex, looping, interconnected networks of veins capable of surviving serious damage. The internet takes advantage of this safety feature, electric grids not so much. No Pollyanna, DeFries warns that humans are only reliable problem-solvers when it comes to short-term situations. Long-range scenarios—e.g., dealing with climate change and widespread poverty—always seem stuck in the discussion phase. Rules to solve global problems inevitably involve tactics that work and those that fail, but reality is messier. Thus, top-down command economies—e.g., the old Soviet Union—are disastrously inefficient, but pure bottom-up free markets produce cruelties that require action from the top. “Ironically,” writes DeFries, “the more civilization becomes sophisticated, urbanized, and seemingly removed from nature, the more it becomes interconnected and mired in complexity. Nature’s strategies become even more relevant. They can postpone and cushion the fall in the endless cycle of growth, stagnation, breakdown, and renewal.”

Sturdy science applied to society’s biggest problems and good food for thought.