Resilience reconsidered: Case histories from disease ecology

TL;DR

This paper broadens ecological resilience to include human cognitive modules and cultural factors, using information theory and renormalization to analyze responses to habitat degradation, with implications for public health.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework integrating cognitive submodules and cultural context into ecological resilience analysis using advanced information-theoretic methods.

Findings

Identification of punctuated responses to habitat degradation

Application of renormalization formalism to ecological resilience

Insights into public health impacts of urban and industrial decline

Abstract

We expand the current understanding of ecological resilience to include the nested hierarchy of cognitive submodules that particularly, if not uniquely, delineates human ecosystems. These modules, ranging from the immune system to the local social network, are embedded in a cultural milieu which, to take the perspective of the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Boyd, ''is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth''. We begin by extending recent treatments of cognitive process as associated with characteristic information sources to a certain class of ecosystems through a generalization of coarse-graining. In the spirit of the Large Deviations Program, we then import renormalization formalism via the Asymptotic Equipartition Theorem to obtain punctuated response to parameters of increasing habitat degradation. A Legendre transform of an appropriate joint information permits analysis away from critical points, and generates the expected quasi-stability in a highly natural manner. We interweave the discussion with applications to the public health impacts of the massive deurbanization and deindustrialization presently afflicting the United States.