# Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems *Holling · Ecological & Commons, Complexity & Systems · Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics · 1973 · Open access* Holling's paper is the origin of resilience as a technical concept, and the taproot beneath everything else in the ecological-commons set: Walker and colleagues, Levin, and Holling's own later panarchy work all grow from the distinction it draws here. Its move is to separate two properties that ecology had long run together under the single word stability. Stability, in Holling's usage, is the tendency of a system to return to an equilibrium after a disturbance, measured by how fast it returns and how little it fluctuates on the way. Resilience is something else entirely: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while still keeping the same essential relationships between its variables, measured not by constancy but by persistence, by how much shock it can take before it flips into a qualitatively different state. The two can vary independently, and Holling's central and counter-intuitive claim is that they often trade off against each other. His worked cases carry the argument: the spruce budworm forest is wildly unstable in its numbers and precisely because of that instability enormously resilient, while the climatically buffered, heavily managed fisheries of the Great Lakes stay steady right up until they collapse and then do not recover, because the pursuit of a constant maximum sustained yield strips out the very variability that let them absorb shocks. Underneath sits the idea the paper is most cited for, domains of attraction: a system does not have one equilibrium but several, separated by thresholds, and the question that matters is not how stable it is within its current basin but how likely a disturbance is to push it across a boundary into another, from which return may be difficult or impossible. The management conclusions are where the paper speaks most directly to organisational work. A regime built to maximise efficiency and predictable yield buys short-term stability at the cost of resilience, and so manufactures fragility, engineering out the slack and heterogeneity a system needs to survive the unexpected; the alternative Holling sketches rests not on a presumption of sufficient knowledge but on the recognition of ignorance, not on the assumption that the future can be predicted but on the certainty that it will surprise us, and therefore on keeping options open, thinking regionally rather than locally, and preserving the heterogeneity that underwrites adaptive capacity. For a corpus that resists the engineering-away of complexity and the optimisation of psychological safety into a measurable, constant deliverable, this is the scientific bedrock: the efficiency-versus-resilience argument, the case against maximum sustained yield as a model for anything living, and the reframing of safety as a capacity to absorb the unexpected rather than a state of enforced constancy all begin here. Two cautions are worth stating. First, resilience is morally neutral in Holling's hands and stays that way: a degraded, locked-in or pathological state can be highly resilient too (his later work makes this explicit), so resilience is not a synonym for health or a thing to be maximised without first asking resilience of what, to what, and for whom. Second, the word has since been thinned in management and wellbeing discourse into an individual virtue, a capacity to bounce back that relocates the burden of a brittle system onto the people inside it, which is close to the reverse of Holling's systems-level, structural meaning; read against the original, most organisational uses of the term are really reaching for stability. (Text drawn from the 1973 Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics paper, vol. 4, pp. 1–23.) - **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/holling-1973/ - **View the source paper:** https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/26/1/RP-73-003.pdf - **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=holling-1973 ## Connected concepts (9) - [Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ostrom-2010.md) (paper) - [Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/perrow-1984.md) (paper) - [Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/holling-2001.md) (paper) - [Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/levin-1998.md) (paper) - [Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/walker-et-al-2004.md) (paper) - [Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/folke-2006.md) (paper) - [Efficiency vs Resilience](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/efficiency-vs-resilience.md) - [Adaptive Cycle](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-adaptive-cycle-and-self-organised-criticality.md) - [Resilience is a Verb](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/woods-2018.md) (paper)