This is a fantastic read about how ecological systems, like human society, are arranged in layers. Some layers react quickly to changes while others move very slow. These layered systems absorb shocks, survive and sustain change.
Perhaps the most interesting is to understand how things go wrong.
Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.
Read on: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2
Thanks @Rob for the share.