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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.
Notes
1. To be clear, what I’m proposing is not a timeline, alternate periodisation, or golden spike. The adaptive cycle is rather a heuristic, a vision device that helps us see contemporary situations and practices in a different light and open new imaginaries.
2. Scholars have gone to great lengths to counter homogenising grand narratives of a single ‘we’ equally responsible for the Anthropocene’s formation. For example, Bonneuil and Fressoz (Citation2016) highlight the key role of industrial capitalism and colonialism and suggest terms such as Anglocene more appropriately capture the ‘who’ of the Anthropocene.
4. This section elaborates ideas developed in Braun and Wakefield, Citationin press.
5. Such back loop practices, I argue, occur within and reclaim the ‘implicated,’ multiple rhythms of everyday time, which Sébastian Norbert (Citation2017) argue are entrapped by resilience’s homogenous, future-oriented temporality.