Rafe Sagarin - Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and D

Description

Whether discussing responses to terrorism, natural disaster, or disease, the past decade is full of failures. Many disasters were evaded only because of slip-ups on the part of the enemy: the underwear bomber’s underwear didn’t explode; SARS just wasn’t that bad. Other disasters landed full body blows, yet the response was more of the same: add a new charade to the security checkpoint, another meter to the levee wall. This time, the argument goes, we’ll finally have the risk—suicide bomber or hurricane—beat. Inevitably, we will find, we don’t.

Ecologist Rafe Sagarin offers a revolutionary prescription for security systems in society: applying lessons from 3.5 billion years of evolution to fortify ourselves against disaster and war. More than copying what nature looks like, Sagarin argues that we must learn from how nature is organized, how it acts, and how it continually grows and diversifies on this dangerous and unpredictable planet.

Sagarin brings the abstractions of ecology to life to uncover nature’s examples of how can we detect danger, understand behavior, and defend against disaster or disease outbreaks. What can we do to avoid threats? Learn from the octopus, the picture of variability, from its ability to change color to its capacity to learn how to use coconut shells as body armor. Both traits evolved, but where one was preprogrammed, the other is open-ended, making use of whatever’s available. Within that combination of long- and short-term variability lays powerful protection.

LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS gathers wisdom from the hedgehog and the salmon, mangrove swamps and viral parasites, showing how nature’s lessons can transform our security systems from a series of after-the-fact, one-time interventions to proactive, holistic, and adaptable strategies that not only protect us from the threats we know about, but prepare us to respond efficiently and effectively to danger lurking around the corner. No system will ever be perfect, but that’s nature’s, and Sagarin’s, point: it’s not possible to eliminate all risk. Given how many species have been able to survive millions of years despite being under constant existential threat, learning from nature should enable us to do at least half as well. It’s all here in Sagarin’s timely, original, and totally game-changing book.

Rafe Sagarin is a marine ecologist and Environmental Policy Analyst at the University of Arizona. His research has appeared in Science, Nature, and Foreign Policy, among other publications.

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Link

http://www.booksmith.com/event/learningfromoctopus