Resilience Theory and Thomas Vale's Plants and People: A Partial Consilience of Ecological and Geographic Concepts of Succession

Abstract

Geography has discovered resilience theory, a body of thought about ecological change that initiated with C.S. Holling in the 1970s. We describe the similarities and differences between resilience theory and a geographical treatise, Thomas Vale's (1982) book Plants and People. Vale's work draws more from the tradition of field botany and plant succession than from the theoretical and mathematical ecology that prompted Holling's ideas. Yet like resilience theory, Vale's model of ecological change emphasized multiple states, the threshold transitions between them, and their irreversibility. Each described how forests and rangelands can flip between stability domains in response to altered fire regimes, modified grazing pressures, and climate change. Plants and People also recognized the dual nature of stability encapsulated in Holling's formalization of engineering and ecological resilience. Although resilience theory predates Vale's work and retains primacy through its citation record, we show how their partial consilience promotes a more critical understanding of resilience theory and the ways in which models, scale, and human values influence our comprehension of ecological change.