Ecosystem Importance Quotes

I don't kill predators," he says. "Why not? Fellow feeling?" "They're to important to the ecosystem.

The same way biodiversity is important to biological ecosystems, business diversity is important to economic ecosystems. It's good to have an abundance of various kinds of businesses. This cultivates resilience in the system.

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control.

If there's a lack of trust in an economic system, it introduces additional costs into the system. And those costs are shared among all participants in the economic ecosystem. So that's why trust is important.

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.

The intricate networks of ecosystems teach us the importance of building strong supply chains and partnerships.

Its important to acknowledge inter-dependence in economic ecosystems. But I think it's also important to emphasize inter-value-adding. So in addition to acknowledging our need for each other, we should also emphasize the ways that we add value to each other. The former promotes necessary appreciation for others. And the latter promotes necessary sense of self worth. And that's a good balance.

As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt – if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss is the common response. This is true of the end-Cretaceous, when the impact of an extraterrestrial rock caused near-immediate global winter, and of the end-Permian, when skyrocketing greenhouse gases from unprecedented volcanic eruptions sparked global warming.

Because if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s one more INFP trying to act like a type that they’re not. The world has enough extroverts. It has enough sensors. It has enough thinkers and judgers, and each of them is out there fulfilling their uniquely important role within our social ecosystem.

The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today.

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages ts guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.

And to start with I would focus on five of these killer apps that have immediate application to governing today: (1) the ability to adapt when confronted by strangers with superior economic and military might without being hobbled by humiliation; (2) the ability to embrace diversity; (3) the ability to assume ownership over the future and one’s own problems; (4) the ability to get the balance right between the federal and the local—that is, to understand that a healthy society, like a healthy tropical forest, is a network of healthy ecosystems on top of ecosystems, each thriving on its own but nourished by the whole; and, maybe most important, (5) the ability to approach politics and problem-solving in the age of accelerations with a mind-set that is entrepreneurial, hybrid, and heterodox and nondogmatic—mixing and coevolving any ideas or ideologies that will create resilience and propulsion, no matter whose “side” they come from. Of

Commercial loans serve various purposes, from financing expansion and working capital to equipment acquisition and real estate investment – They’re a very important part of the capital ecosystem of the world, and of its individual nations.

It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens? Guilty as Charged Some scholars try to exonerate our species, placing the blame on the vagaries of the climate (the usual scapegoat in such cases).

Wherever forest can develop in a species-appropriate manner, they offer particularly beneficial functions that are legally placed above lumber production in many forest laws. I am talking about respite and recovery. Current discussions between environmental groups and forest users, together with the first encouraging results-such as the forest in Konigsdorf-give hope that in the future forests will continue to live out their hidden lives, and our descendants will still have the opportunity to walk through the trees in wonder. This what this ecosystem achieves: the fullness of life with tens of thousands of species interwoven and interdependent. And just how important this interconnected global network of forests is to other areas of Nature is made clear by this little story from Japan. Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at the Hokkaido University, discovered that leaves falling into streams and rivers leach acids into the ocean that stimulate growth of plankton, the first and most important building block in the food chain. More fish because of the forest? The researcher encouraged the planting of more trees in coastal areas, which did, in fact, lead to higher yields for fisheries and oyster growers.

Fresh drinking water is an issue of primary importance, since it is indispensable for human life and for supporting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Sources of fresh water are necessary for health care, agriculture and industry. Water supplies used to be relatively constant, but now in many places demand exceeds the sustainable

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

To avert climate crises, it's important that humanity protects and restores natural carbon sinks, like forests and wetlands. But modern advancements in architecture, materials science, and construction give us the ability to make our modern cities into carbon sinks. We have the technologies, the knowledge, and the capabilities to make cities more valuable to the natural ecosystem than forests are.

A good family farm produces more, in net terms, than the farm family consumes. The good farmer has secured enough land to grow crops and support his or her livestock. The extra production beyond the farm family’s own consumption can be sold and traded for other goods and services—TVs, clothes, books. Some countries are like good family farms, with more bio-capacity than what it takes, in net terms, to provide for their inhabitants. Compare this with a weekend hobby farm, with honeybees, a rabbit, and an apple tree, where most resources have to be bought from elsewhere. Presently 80% of the world population lives in countries that are like hobby farms. They consume more, in net terms, than what the ecosystems of their country can regenerate. The rest is imported or derives from unsustainable overuse of local fields and forests.

Foreign species are acting like any other species: a few have major impacts, but most don’t. Because a large majority of them have such limited impacts, the importation of lots of new species almost always increases the numbers of species in any given location, just as we saw in the forests and waters of Lake Maggiore. When lots of new arrivals establish breeding populations, hardly any ‘natives’ die out as a consequence.

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing 100 pounds or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens?

When we think of the rain forest, we might think only of the Amazon—the lungs of the Earth—but our mini ecosystems are important as well, and it’s up to us to try to understand their complexities and do all we can to keep them healthy and thriving. My home, Vancouver Island, is a rain forest. I’ve gotten more involved in my own community projects, while still supporting Green Party efforts worldwide and Indigenous and First Nations’ family and culture initiatives.

Every time political leaders of the world meet in those funny events called G8 or G20, the failure of political power—their lack of grasp on the future—becomes more evident. When they met in Sapporo, Hokkaido, in July 2008, and in L’Aquila in July 2009, the powerful men and women who lead the nations were supposed to make very important decisions about the crucial subject of climate change and its effects on the planetary ecosystem. But they were completely unable to say or do anything meaningful, so they have decided that, by 2050, toxic emissions will be reduced by half. How? Why? No answer. No political or technological action has been taken, no shorter deadline has been decided upon. Such a decision is like a shaman’s ritual, like a rain dance. The complexity of the problem exceeds world politicians’ powers of knowledge and influence. The future has escaped the grasp of political technique and everything has capsized, perhaps because of speed.

