RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 60

The patchy and variable arid zone climate was part of the matrix. Variability is
becoming something that is now increasing all over Earth with climate change,
evidence is showing, and this gives desert science a new global mission (Carpenter
et al ., 2001: 768). Like Holling three decades earlier, they describe two sorts of
puzzle: those of 'self-contained ecosystems' (with linear effects) and those of open
systems (with patchy effects), including those with human variables, which recover
from shocks only because 'reinvasion' (repopulation from a fresh source) is possible
(Holling, 1973: 10). Lakes and rangelands are the examples again in Carpenter et
al ., just as they were in Holling.
As we have moved from equilibrium to panarchy , from biophysical to social
ecological systems, we now see the natural world as cultural (Gunderson and
Holling, 2002). There is fluidity between ecology and society. Such a world-view
is changing what is meant by 'science', perhaps returning it closer to its origins in
the Latin scientia , and certainly more in sympathy with the German concept of
Wissenschaft that persisted right through the divides between science and humanities
much discussed in Anglophone circles (Snow, 1959). Policy-making demands a
knowledge base that is more than the sum of standard disciplines like economics
and ecology. There is a new role for geography, history and all the humanities in
understanding the global environment. As place shapes science as well as society,
it is the peripheral geographies and exceptional places that drive the intellectual
direction. Exceptions at the edge of survival like the Australian desert have pushed
the mathematics of planetary survival and the modelling and imagination of the
future through the concept of resilience.
References
Anker, P. 2001. Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 ,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Bhatanacharoen, P., Greatbatch, D. and Clark, T. 2011. The Tipping Point of the 'Tipping
Point' Metaphor: Agency and Process for Waves of Change, University of Durham
Business School, unpublished paper.
Brand, F. S. and Jax, K. 2007. Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a
Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object. Ecology and Society 12, Article 23. Available
at: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss1/art23/.
Braudel, F. 1995. A History of Civilizations (original French 1987; trans. R. Mayne 1993),
New York, Penguin.
Broecker, W. S. 1987. Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse? Nature , 328,123-126.
Carpenter, S., Walker, B., Anderies, J. M. and Abel, N. 2001. From Metaphor to
Measurement: Resilience of What to What? Ecosystems , 4, 765-781.
Cittadino, E. 1980. Ecology and the Professionalization of Botany in America, 1890-1905.
Studies in the History of Biology , 4, 171-198.
Clunies Ross, I. 1956. Introduction. Arid Zone Newsletter (AZN) , 1, 1-2.
Crosby, A. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 ,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Crutzen, P. J. and Stoermer, E. F. 2000. The 'Anthropocene'. IGBP Newsletter , 41, 17-18.
Cuddington, K. 2001. The 'Balance of Nature' Metaphor and Equilibrium in Population
Ecology. Biology and Philosophy , 16, 463-479.