Resilience as a Systems Concept, with an Application to the American West

What is resilience, and why has it emerged as an important concept in environmental science and governance? Answers to this framing question are still being floated, but one influential trend sees resilience as a successor to sustainability. In Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back , Andrew Zolli writes that sustainability has gotten "long in the tooth," and identifies resilience as a new way to approach a broad array of social and environmental goals (Zolli and Healy 2013, 21). In this paper, we review some reasoning that one of us (Thompson) has offered in favor of an alternative answer to the relationship between sustainability and resilience. We introduce readers to the work of a forgotten pragmatist, C. West Churchman, and we present an application of his ideas to present-day environmental policy disputes in the American West. In fact, a detailed development of the argument we will make in this paper would exceed the limits of a single essay. We thus beg our readers' indulgence as we sketch out an incomplete argument, relying too heavily on extra reading assignments to work that has been published elsewhere. We begin with a brief discussion of the sense in which we think of our approach as an alternative, and then trace a line of thought that connects recent thinking on resilience to the pragmatist tradition in philosophy of science. Our application to ongoing debates in the American West illustrates some weaknesses in the way that policymakers have interpreted sustainability and indicates some dangers in the turn to resilience.