Just consider the next thought that pops up in your mind. Where did it come from? Did you freely choose to think it, and only then did you think it? Certainly not. The process of self-exploration begins with simple things, and becomes progressively harder. At first, we realise that we do not control the world outside us. I don’t decide when it rains. Then we realise that we do not control what’s happening inside our own body. I don’t control my blood pressure. Next, we understand that we don’t even govern our brain. I don’t tell the neurons when to fire. Ultimately we should realise that we do not control our desires, or even our reactions to these desires. Realising this can help us become less obsessive about our opinions, about our feelings, and about our desires. We don’t have free will, but we can be a bit more free from the tyranny of our will. Humans usually give so much importance to their desires that they try to control and shape the entire world according to these desires. In pursuit of their cravings, humans fly to the moon, wage world wars, and destabilise the entire ecosystem. If we understand that our desires are not the magical manifestations of free choice, but rather are the product of biochemical processes (influenced by cultural factors that are also beyond our control), we might be less preoccupied with them. It is better to understand ourselves, our minds and our desires rather than try to realise whatever fantasy pops up in our heads.

So dominant is soy as industrial animal feed that the average person in the UK or Europe consumes approximately 61kg of soy per year, largely in the form of animal products such as chicken, pork, salmon, cheese, milk and eggs.36 Only 20–30 per cent of imported soy is ‘certified sustainable’ (and we have already discussed how little that means). So, if you live in the UK, there is a tennis court of land producing soy in the tropics just for you, and most of it comes from places like Brazil and Argentina where ecosystems that affect global climate are being destroyed.**

If humanity continues its suicidal ways to change the global climate, eliminate ecosystems, and exhaust Earth's natural resources, our species will very soon find itself forced into making a choice, this time engaging the conscious part of our brain. It is as follows: shall we be existential conservatives, keeping our genetically-based human nature while tapering off the activities inimical to ourselves and the rest of the biosphere? Or shall we use our new technology to accomodate the changes important solely to our own species, while letting the rest of life slip away? We have only a short time to decide.

It shouldn't be here. This sedge grass is decorative bullshit he imported from Northern Asia. The lab spent two years modifying it to slot into our ecosystem, all so that the mountain would literally smell of honey. Terra di latte e miele, she said, mockingly. Thank god my father went into business, not poetry. He's far too much of a romantic. I laughed, incredulous at this portrait of my stiff employer, and Aida reddened. It is romantic, if you think about it. He planted the grass for my mother. She's one of those Catholic Koreans, painfully devout. You know. The promised land, Canaan, found after forty years of wandering the desert. The land of milk and honey.

What is important in conserving an ecosystem is conserving the functions, the connections between organisms that form a complete, interacting whole. In reality, species do move, and the notion of ‘native’ species is inevitably arbitrary, often tied into national identity. In Britain, ‘native’ plants and animals are categorized as those that have inhabited Britain since the last ice age. In the United States, however, ‘native’ plants and animals are those that have existed there only since before Columbus landed in the Caribbean. These plants and animals have legal protection over and above ‘aliens’, but there is no easy distinction between native and non-native ranges for species, and non-native plants are not necessarily damaging to native diversity

All three dolphins were magnificent, absolute marvels of the ocean, and by all rights they should have been out in the Pacific, doing what 55 million years of evolution had designed them to do in the most important ecosystem on earth, instead of in here, leaping to the beat of cheesy pop songs. As I watched, sweat trickled down the back of my neck but something else was rising: anger. The show was soul-crushingly stupid. It was plainly and inanely stupid- all of this was stupid, everything that went on at the cove, the entire arrogant, selfish relationship we had with these animals and with all of nature, as though every bit of life existed only for our purposes. We behaved as though we were gods, deciding the fate of everything, but we weren't. We were just dumb. I felt a wave of despair wash over me.

Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.

The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was immediately washed away by the waves. Yet when the invaders advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint, one that would never be expunged. As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 200-kilogram, two-metre kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes five metres long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials – like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme. Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens? Guilty

The real improvements then must come, to a considerable extent, from the local communities themselves. We need local revision of our methods of land use and production. We need to study and work together to reduce scale, reduce overhead, reduce industrial dependencies; we need to market and process local products locally; we need to bring local economies into harmony with local ecosystems so that we can live and work with pleasure in the same places indefinitely; we need to substitute ourselves, our neighborhoods, our local resources, for expensive imported goods and services; we need to increase cooperation among all local economic entities: households, farms, factories, banks, consumers, and suppliers. If. we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide "jobs" to the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non- polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. In that way, we will put local capital to work locally, not to exploit and destroy the land but to use it well. This is not work just for the privileged, the well-positioned, the wealthy, and the powerful. It is work for everybody. I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession-not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting and destroying their homeland. The great, greedy, indifferent national and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing America's cities--it is killing our country. Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community. All true patriots must find ways of opposing it. --1991

Get used to it. The weather may feel like science fiction, but the science underlying it is very real and mundane. It takes only a small increase in global average temperatures to have a big effect on weather, because what drives the winds and their circulation patterns on the surface of the earth are differences in temperature. So when you start to change the average surface temperature of the earth, you change the wind patterns—and then before you know it, you change the monsoons. When the earth gets warmer, you also change rates of evaporation—which is a key reason we will get more intense rainstorms in some places and hotter dry spells and longer droughts in others. How can we have both wetter and drier extremes at the same time? As we get rising global average temperatures and the earth gets warmer, it will trigger more evaporation from the soil. So regions that are already naturally dry will tend to get drier. At the same time, higher rates of evaporation, because of global warming, will put more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so areas that are either near large bodies of water or in places where atmospheric dynamics already favor higher rates of precipitation will tend to get wetter. We know one thing about the hydrologic cycle: What moisture goes up must come down, and where more moisture goes up, more will come down. Total global precipitation will probably increase, and the amount that will come down in any one storm is expected to increase as well—which will increase flooding and gully washers. That’s why this rather gentle term “global warming” doesn’t capture the disruptive potential of what lies ahead. “The popular term ‘global warming’ is a misnomer,” says John Holdren. “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening to global climate is none of those. It is uneven geographically. It is rapid compared to ordinary historic rates of climatic change, as well as rapid compared to the adjustment times of ecosystems and human society. It is affecting a wide array of critically important climatic phenomena besides temperature, including precipitation, humidity, soil moisture, atmospheric circulation patterns, storms, snow and ice cover, and ocean currents and upwellings. And its effects on human well-being are and undoubtedly will remain far more negative than positive. A more accurate, albeit more cumbersome, label than ‘global warming’ is ‘global climatic disruption.’ 

