In Their Own Words

Humour

“The classic trap is to believe that because you have a model, you know the future. Models are not for prediction; they are tools to stretch the imagination and discover how little we actually know.”

Holling often used humor to critique academic arrogance and the illusion of human control. He believed that if you don’t have a sense of humour, nature will force one upon you through unexpected surprises. Colleagues at the University of British Columbia and the Resilience Alliance often recalled Holling’s preference for informality and whimsy. He famously hated stuffy academic hierarchy and would often use self-deprecating jokes, or lighthearted metaphors like comparing ecological resilience to a cartoon character bouncing back after being flattened, and playful storytelling to explain terrifying concepts like ecological collapse. For Holling, humour was the antidote to despair. In a world facing climate change and ecological crises, he believed that doom-and-gloom led to rigidity, whereas humour and play opened the mind to creative, adaptive solutions.

 

Professional Activities

C.S. “Buzz” Holling’s professional activities spanned decades of groundbreaking academic leadership, research institution building, and applied environmental policy. After beginning his career as a forest entomologist with the Canadian Department of Agriculture, he transitioned to academia, serving as a professor and later also as Director of the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology at the University of British Columbia. He later held the Arthur R. Marshall Jr. Chair in Ecological Sciences at the University of Florida, where he mentored generations of sustainability scientists.

A master of institutional architecture, Holling served as Director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria from 1981 to 1984, where he fostered cross-border, interdisciplinary research during the Cold War. In 1999, he co-founded the Resilience Alliance, an influential international scientific network, serving as its founding board chair. He also established the open-access journal Ecology and Society (originally Conservation Ecology), creating a vital platform for social-ecological research.

Throughout his career, Holling frequently served as a strategic consultant for international governments, environmental organizations, and resource agencies, conducting hands-on Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (AEAM) workshops globally. His efforts successfully bridged theoretical ecology, mathematical modeling, and public policy, fundamentally transforming international environmental management practices.

Holling was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 22, 2008.

 

Contributions To Canada’s Systems Thinking Literacy

Holling significantly advanced Canada’s systems thinking literacy through academic leadership, policy innovation, and conceptual breakthroughs.

• Academic leadership at UBC: As Director of the Institute of Resource Ecology at the University of British Columbia, he trained a generation of Canadian scientists and managers using computer modeling, simulation games, and interdisciplinary system dynamics.
• Pioneering Adaptive Management: He introduced Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (AEAM) to Canadian forestry, fisheries, and wildlife policy, shifting management from rigid control to flexible, experimental learning.
• Shaping policy vocabulary: Holling introduced critical concepts, most notably ecological resilience and the science of surprise, giving Canadian leaders a new framework to address climate, environmental, and economic uncertainty.
• Integrating human and natural systems: He shifted Canadian policy literacy toward viewing human societies and ecosystems as deeply interconnected, self-organizing systems, forming the bedrock of modern Canadian sustainability science

 

Contributions To Canadian K-12 Education

Holling’s work had a significant indirect influence on Canadian K-12 science and geography education over time.

• Shifting curriculum narratives: Before Holling, Canadian school biology taught ecosystems as seeking a static balance of nature. Holling’s work helped shift provincial curriculum standards (particularly in British Columbia and Ontario) toward teaching ecosystems as dynamic, constantly changing, and resilient systems.
• Early computer simulations: In the 1970s and 1980s at UBC, Holling helped pioneer ecological simulation modeling. Simplified versions of these dynamic models eventually made their way into high school computer labs and science classes to teach students about predator-prey cycles and resource management.
• Concept integration: He popularized core ideas such as ecological resilience, sustainability, and human-nature interconnectedness that gradually became standard learning outcomes in Canadian middle and high school environmental science, geography, and social studies courses.

 

Contributions To The Global Systems Thinking Discipline

“Buzz” Holling expanded global systems thinking paradigms by challenging classical assumptions of static balance in nature and introducing dynamic resilience theory to explain how complex systems function, transform, and persist. Until then, system stability was characterised by engineering resilience defined as a system’s speed in returning to a single equilibrium point following a shock. Holling named ecological resilience as the capacity of complex adaptive systems to absorb disturbance, self-organize, and maintain core identity before tipping into entirely different dynamic regimes.

