Inhabiting the Anthropocene back loop

Abstract

Working across earth and social sciences, this article reevaluates resilience’s conceptual framework, drawing out alternative pathways for understanding and responding to the dislocations of the Anthropocene. Via a critical reading of the Anthropocene with the help of resilience’s adaptive cycle heuristic, I locate the possibility of new forms of life in its phase of release and reorganisation: the back loop. More than a brief, negative phase to govern or navigate, I argue that the back loop offers the possibility for a practical orientation to the Anthropocene based on experimentation with new uses, release of old frameworks, and allowance for the unknown. Inhabiting the back loop, as I call it, articulates an ethos couched not in fear or survival but rather creative and technical audacity in unsafe operating space, as embodied already in a variegated landscape of practitioners.