The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was immediately washed away by the waves. Yet when the invaders advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint, one that would never be expunged. As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 200-kilogram, two-metre kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes five metres long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials – like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme. Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. Was it all the fault of Homo sapiens?

I firmly believe that a tradition’s development is strongly rooted in its ecosystem. Mexico isn’t very far from the equator, so there isn’t a big difference between the length of the day and the night throughout the year. In ancient Mexico, the day was divided into 20 fractions. Each consisted of approximately 72 minutes, thus resulting in 11 fractions of the day and 9 fractions of the night, which were stable during most of the year. Darkness prevailed during almost half of the day, giving way to the world of dreams and the nahual. That is why the nahual became as important as the tonal and gave rise to one of the most sophisticated dream cultures of the ancient world.

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

Generally, critics feel that by embracing novel ecosystems, we are abandoning hope of undoing the damage done by humans, or offering a free pass to companies or governments that damaged them in the first place. Still, with around a third of all ice-free land now thought to be covered by novel ecosystems, it grows increasingly important to wrestle with what these mongrel, immigrant communities mean for the future of our planet as a whole. And it is in abandoned places, where human-impacted land is not being managed—where non-native species and native species alike are left to their own devices, without heavy-handed but well-meaning intervention—that we might begin to view alien invasions over a longer period of time, and perhaps come to to appreciate that, in time, an ecosystem might start to adapt to its new citizens and find a new sense of balance.

An ecosystem might be likened to a great biological machine, perhaps. If this analogy is pursued, humanity must be seen as part of the machine. No doubt an important part—an engine, a key circuit—but in no case apart from the mechanism, as is often fallaciously assumed.

Winners in industries dominate at the top. Winners in ecosystems can create and capture value from a variety of positions, and choosing where to play is just as important as what, how, and when to play.

Run BTS!, the variety show started by BTS and Big Hit Entertainment on V Live, was the final piece of their new ecosystem of activities. For idol groups, not only did special appearances on variety programs allow fans to enjoy domains beyond music, but they were also important in highlighting each member’s unique personality. Both before and after 2000, the first generation of boy groups in Korea formed the basis of their popularity through variety show specials.

Unfortunately, one of the planet’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems will not survive two degrees intact. The science on corals and global warming has got steadily more alarming over recent years, in tandem with the accelerated destruction of reefs by rapidly rising temperatures around the world’s tropical coastlines, as has already been described. In 2018 the IPCC had to admit that ‘tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.’ Marine biologists watched in horror as the Great Barrier Reef suffered back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, losing fully half its coral cover in the process. The IPCC’s latest predictions for the two-degree world are dire: even if global temperatures stay under 1.5 degrees, 70–90% of reef-building corals will be lost. With two degrees of warming, this increases to 99%.

1. Sri Lanka’s Cultural and Historical Richness "Sri Lanka is a place where history lives in harmony with the present. From ancient temples to colonial fortresses, every corner of this island tells a story." Sri Lanka’s history stretches over 2,500 years, featuring incredible landmarks like the Sigiriya Rock Fortress and Anuradhapura's ancient ruins. The country is also home to the famous Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, an important religious site for Buddhists around the world. Each historic site tells a different story, making Sri Lanka a treasure trove of cultural and spiritual experiences. Find out more about planning a visit here. ________________________________________ 2. Nature’s Bounty and Biodiversity "In Sri Lanka, nature isn't merely observed; it's experienced with all the senses — from the scent of spice plantations to the sight of vibrant tea terraces and the sound of waves on pristine beaches." Sri Lanka’s national parks, like Yala and Udawalawe, are among the best places to see elephants, leopards, and a diverse range of bird species. The island’s ecosystems, from rainforests to coastal mangroves, create an incredible array of landscapes for nature lovers to explore. For those planning to visit these natural wonders, start your journey with a visa application. ________________________________________ 3. Sri Lankan Hospitality and Warmth "The true beauty of Sri Lanka is found in its people — hospitable, welcoming, and ready to share a smile or story over a cup of tea." The warmth of Sri Lankans is a common highlight for visitors, whether encountered in bustling cities or quiet villages. Tourists are frequently invited to join meals or participate in local festivities, making Sri Lanka a welcoming destination for international travelers. To experience this hospitality firsthand, ensure you have the right travel documents, accessible here. ________________________________________ 4. Beaches and Scenic Coastal Areas "Sri Lanka’s coastline is a place where sun meets sand, and every wave brings with it a sense of peace." With over 1,300 kilometers of beautiful coastline, Sri Lanka offers something for everyone. The south coast is famous for relaxing beaches like Unawatuna and Mirissa, while the east coast’s Arugam Bay draws surfing enthusiasts from around the globe. To enjoy these beaches, start by obtaining a Sri Lanka visa. ________________________________________ 5. Tea Plantations and the Hill Country "The heart of Sri Lanka beats in the hill country, where misty mountains and lush tea plantations stretch as far as the eye can see." The central highlands of Sri Lanka, with towns like Ella and Nuwara Eliya, are dotted with tea plantations that produce some of the world’s finest teas. Visiting a tea plantation offers a chance to see tea processing and sample fresh brews, with the cool climate adding to the serene experience. Secure your entry to the hill country with a visa application. ________________________________________ 6. Sri Lankan Cuisine: A Feast for the Senses "In Sri Lanka, food is more than sustenance — it’s an art form, a burst of flavors that range from spicy curries to sweet desserts." Sri Lankan cuisine is a rich blend of spices and textures. Popular dishes like rice and curry, hoppers, and kottu roti offer a true taste of the island. Food tours and local markets provide immersive culinary experiences, allowing visitors to discover the flavors of Sri Lanka. For a trip centered on food and culture, start your journey here.

