Resilience vs Sustainability

1)

“IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA WHILE IT LASTED, BUT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN IT COULD NOT LAST. THE ERA OF SUSTAINABILITY IS OVER.” The opening sentence of this article, like a sudden and huge wave coming towards me, immediately stirred complex emotions in my heart, including shock, melancholy, and regret. Interestingly, like the forthright boy in Anderson’s fairytale The Emperor's New Clothes, Mentz explicitly makes the above declaration because he believes that to be sustainable is “not the human experience of the nonhuman world” and that “human beings have never lived in pastoral stasis, natural or cultural”.

In my understanding, pastoral literature has to reexamine sustainability and even give place to new literary models centered around turbulent ocean instead of stable land, because the fantasy about stasis described in pastoral, namely sustainability, is just a pipe dream far away from the reality that radical disruption takes place “in all natural systems at all times,” resulting in a need of “dynamic narratives about our relation to the biosphere”.

In Mentz’s view, “what we should crave is not stasis but room to maneuver. Not permanence but buoyance”. Therefore, resilience, with a connotation of adaption and adjustment, provides a viable alternative to sustainability.

In a world full of uncertainties, post-sustainability ecopoetics with ocean stories which can help us escape the pastoral nostalgia and an ecocriticism which treats dynamic change as a primary feature can more productively represent nature than pastoral poetry. As a professor of English, Mentz’s innovative exploration of sustainability in terms of literature is an eye-opener to me. After reading the article, the previous complex emotion has been replaced by a more positive attitude towards unpredictable changes in the world. I agree with Mentz that “the era of sustainability is over”. After the outbreak of Covid-19, during a typical post-sustainable time, hopefully, the perspective advocated by Mentz would help us draw strength from literature and get through the current difficulties. 2) Mentz argues that the idea of sustainability is fictional: “BEhind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It’s been pretty to think so, but it’s never been so.” The model of sustainability gives the argument that the world and ecologies are sustainable whereas in real sense, changes are

common in the world. Sustainability is not practicable because it misleads human beings about the odds of having a constant world. Trusting the notion of sustainability results in pain especially when individuals are met with unexpected changes.

Pastoral literature endorses the ideology of sustainability: “In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment.” Descriptions of pastoral environments in literature depict imageries of sustainable environments. Accordingly, the literature depicts an environment which is utopia-like without any disruptions. However, the depictions are not realistic because real-world environments are not perfect due to inevitable changes.

Mentz endorses resilience instead of sustainability because humanity should learn to manage the ‘ nonstable systems.’ Mentz writes, “The humanities can add ocean stories to emerging models of ecological resilience, which measure the tendency of ecosystems to tolerate disturbance after perturbation.” Focusing on resilience would ensure that disturbances would not alter ecosystem. Recognizing the significance of resilience would equip humanity with the knowledge and ideology they require to survive in the “postequilibrium situation.”

Mentz explains, “To imagine a swimmer poetics for our storm- filled world can generate unsustainable but engaging narratives. Swimmers live in the world and enjoy it, but being in the water means knowing that stability cannot last.” Swimmer poetics is more practical than the pastoral poetry. Swimmer poetics would symbolize the inevitability of chaos and catastrophes are inevitable in the world; thus, sustainability is not guaranteed.