Adaptive Capacity Quotes

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

I don't see the desert as barren at all; I see it as full and ripe. It doesn't need to be flattered with rain. It certainly needs rain, but it does with what it has, and creates amazing beauty.

Your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce - to think, to learn, to create, to adapt. That's true financial independence. It's not having wealth; it's having the power to produce wealth.

Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.

A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

The value of catastrophic events is that they can help people face up to problems that are otherwise impossible to address.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

Scaling is multidimensional. Different methods address different things.

All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.

Dinosaurs were huge and powerful; they could not adapt and they died out. And so the big difference between dinosaurs and cockroaches is adaptability: one is able to adjust, while the other, apparently, couldn't... The same analogy applies to fighting, and probably any other sport. It's not always the strong that survive. It takes brains, guts, tolerance and forward thinking. We've seen this since the beginning of mixed martial arts.

Flexibility is the key to stability.

Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

You can always think that we're old and not innovative, but there is no company that can limp on for 139 years without being creative and having the genes to change.

I basically look at how exponential emerging technological changes runs counter-intuitive to the way our linear brains make projections about change, and so we don't realize how fast the future is coming.

I can adjust to any situation.

... universal adoption of the institutions of the free society would better enable adaptation to climate both now and in the future. It would also ensure that, if at some point in the future, a real catastrophe, whether human-induced or otherwise (including climate change), does loom on the horizon, humanity would be in a better position to address it.

I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

There’s a carrying capacity in any society for how much change it can incorporate at any one time.

In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack. The result? Overwhelm - on an unprecedented scale.

As Americans, we have traditionally been the optimists sporting the 'can-do' attitude. But when it comes to addressing climate adaptation and resiliency, we seem to be more 'can't do' than 'can-do.'

The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.

India survived through the centuries by combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary psychological skill.