I first encountered Walker’s work on resilience when I was a novice researcher in human geography, coming to terms with our failure to mitigate climate change in a timely enough way, and needing something other than mitigation or adaptation to think with. A little over a decade later, I approached Walker’s new book with some hesitation. I have grown worried that resilience places too much importance on strength or robustness, and is insufficiently attentive to what is valuable but intrinsically vulnerable – beings, relations, systems, that cannot be made resilient, but are nonetheless worthy of existence. I also loathe how the term can deflect attention away from the causes of ecological and social harm, busying us with the ever-intensifying task of coping with increasing onslaughts, instead of dismantling the structures causing them. Walker almost immediately won me over with the concluding sentence of his first chapter: ‘There are limits to humanity’s resilience’ (2019: 11). Walker is precise and critical in his use of the term, not over-stretching its usefulness. A resilient system isn’t one that ‘bounces back’ to a prior state, he argues, but one that learns and reorganises itself in response to disturbance, improving its overall adaptive capacity without changing its core functions. He reminds us that resilience is not always positive – some invasive species are frustratingly resilient to efforts to manage them, and some harmful systems are troublingly resilient to transformation. Walker’s book refreshes resilience, revisiting how we have come to understand it, clarifying its usefulness in thinking about socio-ecological systems. The book is organised in five parts. Part 1 comprises introductory matter and scene-setting. Part 2 describes resilience in natural systems, what it is and the history of its formulation in ecological research, addressing familiar ecological concerns like keystone species, interconnectedness, disturbance and diversity. This is perhaps Walker at his best – he is, after all, an ecologist, and his love of and fascination with the natural world are contagious. Part 3 considers resilience in human systems, beginning with more individual, psychological understandings of resilience before considering how resilience operates on the scale of communities. Part 4 attempts to synthesise Parts 2 and 3, and Walker grapples more explicitly with questions of inequality, inequity and the role of economic systems in ecological harm. Part 5 outlines ‘a way forward’. Throughout, the writing is engaging, accessible to a Book Reviews

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Brian Walker，《寻找韧性：自然与社会的变化和不确定性》，墨尔本：CSIRO 出版社，2019 年，157 页，ISBN 9 7814 8631 0777，43.75 澳元。

当我还是人文地理学的新手研究员时，我第一次遇到沃克关于复原力的工作，开始接受我们未能及时缓解气候变化的问题，需要考虑缓解或适应以外的其他东西。十多年后，我有些犹豫地接近了沃克的新书。我越来越担心弹性过于重视力量或稳健性，而没有充分关注有价值但本质上易受伤害的东西——生命、关系、系统，它们无法具有弹性，但仍然值得存在。我也讨厌这个词如何将注意力从生态和社会危害的原因转移开，让我们忙于应对日益增加的冲击的不断加剧的任务，而不是拆除造成它们的结构。沃克几乎立即用他第一章的结束语征服了我：“人类的复原力是有限的”（2019：11）。沃克对这个词的使用准确而批判，并没有过度扩展它的用处。他认为，一个有弹性的系统不是一个“反弹”到先前状态的系统，而是一个学习和重新组织以应对干扰的系统，在不改变其核心功能的情况下提高其整体适应能力。他提醒我们，复原力并不总是积极的——一些入侵物种对管理它们的努力的复原力令人沮丧，而一些有害系统对转型的复原力令人不安。沃克的书刷新了复原力，重新审视了我们是如何理解它的，阐明了它在思考社会生态系统方面的用处。本书分为五个部分。第 1 部分包括介绍性内容和场景设置。第 2 部分描述了自然系统的复原力、它是什么以及它在生态研究中的形成历史，解决了熟悉的生态问题，如关键物种、相互关联、干扰和多样性。这也许是沃克最好的一面——毕竟，他是一名生态学家，他对自然世界的热爱和迷恋具有传染性。第 3 部分考虑了人类系统中的复原力，首先是对复原力的更多个人心理理解，然后再考虑复原力如何在社区规模上发挥作用。第 4 部分试图综合第 2 部分和第 3 部分，沃克更明确地解决不平等、不公平和经济系统在生态危害中的作用等问题。第 5 部分概述了“前进的道路”。自始至终，文字引人入胜，