RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 59

The Resilience Alliance mimics a disciplinary scholarly community, but its
aspirations are to go beyond disciplines, to integrate across the divides between
society and ecology in thinking and practice. Since 1973, the word resilience has
gained the imprimatur of technical integrative expertise, rather than being just a
foundation concept of ecology. Its trajectory has been one of the forces that pushes
the discipline of ecology towards policy relevance, along with ecological economics
and concepts like 'ecological services' (Daily, 1997).
The seeds of policy relevance - of science for society, if you like - can be found
in the imperial ecology of the Oxford School as far back as the 1920s and 1930s.
Global-minded ecologists such as Julian Huxley and Charles Elton trained their
students for work in the British dominions and colonies rather than to undertake
ecological studies at home in England. Under Arthur Tansley, Oxford ecologists
sought to theorise and systematise what had been natural history, in order to enlarge
and improve the Empire. In historian Peder Anker's words, they wanted to use
ecology to create 'a scientific management tool . . . to develop effective social
systems . . . for society at large [and] for the administration of knowledge' (Anker,
2001: 78).
In 1921, Stephen Forbes urged the Ecological Society of America in his
presidential address to consider humans (and their actions) as part of ecology as
much as any other organism (Forbes, 1922). The discipline of human ecology was
also highly implicated in Elton's Oxford School in the 1930s, though ecological
science regarded itself as strictly biological, focusing on plants and animals other
than humans, for much of the twentieth century. In a sense, human ecology
returned to its original disciplinary fold in the 1990s with the foundation of the
journal Ecology and Society , though there was great resistance within the ESA to this
turn of events. The impetus for treating society and ecology together was furthered
by the environmental crisis of the 1970s, and is most apparent in Michael Soulé's
conservation biology, which in 1985 he defined as 'the science of crisis' (Soulé,
1985). The term biodiversity became famous through a Forum at the Smithsonian
and the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and its presence in academic and
policy discourse has risen on a hockey-stick curve since then (Wilson, 1988;
Farnham, 2007: 2).
Co-authorship and common institutions build trust. Ecologists need to know
who is saying what, and precisely where it applies. The concept of resilience has
developed global dimensions, including strong connections with the international
policy community that has been central to the prominence of political concerns
about climate change. Nonetheless, its origins in ecology are still evident. In their
2001 paper, Carpenter and his colleagues selected two major case studies to show
how resilience thinking worked in an SES. The first was the Great Lakes regions
on North America - a lacustrine system exploited for agriculture. The second
resilience case study was the rangeland country of western New South Wales -
semi-arid to arid country exploited for pastoralism. In the twenty-first century,
there was more emphasis on economics and the lifestyles of the people, including
their comparability as 'democracies with traditions of science-based management'.