As a mechanical engineer who took a lot of physics, I am fascinated by this particular creationist argument, because it is both scientifically subtle and completely misinformed. Here’s the most important thing to know: The Second Law applies only to closed systems, like a cylinder in a car engine, and Earth is not even remotely a closed system. Transfers of matter and energy are constantly taking place. Life here is nothing like a perpetual motion machine, but neither is it like a ball rolling inexorably downhill. There are three main sources of energy for life on Earth: the Sun, the heat from fissioning atoms deep inside Earth, and the primordial spin of Earth itself. These sources provide energy throughout the day. The Sun provides the most energy. It’s a fusion reactor releasing 1026 Watts every second (1026 Joules). Earth’s core also provides energy in the form of heat. The spinning of our planet keeps shifting the energy inputs and adds acceleration to the wind and the waves. So as you can see, the world we live on is not even remotely a closed system. All of our world’s ecosystems ultimately run on a continual external source of light and heat. Energy

Mangrove destruction is not only an ecological threat to a valuable ecosystem but also a social threat for [the poor]. External debt pressure on exporting countries, neo-liberal doctrines and ecological blindness of northern importing consumers, together with a flagrant lack of local governmental action to protect the environment in most shrimp-producer countries, are the main driving forces of mangrove destruction.

Moreover, multiplicity, iteration, and adaptation are universal concepts in that they are apparently important attributes for agents at all levels-from chemical reactants to biological ecosystems.

are a win-win for their entire ecosystem. In consultant speak, we’d refer to the ecosystem as “the value chain.” The terminology doesn’t matter. What’s important is the idea that a great company makes tons of money while adding real value for its customers

The ability to shift from reacting against the past to leaning into and presencing an emerging future is probably the single most important leadership capacity today. It is a capacity that is critical in situations of disruptive change, not only for institutions and systems, but also for teams and individuals.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing,” proclaims an ancient fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus. It is implied that the hedgehog curls into the side of higher wisdom, and we are advised to sink into the still depths of this hedgehog way of knowing. Discerning people have told me that because no one can do everything needed to help the troubled world, it is most impactful (and least confounding) to focus our passion on one thing. Pick one cause, one creature, one ecosystem. Go deep. I think this is mostly true.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling.

Goals, Strategies, and Fundamentals Missions are generally long term in nature. Goals translate missions into practical, quantifiable medium-term objectives that then trigger the search for short-term action plans. Goals can be broadly quantified around three main dimensions: profitability, growth, and sustainability. It is important that boards and executive teams understand the interactions and especially the trade-offs between these three dimensions. It is impossible to pursue all three goals simultaneously, at least in the short term. Boards need to address this major challenge with executives, as, at least in the short term and possibly also in the medium term, these three goals cannot be pursued simultaneously. Executive teams thus face clear trade-offs which they need to recognize and manage. Boards are there to support executives with necessary clarifications on the goals that need to be pursued. Strategies are the action plans that executives deploy following the choice of mission by owners and the selection of goals by the board, in collaboration with the executive team. In case growth is chosen as the goal, for example, typical strategic choices are: build, buy, or ally strategies.14 The selection of a strategy does not depend solely on goals, it also depends on company fundamentals: the type of industry the firm operates in, the client’s ecosystem, suppliers, competitors, regulators, where and how the company generates cash flows, the types of risks the company faces and needs to mitigate against, as well as the company’s ability to raise financing. Examples are presented illustrating how strategies are selected by examining cash flow generating opportunities.

So can we arrive at a general principle as to why e-books have flopped in developed markets while audio and video streaming have triumphed? The technology commentator and best-selling author Edward Tenner argues that there are several reasons people are sometimes reluctant to abandon an old technology in favor of a new one. The first involves the potential vulnerabilities of the new thing. For instance, the fax machine is now a museum piece, but for a while people continued to prefer it over emailing scanned documents out of security concerns. Another potential reason involves aesthetics and nostalgia. Although dwarfed by music CDs and streaming, vinyl record sales continue to grow within the niche market of music aficionados. And despite improvements in automatic transmissions, certain car lovers prefer stick shifts. Perhaps the key to understanding format resilience is that technologies rise and fall as part of ecosystems, rarely on their own or by themselves. Those ecosystems need to evolve quickly, through open innovation, in order to appeal to new generations of users, transforming the landscape in the process. E-book platforms have remained fundamentally closed to external innovators, especially on the software side. As a result, the functionality of e-books remains limited. Moreover, research indicates that reading a physical book enables the reader to absorb information more efficiently than reading the same book on an e-reader or a tablet. “The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized,” argues Abigail Sellen, a scientist and engineer at Microsoft Research Cambridge in England. “Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don’t think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book.

Despite its supposed universality, the second law appears to be constantly violated by living organisms, whose conception and growth (as individuals) and whose evolution (as species and ecosystems) produces distinctly more ordered, more complex forms of life. But there is really no conflict: the second law applies only to closed systems under thermodynamic equilibrium. The Earth’s biosphere is an open system, which incessantly imports solar energy and uses its photosynthetic conversion to new plant mass as the foundation for greater order and organization (a reduction of entropy).

When both factors are in play—the new value proposition’s rise hampered by ecosystem emergence delays, and the old value proposition’s trajectory augmented by ecosystem extensions—thinking in term of value creation (rather than performance) becomes even more important.

