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When planning for the future, how do you balance adaptability to changing conditions with optimization to current conditions? This question underlies the tension between two frameworks for understanding and managing the interactions of people with the natural environment: resiliency and efficiency. On one hand, the interactions among and within human-natural systems often demonstrate variability and complex behavior, to which adaptation may be necessary. On the other hand, reductionism and efficiency provide the tools for addressing scarcity and the tradeoffs that scarcity necessitates. Therefore, it is beneficial to inform reductionist understanding and efficient management of human-natural systems with lessons from resilience and complexity and to inform resilience thinking through the use of efficiency-based tools. In this dissertation, I investigate three different natural resource questions using environmental economics techniques while drawing insight from the frameworks of resilience and complexity. For each issue, I focus on understanding and addressing a different dimension of pertinent variability. Specifically, I consider the following aspects of variation: · Variation across the preferences of individuals in society with a latent class model that links stated preferences and attitudes regarding the management of an invasive species in high-elevation forests. This demonstrates a small set of categorically different preferences for resilience-based management of the forests. · Variation in the capitalization of flood risk across different types of residential property using both a spatial-autoregressive hedonic pricing model and a non-parametric matching estimation. This demonstrates consistent, significant differences in the discount for properties in floodplains across condominiums and standalone properties. · Variation across the objectives of management over time by simulating a dynamic bioeconomic model of managing nutrient loading in a shallow lake system. This demonstrates the importance of considering the interaction of human dynamics with natural-system behavior. Combined, these efforts demonstrate the possibilities for, and benefits from, using the frameworks of resilience and complexity for perspective and the frameworks of efficiency and optimization as tools, thereby connecting resilience with economics when investigating issues involving complex, interacting human-natural systems.