Resilience: A Keyword in Environmental Studies?

Everybody likes the idea of resilience, right?

Resilience connotes bounce-back-ability.  Grit.  Adapting to change and dodging hardship.  Surviving struggle.

Why wouldn't we want to design resilience into communities, cities, architecture, cultures, young people?  Why wouldn't we want to raise our kids this way?  Why wouldn't we want to study the ways in which these things have proven resilient in the past, in order to emulate them for the upcoming storms?

Or, put another way, why would we resist grit, given all the shit?



















We hear it like this:

What's wrong with millenials?  They lack resilience.

Why do we admire hardworking migrant farmworkers?  They're resilient.

What can we do about colonialism?  Cultural resilience.

Cities designed for climate change? Resilient.

Communities that can come out on top after a disaster?  Resilient.

Survivors of sexual violence, institutional racism, intergenerational trauma? Resilient.

Critiques of the word abound.  It's got a lot of problems, as these statements show.  Condescending, fetishizing, appropriating.....  It smacks of privilege.

It puts responsibility for pulling up bootstraps on the individual, and absolves structures and history of blame.

It erases, or risks appropriating, historical ways of managing colonial violence (e.g. Vizenor's concept of native "survivance").

In the context of climate change, "adaptation and resilience" become funding opportunities that accept business-as-usual carbon colonial-capitalism as inevitable and fixed.



Is it a good word? Can we talk about cultivating resilience in the Anthropocene without participating in all these erasures of blame and history?  Or is it just a worthy ideal we can all get on board with?

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This keyword entry is inspired by a Facebook thread involving a cast of brilliant thinkers who expanded my own thinking immensely: Britta Spann, Julie Sze, Mary Mendoza, Jennifer Ladino, Deborah Miranda, Anita Mannur, Leena Dallasheh, Rachel Pye Hamling, Stacy Alaimo, Aubrey Streit Krug, and Dianna Fischetti.  I'd be so dumb and uninspired without these women.  Child development, social and clinical psychology, popular culture, indigenous studies, the environmental humanities-- these fields approach the term quite differently.