This is a book written in part and edited by C.S. (Buzz) Holling, a Cedar Key resident. It is a work of 16 chapters in 507 pages, published by Island Press, ISBN 1-55963-857-5. 
The Greek God Pan, god of the meadows dances to his own tune
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There are several caveats that I must include from the beginning. First, I am neither a mathematician nor a statistician. When I took the GRE's for graduate school, they made me promise not to take any course that involved mathematics. As a result, some chapters in this book were opaque to me. I skipped them. Secondly, the book is a compilation of many authors and I found the change in writing styles somewhat disconcerting. Like reading Chaucer with parts of the journey written by Mickey Spillane. With those two things aside, this is a very important book for those of us that constantly scratch our heads over the strange happenings in our human culture. This is a book that had its beginnings in the study of the flow of change in ecological systems, such as the Florida Everglades. The principles formulated in the study of these natural systems are then applied to human culture. Of course, major modifications had to be made to include the existence of human consciousness and our cultural organizations that adapt to changing needs. The crux of the message here is that human systems, like natural ecological systems, go through quantifiable changes. The picture, resembling a möbius strip, taken from the cover, illustrates this flow of change. There is an exploitation of a set of circumstances, developing into a stable system; which is then conserved, sometimes at all costs, just because it worked to solve the original problem. But as the world changes, the old solution fails to solve the new problems and the conservation effort crumples and releases to allow re-grouping and a new exploitation. The cycle then continues. A deeper insight, not fully explored (I think), is that human systems are a series of these flow patterns operating both independently and interconnected. An example is that the State of California experiments with legalization of Marijuana while the Federal Government resists any change to the present drug laws. It is the tension between the old ways and the new. It is the resulting flow of change that gives human systems a chance to progress or return, providing a massive amount of resilience. It should be apparent that simultaneous failures throughout the system can result in chaos, like the recent demise of the USSR. There are many more revelations within reach in this book, even for those of us who (because of some personal shortcomings, like me) must pick only the fruit close to the ground. Forgive me for over-stretching my metaphor; there are many more juicy tidbits in this book for anyone interested in the flow of human culture. | 