Reinforcing the importance of this opportunity, Immelt added: “The Industrial Internet is a win-win for GE and our customers. Our offerings will increase GE’s services margins and boost organic industrial growth, with the potential to drive as much as $20 billion in annual savings across our industries.” There is a word missing in these statements that marks the difference between a great value proposition and a successful ecosystem: partners. This absence is what separates a service business that relies on value-added resellers to move merchandise, and an ecosystem that aligns partners to create new value in a structured way.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

It takes an alignment mindset to establish an ecosystem. However, once it is aligned, the skillset and mindset of alignment become objectively less important. What matters at this point is execution within the boundaries of the ecosystem—the management challenge of getting the trains to run on time, and the opportunity to get the most out of the figurative train lines—extending new services, bolting on adjacent businesses, and doing all this at growing scale with growing efficiency while managing the established relationships within the ecosystem.

Even if the ecosystem doesn’t change, what about the gradual erosion of architectural characteristics that occurs? Architects design architectures, but then expose them to the messy real world of implementing things atop the architecture. How can architects protect the important parts they have defined?

She began removing visible tattoos—from the face, neck, and hands—of those leaving Kenton County jail, at no charge. From one youth’s forehead she removed “13.5”—“Twelve jurors, one defendant, and a half-assed chance of winning,” he told her. This is coming off, she told him, and all this will be behind you; he broke into tears. “I’m like the den mother,” she said. Along the way, she removed a branding: a pimp’s name—Charley—from a woman’s thigh. One man had a Hannibal Lecter mask tattooed across his lower face. She saw “Life’s a Bitch,” “God’s Child,” and “I’m a pornstar. I f— teenage sluts” etched on necks and foreheads. And when I met her, she was removing the spiderweb from the back of Will Pfefferman’s left hand. “We also take off a lot of swastikas,” she said, “and teardrops.” Jo Martin’s Tattoo Removal Ink is important to the story of Kenton County because by the time it opened, it fit naturally into an ecosystem of recovery support outside the jail, yet rooted in the Unit 104 experiment. For

Offer Incentives to Get All-Important Early Wins For most start-ups, creating incentives for early investors is a sensible path. Whether through a seeder or founder’s shares, preferential terms can align the manager and early adopters to encourage growth. As the industry faces scrutiny on fees, the opportunity to offer something that clients are actively seeking is a win-win proposition. If a manager canvasses a wide range of potential investors, he will encounter both supporters and critics of seeding and discounted shares. Among the pools of capital invested in hedge funds, the fund of funds community tends to embrace founder’s shares more actively than others. In doing so, funds of funds have a place in the industry ecosystem by providing R&D for the industry. Except for the fortunate few whose brand allows a mega-launch, a start-up needs flag wavers in its corner to create positive signaling effects and branding. Both seeders and founder’s share investors can help.

Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.

Some investors take their interactions with founders personally. They may say unkind words about you, either directly or behind closed doors. Avoid these high-ego investors at all costs; they’re not worth the pain. You wouldn’t believe the number of investors who harbor feelings of jealousy, resentment, or clinginess to founders’ successes… even though their job is all about supporting founders! Instead, bring on investors who are authentic and genuinely want to help you succeed. That doesn't mean blind agreement: great investors will speak up when they disagree, give their advice in an authentic way, and ultimately respect the final decision the founder makes. This takes the element of fear out of the partnership and ultimately leads to better outcomes for the business. To all investors who act as genuine partners to their founders, thank you. You are playing such an important role in the ecosystem.

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention. Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.

Like most children of her era, she’d been taught to believe that the genome—the sequence of base pairs expressed in the chromosomes in every nucleus of the body—said everything there was to say about the genetic destiny of an organism. A small minority of those DNA sequences had clearly defined functions. The remainder seemed to do nothing, and so were dismissed as “junk DNA.” But that picture had changed during the first part of the twenty-first century, as more sophisticated analysis had revealed that much of that so-called junk actually performed important “roles in the functioning of cells by regulating the expression of genes. Even simple organisms, it turned out, possessed many genes that were suppressed, or silenced altogether, by such mechanisms. The central promise of genomics—that by knowing an organism’s genome, scientists could know the organism—had fallen far short as it had become obvious that the phenotype (the actual creature that met the biologist’s eye, with all of its observable traits and behaviors) was a function not only of its genotype (its DNA sequences) but also of countless nanodecisions being made from moment to moment within the organism’s cells by the regulatory mechanisms that determined which genes to express and which to silence. Those regulatory mechanisms were of several types, and many were unfathomably complex. Had it not been for the sudden intervention of the Agent, the biologists of Old Earth would have devoted at least the “remaining decades of the century to cataloging these mechanisms and understanding their effects—a then-new science called epigenetics. Instead of which, on Cleft, in the hands of Eve Moira and the generations of biologists she reared, it became a tool. (...) Thousands of years later, epigenetics was sufficiently well understood to be programmed into the DNA of some of the newly created species that would be let loose on the surface of New Earth. And one of the planks in the Get It Done platform was to use epigenetics for all it was worth. So rather than trying to sequence and breed a new subspecies of coyote that was optimized for, and that would breed true in, a particular environment, the GID approach was to produce a race of canines that would, over the course of only a few generations, become coyotes or wolves or dogs—or something that didn’t fit into any of those categories—depending on what happened to work best. They would all start with a similar genetic code, but different parts of it would end up being expressed or suppressed depending on circumstances. And no particular effort would be made by humans to choose and plan those outcomes. They would seed New Earth and see what happened. If an ecosystem failed to “take” in a particular area, they “they would just try something else. In the decades since such species had been seeded onto New Earth, this had been going on all the time. Epigenetic transformation had been rampant. Still, when it led to results that humans saw, and happened to find surprising, it was known as “going epi.

