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Paper short abstract:

This historical study traces the origin of resilience to the problem of pest control. Focusing on the agency of budworms, I argue that resilience originally entails an experts' responsibility to adapt their practices to uncertainties, rather than responsiblizing the public for possible disasters.

Paper long abstract:

This paper begins by scrutinizing the early career of Canadian ecologist Crawford Holling, a pioneer in resilience theory. Attracted to the technology of computer modelling, in the 1950s and 60s he was involved in the control of eastern spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana) in Canada. To defend the legitimacy of models that often struggled to predict budworm population and respond to the challenges of popular environmental movements, Holling and his colleagues emphasized the democratic value of modelling workshops that brought together interdisciplinary scientists and policymakers. By the mid-1970s, he began to promote a resource management paradigm based on resilience, conceived as the capacity of a system to retain its interrelation despite disruptions. For Holling, the unpredictability of ecosystem created a responsibility for managers to facilitate adaptive strategies by enhancing diversity, participation, and communication in policymaking. This paper demonstrates how the more-than-human agency of budworm was intertwined with Holling’s conceptualization of science and institutions. Next, I highlight how this history matters for current debates by examining Holling’s impacts on ecological anthropology in the 1970s, agroecology in the 1980s, and urban planning in the 1990s, which shaped the emergence of popular but contested ideas such as traditional ecological knowledge and ecosystems services. The imagery of the unruly pest continued to persist throughout this history. By questioning the way resilience is operationalized in specific contexts and studying these operationalizations in relation to the responsibility resilience originally entails, I argue that the idea retains critical potential in addressing uneven power relationships in resource management.