Chaos, anti-chaos and resources: Dealing with complexity

Abstract

Chaos is ordinarily disorder or confusion; scientifically it represents a disarray connection, but basically it involves much more than that. Change and time are closely linked and they are essential when considered together to understand the foundations of chaos theory. The theories of dynamic systems have been applied to numerous areas of knowledge. In the 80's, several exact sciences (physics, chemistry or biology, for example) and some social sciences (economics or management or even the sociology) still had their own objects of study and their own methods of analysis and each one of them was different from the others. The Science has been branched and specialized, so that each one uses to have its own world. Recently new forms of analysis, looking for an integrated study have emerged (Filipe, 1). It is the case of chaos theory, which is applied here to natural resources, in order to understand the complexity of natural phenomena following this perspective. Anti-chaos theory is also introduced to show how systems in nature often tend to self-organization.