After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

The first of these that we know of is the Löwenmensch. It is an extraordinary piece of work, around twelve inches tall, the figure of a man with a lion’s head, and an important piece in understanding our evolution. Of the artist, it shows profound skill, fine motor control and foresight in selecting the right bone and having a plan to carve this figure. It shows an understanding of nature, and reverence of the animals in the ecosystem that impact upon the lives of those people. Crucially it shows a willingness to imagine a thing that does not exist. The figure is a man, as determined by the genitals, and has seven stripes cut into the left arm, almost like tattoos. It was found deep inside the cave at Hohlenstein-Stadel in 1939, in an almost secret vault, a kind of cubbyhole that also held other objects – carved antlers, pendants and beads. The inference is that these objects were precious, possibly things with totemic significance. Nearby in the Vogelherd Cave, figures of a mammoth and a wild horse have been found, and the ornately carved head of a cave lion. Perhaps cave lions at this time were iconic of a ceremonial cult, and the cut marks on the arm meant something important on this mythical creature. Perhaps.

We don’t think there’s anything wrong with mega or micro, video or cyber, gathered or scattered, house or weekend church. Each of those experiences is fine for those who want what is being delivered. In other words, if someone leads or partakes in any form of church and genuinely feels it is driving them naturally toward the life and mission of God, then for them, that is good news. But for many, it is not, and other options need to be offered. For us, in the brave city camp, we have come to call teaching and gathering settings “tables,” just like every other “table” in the ecosystem. (More on this later.) Teaching and gathering are important concepts and practices, but no more important than any other aspect of life.

Ask yourself: What assets or capabilities do you need to be successful in this comfort-and-safety-as-a-service proposition? For example, you would need the capability to assemble and distribute the necessary HVAC equipment, security cameras, and other physical infrastructure. This, fortunately, may be a capability you already possess as an equipment manufacturer. But chances are that such a player would lack at least a few other critical capabilities. For instance, you would need the ability to install and maintain that equipment, which may go beyond the scope of your current operation. Perhaps most importantly, you would need an online platform to connect all the devices, sensors, and other equipment—allowing for the creation of digital twins for real-time remote digital monitoring. This online platform would also allow customers to make adjustments, access camera footage, and manage their subscription, all in one place.

if you are an HVAC equipment manufacturer, an online or software player would be an ideal choice as they would be well positioned to fill in the missing but critical capability of building the platform. They are an attractive potential collaborator. (Though, it is important to note that in such a scenario, partnering with an online player carries a risk of putting that player in a position to disintermediate you—so you would be wise to proceed with caution.) At the same time, you bring something important to the table, too: your equipment, which is essential to the value proposition. This makes the partnership feasible.

Finally, any successful culture building effort focused on the ecosystem economy needs to promote long-term thinking. Rather than concentrating their energies on meeting narrow targets in the immediate future in order to impress their bosses and advance their own career prospects, employees should be focused on creating something sustainable—something that contributes value for everyone involved. This is particularly important in the context of ecosystems since, as we previously explained, building an ecosystem requires adjusting your expectations in the short term. You may have to sacrifice in the immediate future in order to lay the foundation for a successful ecosystem business later on.

Identify and leverage control points While building your ecosystem business, you need to pay close attention to the control points—like data. That is to say, identify the key steps in the customer journey that, if you control them, will allow you to gain an advantage over your competitors and form a deeper, closer relationship with your customers by meeting their needs holistically. Typically, important data sets make good control points. Therefore, you must identify and pursue the especially important data sets that will offer deeper and more meaningful insights into your customers’ needs. And beyond data sets, there could be many other things (e.g., access to customers) that could function as control points.

An ecosystem, after all, is by definition a community of interconnected businesses that work across the boundaries between traditional sectors. An important part of what makes ecosystems special, therefore, is that they thrive on connectivity. They create value through cooperation and then share that value among their different constituent parts.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons that history teaches us is that unlikely and seemingly farfetched possibilities often turn out to be the most consequential. We ignore them at our own peril.

important parts: The current situation: Taking into consideration your evolving customer base, your customers’ evolving needs, and your differentiated bets, ask yourself: Do I need an ecosystem to pull off the proposition?

Most traditional businesses have a culture of not accepting failure, which sometimes leads them to declare new business projects successful even when they plainly are not. This incentivizes company leaders to do all sorts of irrational things, like inefficiently allocating resources, investing imprudently in struggling ecosystem businesses, and—perhaps most importantly—pulling resources and management attention away from promising new ventures by keeping them focused on old, failing ones that everyone is too proud to admit are failing. Only radical transparency and not just the acceptance but celebration of failures can help here.

I believe that photography can be a powerful tool for raising awareness about the importance of conservation. I want my photographs to help people understand the threats facing wildlife and ecosystems.

Interdependence  When you look at an ecosystem—say at a meadow—when you study it and try to understand what it is, the first thing you will recognize is that there are many species there. There are many plants, many insects, many microorganisms. And they’re not just an assemblage, or collection, of species. They are a community, which means that they are interdependent. They depend on one another in many ways, and the most important way, in which they depend on one another, is a very existential way: they eat one another. That’s the most existential interdependence you can imagine.

In the 20th century, ecologists discovered that in the self-organization of ecosystems, cooperation is actually much more important than competition. We constantly observe partnerships, linkages, associations—species living inside one another, depending on one another for survival. Partnership is a key characteristic of life. Self-organization is a collective enterprise.

Net-banking ‘was’ an important payment method because of (a) lower credit card penetration (b) fear of using cards online. Over a period, net-banking users started moving to debit cards (as every bank account has a debit card) but the rise of UPI drastically affected net-banking transactions. Erosion of net-banking can be attributed to both merchants and customers alike: Customer: Multiple hops to complete the transaction, non-optimised mobile pages and remembering password (not a user-friendly flow). Merchant: Success rate is inconsistent and lower; commercials are higher (than debit cards) for majority of sectors. Few years ago, net-banking options were prominently displayed on merchant’s checkout pages. But nowadays net-banking options are at the bottom of the page or hidden as the merchants still wants to have it but don’t want users to pay using those.

