[extreme environments]

Matty Layne Glasgow

resiliency,

or tardigrades

I.

Outside one of the ballrooms at the Oregon Convention Center, I slowly un-listen to a man give a speech in which he accepts his Lifetime Achievement Award at an Environmental Humanities-Science-Studies conference. He is surprised to be given such an honor, and those of us in attendance nod and murmur in agreement. He informs us the speech will be ten minutes (he’s practiced), which belies his aforementioned notion of surprise. His thirteen-minute filibuster contrasts the acceptance speeches for the countless other awards presented this evening, most without fanfare or even the attendance of the winners themselves. In my un-listening, he describes how his critiques of sustainability have been unpopular with the organization as he’s advocated for years that more attention be paid to resiliency. Through the clanking of conference center dishware soiled with hors-d’oeurves and the slurping of wine from quickly-emptying glasses, I conjure the archetypal father figure urging his child to just tough it out. Life’s unfair, kids! Survival of the fittest, baby! I cannot recall Darwin’s visage, but perhaps here he is before me, staking his claim on further credit for our shared knowledge and understanding of the more-than-human world. Perhaps I am unfair. (I am.)

II.

Resiliency in and of itself is an important idea as we consider the ever-worsening state of our global environment thanks to cataclysmic climate change caused by human extraction and industry. The word springs forward from the Latin resiliens, a present participle of resilire, meaning “to rebound or recoil.” The term came into use more commonly in the seventeenth century, meaning the “act of rebounding or coming back,” frequently of “immaterial things.” By 1824, resiliency came to be known in the physical sciences as “elasticity, the power of returning to one’s original shape after compression.” As a word, resiliency fixates on origin, a way for returning to a certain kind of story, a certain state. It’s bound up in a material nostalgia for an earlier form of existence. A poet might say, It’s so formal! And like poetic forms, resiliency bends; it leaps beyond an expectation; it recoils. In those moments of transgression, when a word or being challenges the structure and system that attempts to contain it, we might say queer; we might say beauty. Ecological resilience, too, eschews this notion of the normal or single desired state.

III.

I want to write a sonnet for the most resilient being I know, an ode really, but I can’t. So here I am writing this essay that becomes more of a simile. Like a sonnet, tardigrades are immortal. Not literally, of course, but they can survive, as my father might say, a-hell-of-a-lot. C.S. Holling, who many credit with introducing “resilience” to ecology, might even call them the posterchildren of resilience. If he won’t, I will, the ecologist that I am. Most importantly, they are adorable. These critters ain’t no size queens either, ranging from .05mm to 1.1mm. To behold their microscopic beauty, you’ll need some support. Let me help you. Imagine a plump, barrelesque body. This creature is all neck, honey, four pairs of legs just barely able to dangle from their tubular existence, claws or suction-like paws at the end of each one. The first man to describe tardigrades, JAE Goeze, noted their feral quality: Strange is this little animal, because of its exceptional and strange morphology and because it closely resembles a bear en miniature. That is the reason I decided to call it little water bear. And so, there is a cuteness, a piggy-in-the-moss-ness, a bear-at-peak-hyperphagia-ness to this micro-icon of survival.

IV.

In the introduction to their book Foundations of Ecological Resistance, Lance H. Gunderson and Craig R. Allen credit C.S. Holling for introducing the word resilience to ecological studies in 1973 by “describ[ing] three aspects of changes that occur in an ecosystem over time” (xv). The first refers to the persistence of relationships within a system even as those systems absorb changes of variables and parameters. The sonnet survives variations on rhyme—Hey, Petrarch! Hey, Shakespeare! Hey, Spenser! Hey, Hayes!—and even the loss of a line; just give us a good turn, honey. The second concept “recognized the occurrence of alternative and multiple states as opposed to the assumption of a single equilibrium and global stability, further defining resilience as the size of a stability domain or the amount of disturbance a system could take before it shifted into alternative configuration. Traditionalists, beware, the sonnet is a system, and she has some chimeric states. Enter, Percy Shelley with his terza-rima-sonnets. Welcome, Gwendolyn Brooks and her sonnet-ballads. Holling completes his trinity of resiliency insights by acknowledging the “surprising and discontinuous nature of change, such as the collapse of fish stocks or the sudden outbreak of spruce budworms in a forest.” Is the sonnet dead? a friend asks pithily. They are a resilient little form, I chirp. I suppose it depends on how you define them.

