Emergent Emergencies in Complex Ecosystems

Reflections on the Limits of Narrative Cognition and a Revisiting of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

The felicitous concept of ‘emergent emergencies,’ as proposed by the editors of this issue, suggests a close interrelationship between an ethical and a cognitive problem. It implies that states of emergency can arise out of cognitive inability to comprehend ‘emergence’ — a term used to describe the behavior of complex systems marked by “circular recursion” rather than straightforward linearity or mono-causality […]