RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 50

lived within people were the invasive species. Ecological explosions have a global
span, but the same invasions may appear at different times in different places. For
example, an 'explosion' of infected rats created the bubonic plague in Europe in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moving slowly north, to infect Iceland in 1402
(Hastrup, 2009). The Bubonic Plague (or Black Death) emerged again in Manchuria
(China) as late as 1911. Predicting when and where a minor fluctuation in
populations will drive an invasive explosion is very difficult (Elton, 1958). Although
Elton mentioned ecological explosions driven by shifts in native populations, his
focus was primarily on outbreaks 'that occur because a foreign species successfully
invades another country', often with assistance from human movements' (ibid.: 18).
Elton's work anticipated historian Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism (1986)
by three decades. Crosby's thesis was that the extraordinary expansion of European
peoples over the past five centuries was only possible because of the avalanche of
the biota that travelled with the immigrants. Europeans arrived in the New World
were accompanied by 'a grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling,
buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche', Crosby wrote (ibid.: 94).
The 'portmanteau biota' gave conquering Europeans a strategic advantage.
While Crosby's theory of ecological imperialism appeals to historians interested
in cause and effect, ecologists and environmental managers focused on the invasive
species preferred Elton's rhetoric as a framework for ideas about managing invasions
(Richardson, 2011). In the 1980s, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the
Environment (SCOPE) launched a worldwide assessment of the ecology of bio-
logical invasions under the auspices of the United Nations group, the International
Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). SCOPE asked questions amenable to research
by the scientific method, such as: (1) What biological characteristics make an
invader?; (2) What makes a natural ecosystem susceptible to invasion?; (3) How do
we predict (quantitatively) the outcome of a particular introduction?; and (4) What
is best practice for managing and conserving natural and semi-natural ecosystems?
(Huenneke et al ., 1988: 8-9).
The so-called normal functioning of a dynamic ecosystem was central here; this
was something that the biological invasion disrupted, and that responded to or
adapted to the invasion. The disruptions can, of course, lead to total change, even
collapse of the ecosystem in question. So the capacity of the system to recover, to
be resilient, in the face of invasion or change, is a key question in invasion biology
at all scales from the local to the international. Elton's imaginative leap was to
conceptualise biota as invaders , to give them agency, and to construct them as a
worthy enemy to be managed. Successive generations have taken up the fight
against invasive species in the interests of biological diversity.
Defining resilience and the new domain of global
change science
Resilience is a scientific concept that has been applied to policy, economics and
global change in its broadest sense (quite apart from its use in psychiatry). Although