Introduction: Will They Survive, Or Not?

Abstract

IntroductionWill They Survive, Or Not? Jordan Sheridan (bio) and Nandini Thiyagarajan (bio) This collection of articles grew from a conference held in Hamilton, Ontario in 2017 titled "Resilience in a Multispecies World." Our multidisciplinary conference brought together artists, poets, activists, community members, and scholars from various stages in their careers to think critically about resilience in relation to nonhuman animals. We engaged many different platforms, from traditional panel discussions and keynote speakers to an art exhibit, quick panels based on keywords, hikes, and bird watching trips. We marveled at the resilience of "pests," such as cockroaches and bed bugs, and dived into the collective sadness of extinction and the limited resilience of animals we love. We thought carefully about the animals who live close to us and queried our responsibilities to them. What emerged from this conference was a clear sense that thinking about animals and resilience together—not only in relation to conservation—was urgent, necessary, and a much larger conversation than we could have in three days. The articles collected in this cluster cover a lot of ground but they are just the tip of the iceberg. The concept of resilience is central to how ecologists analyze and manage the population dynamics of plants and animals within an ecosystem. In 1973, forest ecologist C. S. Holling introduced the concept of resilience to describe the ability of an ecological system to withstand, absorb, or fortify against disturbances in a way that still maintains its basic structures.1 Since the early 1980s, ecologists have developed a significant body of theoretical and mathematical models for measuring, understanding, and predicting resilience on the level of populations and ecosystems.2 In recent years the concept has crept into a wide array of social and political fields such as international finance and [End Page 62] economics, corporate risk analysis, urban planning and development, public health, and psychology. Susie O'Brien argues that "in the course of gaining scientific rigor, resilience has not lost its popular appeal as the anchoring idea of a powerful story in which moralism and hope combine to produce a successful outcome."3 What O'Brien calls "resilience stories" is a useful term here because it helps us conceptualize the cultural circulation of animal resilience. She argues that the primary normative neoliberal function of these stories "suggests that we thrive not in spite of upheaval but because of it."4 The concept of "resilience stories" allows us to think about resilience in relation to animals and to understand the politics circulating in such stories. The neoliberal function of resilience stories that urges us to thrive in the face of upheaval and hardship meets a limit when applied to animals. In the Anthropocene, wild animals face anthropogenic threats to their habitat and livelihood and many are not thriving. We understand animal resilience along three lines. First, animals who are not fit for this changing world become signals to indicate the need for human intervention, innovation, and technology. Second, domesticated animals, such as agricultural animals and animals used in scientific experiments, are genetically modified or "enhanced" to be more resilient to disruptions, which are normalized as natural parts of a changing world. Third, more synanthropic animals who demonstrate a confounding level of resilience are seen as pests, symbols, or emblems of the end of the world. Rarely do we focus on animals as individuals or communities with stories of loss, survival, and adaptation that are more complex than simply becoming emblems of the Anthropocene. By casting a light on animals and resilience, this cluster of articles aims to reframe and challenge how resilience is conceptualized. This special cluster of articles draws together diverse perspectives on the question of multispecies resilience and its critical theoretical possibilities. And yet in the overall picture presented here, as Susie O'Brien notes in the afterword, multispecies resilience "doesn't really get at what it wants to describe."5 In this introduction we take this to mean that while multispecies resilience is not fully realized, we can think about how it emerges in various examples as in-process, incomplete, and troubled potentialities. The essays gathered here take up issues that arise in environmental politics and bring them...