ABSTRACT
The self-understanding of Earth system science is of a bold embrace of complexity and dynamism in the physical world. This chapter draws the concept of resilience in directions other than Earth system science’s ideal of well-managed planetary boundaries and elastic, adaptable human agents. Acting as both disequilibriating shocks and sources of nourishing elements, periodic mass-eruptions of matter-energy from the inner Earth have increasingly been viewed by Earth and life scientists as stimuli of major evolutionary changes of direction. Attuned to the relentless dynamics of our planet’s surface and near-surface, Earth system science promotes a concept of resilience befitting a world that pulses with potential for change – at every scale. Philosopher and literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a more general vein, describes this basic structural condition of openness to spatio-temporal otherness ‘as the primordial wound of living-in-time’.