To operationalize these dynamics, Holling developed the Adaptive Cycle (The Lazy – 8 Model Diagram) a four-stage framework depicting how systems continually move through periods of growth conservation, creative destruction, and reorganization. He expanded this into Panarchy, a powerful meta-framework showing how nested adaptive cycles interact across temporal and spatial scales, illustrating how localized disruptions can trigger systemic transformations and how slow, large-scale structures stabilize dynamic systems.

Holling pioneered Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (AEAM), embedding systems thinking into policy by treating resource management as continuous, iterative learning experiments. By bridging ecology, economics, and non-linear dynamics, Holling provided the global systems discipline with foundational concepts to analyze dynamic social-ecological systems under conditions of deep uncertainty and change.

                                       

Individual Learning & Projects

 

Apart from the first appearance of the word Cybernetics in a book title in the late 1940’s, it wasn’t until the late 1960’s that publicly available books included the term Systems Thinking or Systems Science in the title. For the first wave of pioneers, beyond thought engagements with the authors in their Personal Learning Sources, Learner Activities were predominantly via living engagements with other people, in organised academia or independent scholars. This included 1) people studying General Systems Theory, 2) people working in the pioneer’s primary discipline, 3) people from other disciplines building interdisciplinary systems thinking skills, and 4) people wanting to stay in tune with the growing Systems Thinking community taking shape.

This text uses the word engagement to mean “active involvement and interest”. The term living engagements here includes spoken conversations with another person or group of people and written conversations in academic or professional organisation publications. The living engagement may have been supportive or disputational in nature.

Anchoring themselves in stable spousal relationships and home life enabled each pioneer to sustain day-to-day wellbeing as they evolved their systems thinking skills over many decades. As lifelong learners they remained exceptionally productive and fulfilled in and outside the formal academic setting for much of their lives.

The learner activities and projects listed below are intended as starting points for deeper dives into the full network of people with whom they engaged and the projects they conducted.

 

Learner Activities

With whom did Holling more frequently engage in the systems thinking community? 

Lance H. Gunderson, Carl Folke, Brian Walker, Don Ludwig, William C. Clark

With whom did Holling more frequently engage from his discipline?

Lance H. Gunderson, Carl Folke, Brian Walker, Don Ludwig, G. D. Peterson, Steve Carpenter

With whom did Holling more frequently engage in other disciplines? 

Carl Walters, Don Ludwig, Ray Hilborn, Randall Peterman, A. D. Chambers, Ray Hilborn, Randall Peterman

What role did Holling’s spouse(s) play in these engagements? 

Beverly “Joan” Holling (nee Rowley) and “Buzz” were married from early 1950’s to mid-1970’s.  She was the mother of his children and his family partner. Records do not indicate a formal role in Holling’s professional engagements.

Ilse Holling (nee Artner) played a multifaceted in Holling’s later career (married mid 1970’s until his passing in 2019), particularly during his international leadership roles. When Holling served as the Director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) Ilse played a major role in hosting and organizing events for high-level international scientists, diplomats, and bureaucrats across the Cold War divide. She assisted on the ground during major international workshops, symposia, and resilience network meetings, often serving as a guide, liaison, and coordinator for visiting researchers and delegates. In his later years, Ilse assisted Holling with his writing projects working closely with him on drafts of his academic writings and his personal memoirs, helping review, edit, and clarify his ideas and terminology. llse was an integral figure within the Resilience Alliance community helping maintain the close-knit, collaborative culture among global researchers in ecological resilience.

 

Projects

Some Characteristics of Simple Types of Predation and Parasitism (paper, 1959)

Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems (paper, 1973)

Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management (1978)

Cross-scale Morphology, Geometry, and Dynamics of Ecosystems (paper, 1992)

Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (2002)

Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems (paper, 2004)

 

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