Here is an example from economics and urban planning of how a diverse system can be a resilient system.

At its peak in 1950, the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Indianapolis employed 250 workers and turned out two million fizz-filled bottles of Coke a week. Now, it is home to the Bottleworks Hotel, the center of a mixed-use development that opened in late 2020 with the hopes of rejuvenating a neighborhood.

The developer of the site, Hendricks Commercial Properties, said the pandemic had shown the value of diversification as a bulwark against shorter building life spans. No one could have predicted that a havoc-wreaking pandemic would make gathering places so unappealing, at least in the short term. But by having a mix of offices, retail, hotel and other uses, the risk for Hendricks is spread out. The Bottleworks development has an eight-screen movie theater, for instance, but also a tech incubator.

New York Times

This is not really the main point of the article, but I think a useful lesson to learn from the pandemic is that mixed-use neighborhoods where people can live, work, shop, study, and recreate seem to have been more resilient. I don’t have data to back this up, and it should be studied, but it is pretty obvious that the central business district in my city has been hard hit. Very few people live there. The office towers normally fill up each morning with thousands (tens or hundreds of thousands?) of suburban train and car commuters. Restaurants and other services are full of these people on weekdays and often close early on weekday evenings and sometimes are closed on the weekend. Hotels and other businesses that are open in the evening serve business travelers, convention goers, and tourists. There is some shopping, but more luxury goods aimed at these tourists and convention goers rather than basic grocery and household goods. So take away the office workers, business travelers, convention goers, and tourists, and the place is empty. Businesses are devastated. Financially, the city depends on wage, sales, and business tax revenues from the central business district to fund its services throughout the rest of the city. So getting more people to live within walking distance of downtown, and having more “normal” businesses that serve normal people there, could make it more resilient.

The same principle applies to natural ecosystems and agricultural systems too. Diversity might make a system a bit less efficient in terms of production, but you have a variety of organisms waiting in the wings to step in and fill functions if a dominant species that used to fill those functions is lost due to disease, disaster or environmental change (or combinations of these.)

I am thinking about this as I read a book called What’s So Good About Biodiversity by Donald Maier. The author has some reasonable points about biologists using the term biodiversity as a sort of lazy shorthand for ecosystem function or specific benefits. But overall, I find the author to someone without an ounce of understanding of how systems function. He literally can’t see the forest for the trees. He also seems to be a person with zero emotional connection to nature, which I find sad and abnormal. I’m going to call him a biopath – like a psychopath, a person who does not have normal emotions toward other people and is not really aware of what those emotions would feel like. I think there is a normal range of strength of emotion people feel about nature, and I accept that for some people the feelings are not all that strong compared to their feelings about, say, constructed environments or manufactured goods. But to feel nothing is not normal, and the 500 pages of verbal diarrhea in Mr. Maier’s book do not make it any more normal. (I haven’t finished the book – perhaps it will get better towards the end, when Mr. Maier promises to explain what “better reasoning about nature’s value” would look like. If the book has a fantastic ending, I promise to come back and sing its praises in this blog.)