RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 49

ecological facts were too context-dependent to be mapped directly into any
computer mega-system without considerable mediation by ecologists with know-
ledge of the ecosystems in question (Specht, interview with the author, 1991). Such
an admission was an embarrassment for an international programme. The historian
of science, Steven Shapin has described this paradox: 'The claim that [scientific]
knowledge is geographically located is widely taken as a way of saying that the
knowledge in question is not authentically true at all' (Shapin, 1998: 8).
Ecologists frequently described their science as 'young'. It had yet to grow up.
If it was just local and place-dependent, it was not proper science at all (Cittadino,
1980). The ecological concept of resilience has aided ecology in its (at times) painful
move from local field science to force in global change thinking. Its history reveals
that ecology has not, in fact, shed its place-dependence, but rather developed ways
to scale its local from single ecosystems to interconnected ecosystems to planetary
systems. In the process of up-scaling, ecological science has increasingly embraced
the human as well as the non-human (natural) world in its scope of influence. Some
practitioners have used resilience to reinforce management techniques and related
ideas such as crisis policy-making, likening their work to that of a hospital emer-
gency ward (Soulé, 1985).
Science is locally produced, but it often travels with great efficiency. Geographer
David Livingstone (2003) has argued that scientific ideas do not develop in the air,
but rather through particular geographies, and in the relations between them.
Shapin (1998) also urges us to understand not only how knowledge is made in
specific places, but also how transactions occur between places. A view from somewhere
can become true or global at a time when places and ecologies have increasingly
interpenetrated each other's domains, as we live in the Anthropocene era where
the biophysical force of the human species can be felt in the outer atmosphere and
the depths of the ocean. Even global ideas have roots.
The desert ecological models that described the variability of climate and
measured resources and their uncertainties, contributed a vision that has been
stretched to conceptualise the planet. Earth itself is now under the unpredictable,
patchy, unprecedented force of climate change. It is witnessing massive extinctions.
Some say we are in the grip of the planet's 'sixth mass extinction' event (Leakey
and Lewin, 1996). As global change increases variability and unpredictability
everywhere, the way people, animals and plants have adapted to living in a variable
and unpredictable place like outback Australia, has come to provide a model for
imagining planetary futures.
Invasion biology
Biological invasions might be considered permanent interruptions to a natural order,
or an unnatural new order. In the 'explosive' world of Charles Elton, ecological
explosions are slower than nuclear ones, but 'can be very impressive in their effects'
(Elton, 1958: 15). Elton observed that such population explosions usually involve
human vectors and affect people. In the 1919 influenza pandemic, microbes that