Vardy, Mark, and Mick Smith. “Resilience.” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1 (2017): 175-79. doi:10.1215/22011919-3829199.
The plurality of claims made on behalf of resilience in fields as diverse as urban planning, international security, environmental policy, financial regulation, development economics, and mental health echo the fragmented ends and meands that came under the rubric of sustainable development. As many critics of sustainability point out, the varied and sometimes incompatible interests served by sustainability depend on who wants to sustain what—livelihoods or profits, ecological health or economic wealth, individuals, species, or systems. With the recent mainstreaming of climate change as a political problem, resilience similarly threatens to subsume articulations of political difference to a totalizing will to action. Resilience risks becoming code word for “business as usual” as industrial, military, and political elites rearrange their operations to acknowledge the reality of climate chagne while maintaining relations of power. (Text from authors)
© Mark Vardy and Mick Smith 2017. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).