An Ecology of Resilience

Chapter 5 leads Neyrat to explore the concept of resilience the ideas of chaos theory, the concept of turbulence, and how all of these theories found their way into discussions of ecology in the 1970s as part of the realization of a paradigm shift: The world is ontologically and irremediably unstable. With this realization came a new attention to the conception of an ecology of resilience. Neyrat describes the paradoxical point that shows that resilience can be viewed as the ability to adapt to change and, at the same time in order to do this, resilience can also be viewed as how a system remains in a state of perpetually instability. Whereas we would normally think of systems being in stable states, a closer look at thinkers studying theories of resilience in relation to chaos theory demonstrates that a new ecology would be one where there are a myriad of non-linear relations among entities undergoing perpetual change. This mindset is part of what Neyrat calls the ecology of turbulence. Resilience is at once the ability to adapt to change and also to buffer disturbances or turbulence to the system and persist.