V.

Twenty-three years later, Holling distinguished two kinds of resilience: engineering and ecological. The former refers to “the rate or speed of recovery of a system following a shock,” while the latter “assumes multiple states (or regimes) and is defined as the magnitude of a disturbance that triggers a shift between alternative states. Regime change. Triggers. Shock (doctrine). Naomi Kline would have a field day with these militaristic constructions; perhaps, she already has. Someone might read thirteen lines and no longer see a sonnet. Someone might read fourteen lines that do not turn and call them a road to nowhere, a poem with no true formal drive.

VI.

Most commonly known as water bears or moss piglets, these microscopic invertebrates have been around for more than 500 million years. (Longer than the sonnet!) They’ve survived the planet’s last five mass extinction events. They owe this longevity, in large part, to their ability to enter into dormant stages to survive extreme environments. This dormancy can occur in two ways: diapause and quiescence. Diapause is “maintained by an internal physiological response” or “endogenous control” of the tardigrades themselves. Conversely, quiescence “is directly induced and maintained by a variety of environmental factors,” making this process under “exogenous control.” The removal of unfavorable stimuli ultimately reverses the tardigrade’s quiescence. Diapause and quiescence are not mutually exclusive; in fact, when they occur simultaneously, the tardigrades increase their resistance to environmental stresses. Through these processes, when a tardigrade enters cryptobiosis, they are able to survive desiccation and/or freezing. The heat and the cold, honey, they do not take down a water bear queen. In this state, metabolic activities come to a reversible standstill, and the tardigrades slowly lose their water and shrivel up into a tiny ball known as a “tun,” which allows them to survive temperatures as low as -200C and as high as 151C.

VII.

A sobering admission: humans are not water bears, as much as we desire their powers of resilience. We’ve certainly imagined their tun-like prowess through literature and film over the years. Think the suspended animation in Sleeping Beauty, the encasing of Han Solo in carbonite, or cryogenically-frozen space travelers in any number of films, from 2001:  A Space Odyssey to a personal favorite, Prometheus. Myriad environmental stresses pause the lives of these beings. For Sleeping Beauty, it was a cranky fairy and a cursed spindle. For Han Solo, an even crankier Darth Vader. And for our intergalactic travelers, it is often the moodiest and most extreme of environments—space. The resiliency of which I’m thinking is a touch closer to home. It is, in fact, on all of our shared home (Earth) that I ponder the extent to which ecological systems, of which we are a part, might maintain our relationships without, as Holling put it, a completely alternative configuration. In bringing this notion of ecological resilience into the social sphere (they are inherently enmeshed, after all), we must consider the same questions as Raven Cretney: the resilience of what, and for whom?

VIII.

In her article, “Resilience for Whom? Emerging Critical Geographies of Socio-ecological Resilience,” Cretney builds on Neil Adger’s definition of social resilience as “the ability of groups, or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change.” Cretney describes how social and ecological systems are “linked and interdependent on one another through the connections between well-being, economic activities, and environmental conditions.” Resilience has been used, as Cretney notes, “as a tool for promoting neoliberal ideology,” through the reduction in state support that necessitates “communities, departments, and projects become increasingly adaptable, flexible, and open to change through disruption.” The misappropriations of the very notion of resilience foregrounds the need to ponder both ecologically and socially who our global systems of power, namely capitalism, require to be resilient and why. Ultimately, Cretney offers resilience as a means of radical transformation, citing the early 2000s Transition Towns movement in the UK as a local movement committed to “alternative currencies, community gardens, raising awareness, and alternative energy projects” as a means of enduring climate change, as well as energy and financial crises. The future, it seems, is grassroots when it comes to resilience—a perfect term at the nexus of the ecological and the social, where flora becomes resistance.

IX.

