Nature has survived billions of years of upheaval—yet coral reefs are collapsing, the Amazon is losing resilience, and lakes can flip into degraded states almost overnight. How can systems this battle-tested also be this brittle? In this talk, I'll argue that the answer lies in a central paradox of complex systems: the "Robust-Yet-Fragile" principle. The very features that confer resilience can also accumulate hidden vulnerabilities to novel or extreme shocks.

I'll walk through a series of empirical examples to show this duality in action, then formalize it through the lens of control theory's "conservation of fragility". The implication is unsettling: managing nature for resilience may be exactly what makes it fragile, and averting collapse requires learning to spot vulnerabilities hiding in plain sight.