Diversified flexibility confers resilience in unpredictable environments across scales

Evidence

To buffer against uncertainty, Ed and Paulie run a diversified farm. The cows are the mainstay but in years when milk prices are down, maybe the lamb market will pay the kids’ tuition, or maybe the Christmas trees. They survive in an era of disappearing family farms by a resilience rooted in flexibility, where stability comes from diversity. … It’s the same for Tetraphis, a moss that is hedging its bets in an unpredictable landscape where a landslide of decay can disrupt years of steady growth. It achieves stability in an unstable habitat by freely switching between reproductive strategies. When the colony is sparse and there is lots of open space, it pays to be clonal. The gemmae can occupy the bare wood more quickly than any spore and maintain a competitive advantage against other moss species. But when it gets crowded, the only offspring that have a chance are spores. And so sexual reproduction is begun, to produce spores of divergent genetic makeup that will be blown away from the parents in their dwindling habitat. It’s a gamble that any spore will land on a suitable log and be able to start a new colony. But it’s a sure thing that without disturbance the colony will become extinct if it stays in one place. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 343

Categorization

• XREF: The farm-as-ecosystem analogy (diversification against unpredictable disturbance) carries the book’s braided human-and-nonhuman observational thread straight into the polyad’s land/place and environmental-justice courses. — connects to: Tetraphis switches between clonal and sexual reproduction based on colony density — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 340; Mosses evolved two reproductive strategies trading dispersal distance against genetic novelty — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 323; A society’s resilience lies in self-determined capacity to adapt to change — Kyle Whyte, Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and…, 41 (+8 more)
• SEED: An essay could be built around the farm/moss parallel: how family farms and disturbance-adapted species both survive by keeping options open rather than optimizing for one strategy.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Plastic resilience requires colliding energies; mere flexibility is passive conciliation #complicates (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 252
• Plasticity is adaptive while flexibility is submission, not resourcefulness #complicates (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 23
• Flexibility is passivity — conciliation, not resilience #contradicts (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 252
• Resilience marks irreversible psychic change, not a return to prior equilibrium #expands (0.70) — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 3800