One aspect of fish physiology is crucially important to replenishment of many fish species: the larger an adult female fish is, the more eggs it will produce. This is possibly an obvious point, but, importantly, the increase in egg production is not linear. To use a hypothetical example, a single 10kg female might produce many millions of eggs per year, while even ten 1kg females combined of the same species would produce only a few thousand per year. If we remember that the larger fish are the most prized in the fishing industry, we can immediately see that the damage done to the ecosystem by removing the largest fish is exponentially greater. I would stress here that no blame should be attached to those fishing at subsistence level for collecting what they can; for these people, it is usually a matter of survival. Leaving this consideration to one side, it is nevertheless a salutary point to note that even a very modest level of fishing intensity can cause much ecosystem distortion very quickly. In areas that were once protected but which then permitted fishing, ecosystem collapse happened in only a very few weeks.

Here are some reasons for the software developer community to adopt "docs-as-ecosystem": Proposes a more holistic and community-centered approach: The term "docs-as-ecosystem" recognizes that documentation is not just a set of markdown files or code snippets but an ecosystem that needs to be managed and nurtured. The term "docs-as-code" has been widely adopted recently, but it may not fully capture the complexity and diversity of documentation development. The term "docs-as-ecosystem" aligns with the industry trend towards a more holistic and community-centered approach to documentation development. Encourages collaboration: The term "docs-as-ecosystem" acknowledges that documentation development involves different roles and stakeholders, such as technical writers, designers, developers, community members, and beyond. By adopting this term, the software developer community can encourage collaboration across diverse stakeholders and facilitate the creation of high-quality documentation. Emphasizes the importance of retrieving and incorporating community feedback: The term "docs-as-ecosystem" highlights the importance of retrieving and integrating community feedback in documentation development. It recognizes that documentation is about providing information and meeting community needs and preferences.

The IoT market grows rapidly and it’s acceleration will continue in all major areas like Industrial Internet of Things; Digital Enterprise; Internet of Healthcare; Internet of Energy; Internet of Education; Digitalisation of global Supply Chains. Security concerns add to the IoT complexity. Strategically, to assure the system’s reliability & data / knowledge engineering, it is important to insure data integrity, availability, traceability, and privacy. A complex problem of digital transformation globally. The Internet of Things cybersecurity, therefore, is not a matter of device self-defence. What is needed is a systemic approach. Identify underlying patterns. Secure elements of a chain: from security of a device that creates, captures your data.. to the data storage.. to the back-end storage.. Create/ join IoT ecosystems, driven by protection with external monitoring, detection and reaction systems. It is a challenge - to secure systems.

Once we’ve hit the part where my own species is mostly taken care of, I’ll start to worry about African rhinos. Until then, I’ll just keep restraining myself from punching people when they look me in the face and argue that an ecosystem somewhere is more important than homelessness.

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow.

The importance of natural diversity in this tiny nation cannot be overstated. It’s even written in the constitution: Ecuador is the only country in the world to recognize “Rights of Nature”—the idea that ecosystems have inalienable rights, just like people do—at the highest legal level. “Nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence,” states Article 71 of the country’s constitution, in accordance with the Ecuadorian concept of Buen Vivir, which emphasizes harmony with other people and nature above material development.

Con-Text is the centuries-old city of Islam, a great and sprawling city consisting of various edifices erected for the various purposes of living by Muslims of bygone and present times, made in different forms and out of different materials, in various states of preservation, renovation and disrepair, of wide-ranging functions with different degrees of use and dis-use, with quarters and neighbourhoods inhabited by diverse peoples doing different things—all of which are nonetheless component elements in a part of what is ultimately, for all its citizens, the same shared environment and ecosystem of living and identification. The citizen is the one who lives in a city with which he identifies and affiliates himself—even if the specific constitution of his particular identification with the city may differ from that of another fellow-citizen, and even as what he thinks is good or bad about the city (what he thinks should be knocked down or restored, what should serve as a model for further construction, and what he thinks should be abandoned) might differ from that of a fellow-citizen. As the citizen moves about the city, its diverse component elements invoke and provoke in him different responses of orientation, narration and attachment; yet, he recognizes these edifices—even the ones he does not like—as edifices of this city. And even if some edifices are at some point destroyed, they remain in the memory (until such time as they are forgotten) as edifices of this city, as a part and parcel of its history and of the meanings that its name evokes.

A long-standing question in the assembly of communities, ecosystems and regional biotas concerns the relative contributions of abiotic environmental conditions (such as climate), species interactions (such as competition and predation), evolutionary and coevolutionary adjustments, and stochastic processes (such as population demography) [32]. This question has increased importance in a world where species ranges are rapidly shifting in response to climate change and human transport [14,34]. In this context it is important to ask whether species assemblages with novel combinations of species (including both native and exotic species) function in the same way as native assemblages, even when many of the constituent species do not have a shared evolutionary history. The answer to this question, although pressing, is still unclear [16,35–37]. What is becoming clear, however, is that assemblages composed largely of exotic species can and do occur (e.g. plant communities that dominate portions of many oceanic islands, such as Ascension Island [16,36]), and that assemblages dominated by exotic species, such as Eucalyptus globulus woodlands in California, can be as species-rich as those dominated by native species [38]. We believe that these findings support Janzen’s [39] conjecture, which was based largely on patterns observed with native species, that diverse assemblages of species with complex ecological relationships can be formed by the ecological ‘fitting’ [40] and ‘sorting’ of species (sensu Ackerly [41]), that is, solely through ecological interactions among species, and that a long history of coevolution is not always necessary to explain the species composition of communities. Although species coexisting in such recently formed assemblages might not have a prolonged history of evolutionary coadaptation, rapid evolutionary adjustments might still have occurred over timescales of decades to centuries.

