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"Fisher, Len"
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The perfect swarm : the science of complexity in everyday life
\"The modern science of complexity has revealed how fish, birds, bees, and ants use swarm intelligence to guide group movements and to help in the search for food and shelter. Used by humans, swarm intelligence capitalizes on the diversity of our families, our groups of friends, our business contacts, and our social acquaintances to help us make better decisions. In The Perfect Swarm, Len Fisher shows how we can use swarm intelligence to start a craze, to work better in committee and get more from our social networks, or even know when we should change our minds.\"--Publisher description.
Book
Sustainability: We need to focus on overall system outcomes rather than simplistic targets
Many of the global challenges that confront humanity are interlinked in a dynamic complex network, with multiple feedback loops, nonlinear interactions and interdependencies that make it difficult, if not impossible, to consider individual threats in isolation. These challenges are mainly dealt with, however, by considering individual threats in isolation (at least in political terms). The mitigation of dual climate and biodiversity threats, for example, is linked to a univariate 1.5°C global warming boundary and a global area conservation target of 30% by 2030. The situation has been somewhat improved by efforts to account for interactions through multidimensional target setting, adaptive and open management and market‐based decision pathways. But the fundamental problem still remains—that complex systems such as those formed by the network of global threats have emergent properties that are more than the sum of their parts. We must learn how to deal with or live with these properties if we are to find effective ways to cope with the threats, individually and collectively. Here, we argue that recent progresses in complex systems research and related fields have enhanced our ability to analyse and model such entwined systems to the extent that it offers the promise of a new approach to sustainability. We discuss how this may be achieved, both in theory and in practice, and how human cultural factors play an important but neglected role that could prove vital to achieving success. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Journal Article
Avoid major disasters by welcoming minor change
In a recent editorial (see Nature 525, 157; 2015), Nature suggests that nations should \"keep a welcome\" for refugees. I agree. This pressure releasing approach could serve as an effective paradigm for policy development, being used to handle emergent crises of many types.
Journal Article