One tenet of ecological sustainability (riding the Holling/Gunderson wave) is that we need those damn forest fires. The promote innovation in the system. Without them, the whole eco-system would harden up and eventually collapse entirely.
There's an analague there; I don't like it but I want to ride it a bit. It goes like this: Developing systems need catastrophes in order to grow resilience.
I'm fine with that as an abstract idea. Certainly, we see that resilience grows in systems that have been damaged, but not to the point of collapse. Florida has gotten much more resilient after its multiple hurricanes, New Orleans has not.
When we start looking at this from the point of view of insurgency, though, the cloudiness comes. Is it possible to argue that infrastructure systems need attacks?
Certainly you can say that the tenet only states that their resilience will grow if they're attacked. It's not saying that they "should" be attacked.
But in the ecological world, we need these minor catastrophes in order to keep the major ones at bay. The analogy leads me to think of low-intensity conflicts as venting systems for global social networks. We may need them to keep happening, just so the network as a whole doesn't get brittle enough to fracture back into major war.
Comments