RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 52

Both Carpenter and Folke work within the resilience science community,
where it is generally agreed that resilience is a tool used to measure complex
adaptive systems, but even they have different takes on what exactly should be its
moral import for 'the complex adaptive systems' under scrutiny. Typically there is
more contestation about the definition at the social end of the spectrum than at the
biophysical. Resilience is most contested where policy is implicated. A careful
analysis of the internalist resilience literature by Fridolin Simon Brand and Kurt Jax
has revealed that resilience has been used descriptively, as a hybrid (descriptive-
normative) and as a completely normative term by various practitioners (Brand and
Jax, 2007: Table 1).
Despite these differences in how to apply the term, there is surprising unanimity
among writers in this community about the history of the idea of resilience. Most
writers start their discussions of the concept of resilience with the 1973 paper in
the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics by Canadian ecologist Crawford Stanley
(Buzz) Holling (1930-) 'Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems' (Holling,
1973). This is remarkable, as papers from the 1970s are rarely cited in current
scientific literature, yet this paper continues to be cited prominently, often as
definitive of resilience, from that time to the present despite the fact that the
concept itself has been considerably nuanced since 1973.
Perhaps more important than the definition of a concept, Buzz Holling's paper
of 1973 created a beginning for a community of interdisciplinary global change
thinkers working between policy and science. Holling was explicit about the
different management strategies needed for stable and heterogeneous systems. The
linear models arising from the closed lake systems studied by traditional ecologists
like Forbes had less to offer managers working with the complex social systems of
modernity (and with people and environments together) than the more
heterogeneous and unpredictable systems of rangelands, where the spatial mosaics
and demands of making a livelihood introduced 'surprises' into the system. The
resilience community defined itself through applying the ecological concept of
resilience to the systems it studied. As they looked for surprises, rather than stability,
the human dimensions of climate change and correlated social changes emerged
more markedly. This was an application on a planetary scale, but it still had
recognisable roots in disturbed ecosystems, and in planning with human activities
as variables. Resilience came of age in the twenty-first century with the first
international resilience conference in Stockholm in April 2008, hosted by the
Stockholm Resilience Centre (http://resilience2008.org/resilience/?page=php/
main). The second resilience conference was held in Tempe, Arizona, in March
2011 (http://rs.resalliance.org/2010/01/22/resilience-2011), and the third in
Montpellier in May 2014 (http://www.resilience2014.org/).
Resilience has other antecedents, but my interest here is in showing the links
between arid zone ecology in a very specific place (Australia), and the new global
thinking. Holling's key paper provides a way to trace the local geographies of our
planetary consciousness, and the way a scientific community develops its identity.
This global identity is a key to the resilience idea. Holling is a Canadian, not an