Brian Walker , Finding Resilience: Change and Uncertainty in Nature and Society, Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2019, 157 pp., ISBN 9 7814 8631 0777, A$43.75.

Abstract

I first encountered Walker’s work on resilience when I was a novice researcher in human geography, coming to terms with our failure to mitigate climate change in a timely enough way, and needing something other than mitigation or adaptation to think with. A little over a decade later, I approached Walker’s new book with some hesitation. I have grown worried that resilience places too much importance on strength or robustness, and is insufficiently attentive to what is valuable but intrinsically vulnerable – beings, relations, systems, that cannot be made resilient, but are nonetheless worthy of existence. I also loathe how the term can deflect attention away from the causes of ecological and social harm, busying us with the ever-intensifying task of coping with increasing onslaughts, instead of dismantling the structures causing them. Walker almost immediately won me over with the concluding sentence of his first chapter: ‘There are limits to humanity’s resilience’ (2019: 11). Walker is precise and critical in his use of the term, not over-stretching its usefulness. A resilient system isn’t one that ‘bounces back’ to a prior state, he argues, but one that learns and reorganises itself in response to disturbance, improving its overall adaptive capacity without changing its core functions. He reminds us that resilience is not always positive – some invasive species are frustratingly resilient to efforts to manage them, and some harmful systems are troublingly resilient to transformation. Walker’s book refreshes resilience, revisiting how we have come to understand it, clarifying its usefulness in thinking about socio-ecological systems. The book is organised in five parts. Part 1 comprises introductory matter and scene-setting. Part 2 describes resilience in natural systems, what it is and the history of its formulation in ecological research, addressing familiar ecological concerns like keystone species, interconnectedness, disturbance and diversity. This is perhaps Walker at his best – he is, after all, an ecologist, and his love of and fascination with the natural world are contagious. Part 3 considers resilience in human systems, beginning with more individual, psychological understandings of resilience before considering how resilience operates on the scale of communities. Part 4 attempts to synthesise Parts 2 and 3, and Walker grapples more explicitly with questions of inequality, inequity and the role of economic systems in ecological harm. Part 5 outlines ‘a way forward’. Throughout, the writing is engaging, accessible to a Book Reviews