Summary
Panarchy is a model of how linked systems of people and nature change, developed in resilience ecology by C. S. Holling and Lance Gunderson around 2001. Its core is the adaptive cycle, a loop of growth, conservation, release (collapse) and reorganisation, which Holling first described in 1986.
‘Panarchy’ refers to how these cycles nest across scales, from fast and small to slow and large. Slower cycles provide memory and stability; faster ones bring novelty, and a collapse at one scale can cascade upwards, as when a ground fire takes a whole forest stand. Holling, who named it partly after the Greek god Pan, called the whole “both creative and conserving”.
Rationale
Holling’s ‘remember’ link, where slower levels shape how faster ones renew, is a systems picture of how our surroundings “can tug us back”. For societies he puts myths at the slowest level, norms the next.