Resilience, Regeneration, and Other Systems of Aspiration

• In Event: Remediating Remediation: Imagining Alternatives for Assessing and Redressing Environmental Harm - I

Abstract

The increasing popularity of resilience-based environmental assessment signals complex aspirations for researchers in British Columbia’s northwest interior. To its proponents, the budding union of systems theory and cumulative effects analysis has offered new terms and techniques for highlighting the uncertain long-term effects of forestry on the region’s salmon-bearing rivers. Taken up within ambitious policy experiments, this union has also brought systems theorists and other data translators into increasingly central roles. British Columbia’s emerging Cumulative Effects Framework, when implemented in 2021, could provide remediation experts with new legal mechanisms for demanding that the provincial government solicit and recognize their work. By tethering the framework’s legitimacy to locally-authored reports, however, proponents living hundreds of kilometers from the province’s urban centers have also made an implicit plea for the regeneration of their own communities of research. As a paradigm for building new relationships and articulating technocratic goals, resilience-based cumulative effects analysis offers individual researchers a range of metaphors for articulating their interests beyond the confines of the state. To some ecologists conscripted to provide data and moral authority to the Framework, however, the notion that new risk thresholds and monitoring requirements could compensate for years of government downsizing has only deepened their sense of loss. To them, the researchers championing indicators as solutions to deregulation have already resigned themselves to legitimating environmental damage in the wake of institutional collapse. This talk will examine how rural researchers engaged in the twinned work of environmental and communal regeneration have navigated these competing forms of nostalgia.

Author

• Tom Ozden-Schilling, Johns Hopkins University