ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the ontologies of complexity, emergence and interconnection that underpin visions of resilience and the Anthropocene can paradoxically reinforce a modernist split between nature and society, recalibrate modernist fantasies of total control and yet open onto novel political possibilities. It begins by excavating the ontological claims that support contemporary thinking on the Anthropocene and resilience. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the possibilities for destituting resilience and contesting the de-Naturing accounts of resilience and the Anthropocene that have captured both applied and critical scholars’ imaginations. Like many ontologies of complexity, resilience ecologists tend to offer a vision of a single, unitary world characterized by complex, nonlinear interconnections between systemic components and uncertain, emergent change. As resilience has become an increasingly influential organizing concept in a number of disparate fields over the last decade, critical scholarship on the concept has become increasingly dismissive.
