p.1 if we are dealing with a system profoundly affected by changes external to it, and continually
confronted by the unexpected, the constancy of its behavior becomes less important than the persistence of the relationships.
Attention shifts, therefore, to the qualitative and to questions of existence or not.
p.13 To this point, I have argued as if the world were completely deterministic. In fact, the behavior
of ecological systems is profoundly affected by random events.
p.17 Resilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of
the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and
still persist. In this definition resilience is the property of the system and persistence or probability
of extinction is the result.
p.18 In Slobodkin's terms (36) evolution is like a game, but a distinctive one in which the only
payoff is to stay in the game. Therefore, a major strategy selected is not one maximizing either
efficiency or particular reward, but one which allows persistence by maintaining flexibility above all else.
p.21 A management approach based on resilience, on the other hand, would emphasize
the need to keep options open, the need to view events in a regional rather than a local context, and the need to emphasize
heterogeneity. Flowing from this would be not the presumption of sufficient knowledge, but the recognition
of our ignorance; not the assumption that future events are expected, but that they will be unexpected.
The resilience framework can accommodate this shift of perspective, for it does not require a precise
capacity to predict the future, but only a qualitative capacity to devise systems that can absorb and accommodate future events
in whatever unexpected form they may take.
