RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 51

it originated in the science of ecology as a way to describe whole-landscape
response to environmental change, it now reaches beyond specific local biophysical
systems, and is used to describe global change in social-ecological systems (SES)
(Olsson et al ., 2004;Walker et al ., 2004). The shift from the application to bio-
physical systems to those that explicitly embrace politico-cultural elements
(including economics, demographics and sociological structures) poses problems
that scientists active in this field debate among themselves and at times contest
vigorously (Carpenter et al ., 2001).
Resilience has a plain English meaning, outside the boundaries of the scientific
community, and this is both an asset and a liability for the technical term. It has
come to mean 'an ability to confront adversity and still find hope and meaning in
life', according to Australian social commentator Anne Deveson. But as Harvard
psychiatrist George Vaillant remarked wryly: 'We all know perfectly well what
resilience means until we try to define it' (Deveson, 2003: 6).
Resilience is most commonly recognised in the language of the psychology of
stress, and is often discussed in relation to soldiers returning from warfare. Being
resilient is a positive adaptive response, an alternative to becoming a victim of
the changed circumstances. (Goodall and Cadzow, 2009: 4). The definition of
resilience as 'flexibility over the long term' and the ability to adapt to changed
circumstances is applied widely, for example, in architecture and urban planning
(Pickett et al ., 2004).
The high positive moral value of resilience has made it attractive to a range of
scientists beyond ecology, particularly those seeking to work closely with policy-
makers. The cost, however, is that the word can lose its precision for scientific
purposes. The general meaning can stretch resilience too far, rendering it a
panchreston, a notion that is good for everything because it merely means whatever
people want it to mean (Lindenmayer and Fischer, 2007). The scientific resilience
community has consistently tried to define it precisely, and to resist the 'anything
goes' definition, adopting a range of strategies, including intense internal debates,
which continue to the present.
The moral import of resilience has been explicitly debated. 'Unlike sustainability,
resilience can be desirable or undesirable', ecologist Steve Carpenter and his
colleagues commented (Carpenter et al ., 2001: 766). Ecologists endeavoured to
move it outside the realm of metaphor where the experts were literary, and into the
world of measurement, more familiar to science. Although metaphor was useful
because it had transdisciplinary appeal, measurement was critical to a scientific team
whose expertise largely rested on numbers. Numbers are also preferred by policy-
makers because of their perceived objectivity (Porter, 1995). Carpenter, who works
on the zoology of North American lake systems, defined resilience as a precision
measuring tool, part of credible science, preferring to leave the moral decisions to
policy-makers with expertise in sustainability, another 'catch-all' word. Carl Folke,
scientific director of SRC, was less worried about fostering an alliance with
sustainability. He argued that resilience was a new way to 'operationalise
sustainability', a 'perspective' for analysing social-ecological systems (Folke, 2006).