| At the core of such complex systems’ sets of adaptive capacities is the multivalent process of resilience, which carries along with it an equally ephemeral notion of risk and its potential either to support or threaten flexibility within such systems. Resilience represents the capacity of a system to absorb and/or recover from a disturbance (natural storms, wildlife depletion, human population growth, economic development, etc.) without causing a threshold shift into a different stable state of existence. Forms of resilience thinking understand such systems as deeply interwoven sets of relationships attuned toward the energies, decisions, and disturbances (natural, human, or otherwise) that characterize them along multiple and often asymmetrical scales and nonlinear time frames. These concomitant processes of resilience and risk so crucial for adaptability often become more about optimizing toward an idea of an ideal or peak resilience and minimizing the importance of risk and precariousness so that humans may continue to thrive within the rapidly less sustainable ecosystem, and profit from that optimization. In veering away from the value of complexity needed for adaptability, we lose sight of (and sound of) other models of experience and attunement that should enhance and accompany our perception of our own model of experience. The sonic realm allows us to rethink the very limits of human resilience alongside the nonhuman. The delicate set of entanglements we share with plants, animals, geologies and atmospheres, and with other humans, necessitates that we also continually open our sonic imaginations to those entanglements within and beyond the human. | At the core of such complex systems’ sets of adaptive capacities is the multivalent process of resilience, which carries along with it an equally ephemeral notion of risk and its potential either to support or threaten flexibility within such systems. Resilience represents the capacity of a system to absorb and/or recover from a disturbance (natural storms, wildlife depletion, human population growth, economic development, etc.) without causing a threshold shift into a different stable state of existence. Forms of resilience thinking understand such systems as deeply interwoven sets of relationships attuned toward the energies, decisions, and disturbances (natural, human, or otherwise) that characterize them along multiple and often asymmetrical scales and nonlinear time frames. These concomitant processes of resilience and risk so crucial for adaptability often become more about optimizing toward an idea of an ideal or peak resilience and minimizing the importance of risk and precariousness so that humans may continue to thrive within the rapidly less sustainable ecosystem, and profit from that optimization. In veering away from the value of complexity needed for adaptability, we lose sight of (and sound of) other models of experience and attunement that should enhance and accompany our perception of our own model of experience. The sonic realm allows us to rethink the very limits of human resilience alongside the nonhuman. The delicate set of entanglements we share with plants, animals, geologies and atmospheres, and with other humans, necessitates that we also continually open our sonic imaginations to those entanglements within and beyond the human. |
maja