• ment intervention can return its previous self-sustaining state, and even then success is not assured (Walker, 1981). Critical processes function at radically different rates covering several orders of magnitude, and these rates cluster around a few dominant frequencies.
• Spatial attributes are not uniform or scale invariant. Rather, productivity and textures are patchy and discontinuous at all scales from the leaf to the individual, the vegetation patch, the landscape, and the planet. There are several different ranges of scales each with different attributes of patchiness and texture (Holling, 1992). Therefore scaling up from small to large cannot be a process of simple linear addition; nonlinear processes organize the shift from one range of scales to another. Not only do the large and slow variables control small and fast ones, the latter occasionally "revolt" to affect the former.
• Ecosystems do not have single equilibria with functions controlled to remain near them. Rather, destabilizing forces far from equilibria, multiple equilibria, and disappearance of equilibria define functionally different states, and movement between states maintains structure and diversity. On the one hand, destabilizing forces are important in maintaining diversity, resilience, and opportunity. On the other hand, stabilizing forces are important in maintaining productivity and biogeochemical cycles, and even when these features are perturbed, they recover rather rapidly if the stability domain is not exceeded (e.g., recovery of lakes from eutrophication or acidification, Schindler, 1990; Schindler et al., 1991).
• Policies and management that apply fixed rules for achieving constant yields (such as constant carrying capacity of cattle or wildlife or constant sustainable yield of fish, wood, or water), independent of scale, lead to systems that gradually lose resilience and suddenly break down in the face of disturbances that previously could be absorbed (Holling, 1986). Ecosystems are moving targets, with multiple potential futures that are uncertain and unpredictable. Therefore management has to be flexible, adaptive, and experimental at scales compatible with the scales of critical ecosystem functions (Walters, 1986).

The features described above are the consequence of the stability properties of natural systems. In the ecological literature, these properties have been given focus through debates on the meaning and reality of the resilience of ecosystems. For that reason, and because the same debate seems to be emerging in economics, I will review the concepts to provide a foundation for understanding.

Resilience of a system has been defined in two different ways in the ecological literature. These differences in definition reflect which of two different aspects of stability are emphasized. I first emphasized the consequences of those different aspects for ecological systems to draw attention to the paradoxes be-