This site emerges from “Resilience, Survival, Extinction,” a Bard College Common Course introduced in Fall 2020. In the face of enormous ongoing biodiversity loss, the tragic connotations of “extinction” may feel all too obvious. But the idea of extinction—a term describing the loss of species but also of languages, populations, traditions, and technologies—has been shaped by surprisingly complex interactions of environmental history, scientific theory, social conflict, and cultural representation. Consequently, extinction is inseparable from the way we understand such concepts as survival and resilience. In this course, we explored these concepts in the geologic past, in social history, and in the imagined futures of our communities—those defined as human, those that will exist after the human, and the multispecies entanglements in between. Course topics and practice integrated biology, the interpretive humanities, and collaborative art-making, culminating in a final project by students entitled the Resilience Repository.
Alliteration aside, the phrase “Resilience Repository” makes an ambiguous, improbable pairing. Is this a repository for or of resilience? How would one store an abstraction like “resilience” anyway? That word seems to be everywhere these days. While usage of the adjective “resilient” in printed matter has been relatively steady for a century, references to “resilience” have escalated sharply since about 2000. This trend was particularly visible in 2020, during this site’s initial development, when “resilience” appeared frequently in news coverage of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Suggesting the action of rebounding from setback or decline, the term encompasses both injury and hope. For related reasons, it has also been critiqued as a buzzword that can justify the abandonment of those communities that neoliberal state policies most often under-serve. “Repository,” too, carries its complications. It can refer to scholarly archives and specimen collections and also, in the context of extraction-based economies, to storage sites for natural-resource commodities and hazardous waste. Given inequalities in access and proximity to all such forms of repositories, from the academic to the infrastructural, the term registers many questions about the relationship between storage and justice. Reflecting no monolithic assumptions about these issues, and experimenting with ways of archiving diverse forms of social and ecological resilience, the projects that this site gathers do not so much answer such questions as specify and extend them.
Each project in the Resilience Repository is based on a research “object,” broadly defined. The first set of objects were chosen to represent a heterogeneity, with some obvious choices given the themes of the course, and others that were intentionally perplexing. Objects include species that are beloved and protected (Giant Panda) versus historically reviled and eradicated (Eastern Timber Wolf), those considered “invasive” (Garlic Mustard), others that proliferate seemingly effortlessly (Least Concern), and individuals that were the last of their kind (Lonesome George). Objects also encompass small island nations threatened by climate change (Kiribati) and large-scale infrastructural engineering projects (Kariba Dam), fetishized commodities (iPhone), vaults for storage and preservation (Seed Archive); and systems for classifying “information” (Card Catalog). Groups for this first set of objects were assigned randomly, with one student from each of the four sections—Literary Analysis, Laboratory Science, Practicing Arts, and Social Analysis—to bring together different disciplinary perspectives. We devoted several classes over the course of the semester to group work, with students first creating concept maps for their objects. Groups then worked together to decide on platforms for their projects—ranging from video and collage to Unity and Twine—and through an interdisciplinary lens, collaborated to illuminate their objects’ relation to extinction, survival, and resilience. We envision the Resilience Repository as an ongoing, capacious project that invites a multitude of additional objects and collaborations.