Fauna might become activists, too, as I return to my beloved water bears and consider what they need to bear extremity—water. They can survive in all kinds of environments—marine, freshwater, terrestrial—but even in terrestrial landscapes, “tardigrades require at least a film of water surrounding their bodies to perform activities necessary for life.” Even this queen who said No! to five mass extinctions does not thrive in extremity; in fact, the more extreme the environment, the less likely the tardigrade will survive, and perhaps for a shorter period of time after they’re rehydrated from their tun. There are limits to what any organism might bear. There is a difference between enduring, surviving, and living. Even for the tardigrade, resiliency in and of itself is not sustainable. Scientists describe the process of cryptobiosis as a “truly death-like state” and “the act of hidden life.” So, we might understand resiliency in this sense as a proximity to death or a state of being shrouded by that ultimate mortality.

X.

I return to the Oregon Convention Center with even more irony and concern than when we departed. Our Lifetime Achievement Awardee promotes resilience over sustainability. The latter term he might believe has lost meaning in its corporatization and misappropriation by political actors who prioritize resource extraction and market economies over nonhuman environmental well-being. There is truth in this critique, in this distinction. There is also truth in the notion that resilience has become the new sustainability in its construction around maintaining (another word for sustaining) a critical threshold within which a system can continue to operate. Such rhetorical gymnastics are not novel in academic spaces. We love a new word, a new lens, a reconfiguration, all for an age-old problem. This one being something more than mere survival. Like a sonnet, an idea might be turned on its head line-by-line, or in another form, paragraph-by-paragraph.

XI.

I want to be as resilient as a water bear, but I am soft—my brain always racing, my systems always alive, even when I manage to sleep. A friend once told me he believed he could survive a plane crash with the most genuine confidence twinkling in his eye. Now that would be resilient. A mentor once said our drive to make art is tied not only to a fear of our own mortality but to a need to understand it. Sometimes the body’s resilience steps in where the mind fails. The blade not pushed deep enough, not dragged in the most effective direction. The pills pumped or passed from the belly without the intended consequence. Flesh and organ and mind being system, what might push us to an alternative configuration?

XII.

Given what we have done to this planet and our aforementioned cryogenically frozen imaginations, it should come as no surprise that tardigrades have made the trip into space. In 2007, a team of European scientists launched a rocket with a score of water bears from Kazakhstan into the cosmos. They remained adrift in “an open satellite compartment for ten days.” Upon their return, the surviving tardigrades were able to “wake” from their cryptobiosis, move around, and among them, some were able to produce offspring. (Here, Edelman might have something to say about reproductive futurism.) Surprising to some might be their susceptibility to a subtance many humans quite enjoy—hot water. Recent research finds active tardigrades can perish in as quickly as a day when submerged in water warmer than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Water bears in their tun state fare better. Water temperatures of 180F were required for an hour and 145.6F for a day, respectively, to be lethal for half of the tardigrades exposed. All this to say, if you’re going to bring your water bears to the hot springs, make sure they’re in their tun state, honey.

XIII.

When we test a system or any individual fauna for resilience, we place them at the threshold of death, let them straddle it for a bit. There are so many ways for a thing to end, for us to contribute to a system’s destruction, knowingly. It’s in what’s not known, the uncertainty of the final moment, the final image, the last fissure tethering an association together in which we might direct all our hope and despair and everything in between. Something will remain, in defiance. We might call that queer; we might call that beauty. 

XIV.

I’m searching for a pudgy rhyme, some slant / image of a water bear wobbling / along over a grain of sand or salt. / There’s a great lake drying not far from me, / the remnants of an ancient inland sea. / I conjure an animal, one and many, / on that ever-expanding shore—less line / than swath now, a path widening. Do we / harness the microscopic, mount them and / ride the moss piglet or eight-pawed ursine / on a trail to eternity? Where parched / lakebed rises, a spell of consequence, / meant to put us to sleep for good, but not / them, who lie there dead for years, still alive.

References

Bordenstein, Sarah. “Tardigrades (Water Bears).” Microbial Life Educational Resources. https://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/tardigrade/index.html

Brennand, Emma. “Tardigrades: Water bears in space.” BBC Nature, 17 May 2011. https://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12855775

Cretney, Raven. “Resiliency for Whom? Emerging Critical Geographies of Socio-ecological Resilience.” Geography Compass 8(9), 2014.

Gunderson, Lance H., Allen, Craig R., and Holling, C.S. Foundations of Ecological Resilience. Island Press, 2012.

Miller, William Randolph. “Tardigrades.” American Scientist. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/tardigrades

William Fargason