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“The greatest powers of the physical environment slam into the resilient forces of life, and nothing much happens. For a very long time, 150 million years, the species within the rain forest evolved to absorb precisely this form and magnitude of violence. They encoded the predictable occurrence of nature’s storms in the letters of their genes. Animals and plants have come to use heavy rains and floods routinely to time episodes in their life cycle.”
157 ¶ 24
“But diversity, the property that makes resilience possible, is vulnerable to blows that are greater than natural perturbations. It can be eroded away fragment by fragment, and irreversibly so if the abnormal stress is unrelieved.”
“Eliminate a great many species and the local ecosystem starts to decay visibly....an eroding ecosystem”
160, ¶ 35-36.
"This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms -- folded them into its genes and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady."
160, ¶ 38.
Mode is interpretive and argues a value.
“descriptive & analytical of a process.”
Summary
He defines biotic potential in the face of environmental resistance as a necessary tension in every ecosystem.
Resiliency is an ecological value based on diversity of species and habitat stability.
Creatures are adapted to the conditions of the place in which they are born, grow, mature and die by means of genetic variability, instinct, learned behavior, and fortune and may depend on one another