ABSTRACT
There are many roads towards resilience, yet not all are equally socially or environmentally just. As we enter into a new era of climate change and disaster planning and preparation, now often guided by resilience thinking, it is vitally import to consider the implications of past, current, and future social and environmental injustices, and identify strategies for addressing them while working towards a resilient future. Resilience can be a particularly compelling paradigm, as it is often perceived as apolitical and grounded in sound ecological sciences. But as many of resilience thinking’s critics note, extending an ecological metaphor to studying a range of individual-level phenomena (Bonanno 2004), community structure (Hatt 2013), and larger cultural systems (Adger, Barnett, Brown, Marshall and O’Brien 2013; Lyon and Parkins 2013) has potentially stretched the idea beyond practical application. Despite these critiques, resilience thinking continues to grow in prominence in both theoretical and applied fields related to environmental change, thereby necessitating further attention and refinement.
