What is resilience?
Right now, there are a few grammes of body tissue between you and the next life. If one of your heart valves failed, you'd have a few minutes to say goodbye.
Luckily, heart valves are usually sturdy enough to last for 70 or more years, fluttering back and forth with each pulse of blood.
Most of our body parts are not critical. You can get by without a hand, an eye, or even a kidney, but heart valves are a single point of failure essential to keeping you alive.
Whether it's the economy or the environment, a key to resilience is diversity where reliance on a small number of parts should be avoided.
In the economy, Australia has a critical dependency on fuel reserves, but successive governments have wound back supplies to the point where we are vulnerable. It would need only a couple of weeks of unstable supply before fuel stations close and supermarkets run short of food.
Triggering that grim scenario would only take political instability across our tenuous supply lines through Southeast Asia.
The obvious way to reduce this threat is to increase local supplies while moving towards alternative energy sources from renewable energy.
A parallel in an ecology is a '' keystone species'' , which get their name because they are a vital link in the environment. When one is removed, it causes a disproportionate knock-on effect. Examples of these are apex predators such as dingoes, the Australian sea lion and the great white shark.
It can be difficult to predict the importance of a given species in an ecosystem because it involves a deep understanding of how many species interact.
The black-throated finch, for example, mostly eats grass seed, and occasionally, spiders and ants. They were once common in grassy woodlands across north-east Australia from Cape York Peninsula, down to New South Wales.
Even if the black-throated finch is not a keystone species, the role it plays in the environment will be lost if it becomes extinct. We may never know for sure what that impact would be, although it's already locally extinct in 80 per cent of its former habitat.
If the Adani coal mine goes ahead, it will be another blow to the black-throated finch. On one hand, we could say it's just a pretty little bird. Yet this is another example of where extinction is hacking the legs off our stool.
If we keep this up, sooner or later our stool will fall over.
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