C. S. Holling (1973), Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:1–23 — DOI-10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245
Key takeaways
- Two properties, not one. “Resilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist.” “Stability, on the other hand, is the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance.”
- They can come apart. The spruce budworm forest is “highly unstable and it is because of this instability that it has an enormous resilience”. Insect populations in extreme climates fluctuate widely and absorb extremes. Great Lakes fisheries are stable, with low resilience.
- Domains of attraction. More realistic predator–prey models (lags, contagious attack, a prey reproduction threshold) produce bounded domains of attraction, outside which a population goes extinct. Holling takes distinct domains to be “not uncommon” in closed systems, while noting that open systems often recover by reinvasion.
- Measuring resilience. Two measures are proposed: the area of the domain of attraction, and how much the forces must change before every trajectory leads to extinction. Both concern the boundary, not the equilibrium.
- Management. An equilibrium-centred approach that secures a stable maximum sustained yield “might so change these deterministic conditions that the resilience is lost or reduced”, so that a rare event triggers sudden change. A resilience approach keeps options open and does not presume the future is predictable.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, as a supplement to the essay on organizational will. Its §6.1 claim, “stability is not viability”, is Holling’s distinction made twenty years before Aubin’s monograph. It is the primary citation for the conceptual point, with Aubin (LIT-714) for the formal one. Northstar’s emergency regime, effective at suppression while eroding maintenance, is Holling’s maximum-sustained-yield story. The account is THEORY-132.