Road laid out the basic tenets for a now-common way of thought: environmentalism. Environmentalism is more than the simple recognition that polluting a neighbor’s well or destroying a bald eagle’s nest is a bad idea. In most cases that recognition can be viewed as a function of property rights. By poisoning a well, a polluter is, in effect, seizing the water without its owner’s permission. (More precisely, it is seizing use of the water.) The eagles, too, are being taken from their owner, the public. Environmentalism, by contrast, is a political and moral movement based on a set of beliefs about nature and the human place within it. Environmentalists want to stop polluting wells and protect bald eagle nests. But they see the well water not so much as property but as part of a natural cycle with its own value that needs to be maintained. The eagle, for its part, is a constituent of an ecosystem that has an essential integrity that should be protected. Any set of beliefs about the workings of the world is perforce a statement about what is good and important in that world. Environmentalism is an argument that respecting the rules of nature is indispensable to having a good society and living a good life.

Beach sands are home to a multitude of other creatures, above and below sea level. Besides the obvious visible ones—clams, crabs, birds, plants—they also shelter all kinds of nematodes, flatworms, bacteria, and other organisms so small they live on the surface of individual sand grains. Despite their tiny size, many of these creatures play an important role in the ecosystem, breaking down organic matter and providing food for other creatures, including fish.43 Dumping thousands of tons of imported sand on top of these organisms can be lethal to them. A 2016 University of California study found the population of marine worms and other invertebrates on San Diego beaches fell by half after a beach nourishment project.44 Another recent study in South Carolina found major drops in populations of bugs, worms, and other organisms living on the ocean floor in areas that had been dredged for beach nourishment.

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.

bender is going to cook up. Guy Bar-Nahum: And then Google came along and said, “We’re doing Android.” So what’s the difference? Android was going to allow people to download third-party apps. Steve Wozniak: The first iPhone did not have the App Store. Guy Bar-Nahum: Steve panicked, and literally all of a sudden everything clicks through his head and he realizes that he was like a mile behind Google! Steve Wozniak: Openness is so important, and the App Store is a type of openness. It wasn’t the original idea of the iPhone. Steve had to be convinced of it. Guy Bar-Nahum: And so he went to Forstall and told him, “Hey, Forstall, we have to open up an ecosystem,” and that’s where Forstall shined the second time, after making the iPhone UI. He told him, “I was working on it the whole time.” So Forstall had actually ignored Steve’s verbatim order and he worked on it in the basement and made it happen. You have to have balls of steel to do something like that. Guy Bar-Nahum: And then because of Google, Apple was pushed into putting apps on the iPhone. And then apps became the way people touched the web.

The story of the Eridania Basin and the possible scientific promise it holds was pieced together by using the results from different instruments on different spacecraft over many years, spanning several scientific disciplines: geology, chemistry, spectroscopy, laser altitude ranging and photography. The estimate of the age of the surface required the Apollo lunar rock samples from 50 years ago, and radiometric dating techniques which require an understanding of nuclear physics. The estimate of the age of the surface requires a model of the entire Solar System in order to interpret the measured crater density, which illustrates another important idea. The Solar System is a system; no planet is an island; no planet can be understood in isolation, just as the structure of any one living thing on Earth cannot be understood in isolation. Organisms are a product of evolution by natural selection, the interaction of the expression of genetic mutations and mixing with other organisms, in the ecosystem and the wider environment. The planets formed in a chaotic maelstrom from motions as random as the impact of a cosmic ray on a strand of primordial DNA, and whatever worlds emerged from the chaos have had their histories shaped profoundly by their mutual interactions throughout their evolution; the Late Heavy Bombardment is a beautiful example.

In the last chapter, I try to imagine a utopian social network that could somehow hold all of this. I use the lens of the human bodily need for spatial and temporal context to understand the violence of “context collapse” online and propose a kind of “context collection” in its place. Understanding that meaningful ideas require incubation time and space, I look both to noncommercial decentralized networks and the continued importance of private communication and in-person meetings. I suggest that we withdraw our attention and use it instead to restore the biological and cultural ecosystems where we forge meaningful identities, both individual and collective.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling

Probiotics are one of the best supplements you can take to avoid an intestinal imbalance. They strengthen the intestinal walls and manufacture vital nutrients. They also help the body to use nutrients and fight harmful microbes in the GI tract. Your body actually contains about ten times as many probiotic bacteria cells as it does human cells! You simply couldn't survive without these little creatures. Probiotics protect us from a number of health problems, including food allergies and skin problems. Probiotics also play a key role in the female reproductive system. Like the GI tract, the vagina contains and relies on a delicate ecosystem for optimal health. The Lactobacillus strains that populate the walls of the vagina make the environment too acidic for most intruders, thus protecting the vagina and the womb from infection. Just like the GI tract, however, this ecosystem can easily become disrupted by the exact same causes: antibiotics and stress. Spermicides and birth control pills can also cause an imbalance. Imbalances can usually be remedied with therapeutic doses of Lactobacillus acidophilus. When you buy probiotic supplements, it's important to know which strains of probiotic bacteria are in the supplement. Each strain and substrain offers its own unique benefits. The Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium strains are found naturally in the human GI tract and offer countless health benefits. They're the most prevalent strains you'll find in supplements. Lactobacillus GG, sold as Culturelle, is the best studied. Bacillus subtilis is a wonderfully beneficial probiotic that does not occur naturally in humans but is found in many probiotic supplements. It's excellent at killing pathogens and unwanted microorganisms. If B. subtilis is on the ingredients list of your probiotic supplement, you have a gentle friend offering powerful protection. Probiotic supplements come in capsules and powders. They're alive yet dormant when you get them in this form and become active when exposed to warmth and moisture inside your body. Either form is fine, but it's critical to take them on an empty stomach (when your stomach acid levels are low). Even though they can live in the intestines, most probiotics don't survive stomach acid. Enteric-coated capsules help, too. During pregnancy, the advantage to taking probiotic supplements instead of fermented probiotic sources like kombucha, kefir, or yogurt is that the exact strains you're getting are tightly controlled. The cultures used in fermented foods aren't always tightly controlled, so you run the risk of ingesting organisms like yeasts, which produce toxins.