# Stephanie Wakefield

### Anthropocene Back Loop Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space

## Stephanie Wakefield

### Anthropocene Back Loop

Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space

### CCC2 Irreversibility

Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook

The second phase of 'the Anthropocene,' takes hold as tipping points speculated over in 'Anthropocene 1.0' click into place to retire the speculative bubble of "Anthropocene Talk". Temporalities are dispersed, the memes of 'globalization' revoked. A broad drift into a de facto era of managed extinction events dawns. With this acceleration from the speculative into the material orders, a factor without a means of expression emerges: climate panic.

## Stephanie Wakefield

### Anthropocene Back Loop

Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space

*London 2020* OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2020 Copyright © 2020 Stephanie Wakefield

Freely available at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/anthropocene-backloop

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Figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions.

Cover illustration by Caroline Castro. Copyright 2020, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Print ISBN 978-1-78542-071-9 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-072-6

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org

### Contents

#### Prelude

This is the doomsday future we are offered. As oceans rise and temperatures soar, coastal cities are inundated, and swathes of the Earth become uninhabitable. In Miami where I currently live, one foot of sea level rise—expected by 2040—leads saltwater to infiltrate Biscayne Aquifer, rendering tap water undrinkable and devastating the sewage system. Residents flee en masse like 21st-century Dust Bowl refugees. For those who stay, instead of bikini shops and ventanitas, an increasingly-submerged, unbearably hot city of undrivable highways surrounded by virus and excrement-filled oceans.

In most depictions of our future, life for ordinary people is diminished, reduced to survival and precarious getting by. Such imaginaries are common. But despite their ubiquity, are these images of life the only ones possible?

#### Acknowledgements

Writing is a dialogue between the author and the multifarious realms of life experience, dreams, and personal interaction. On the latter, there are many people I want to thank for their support, advice, and conversation. I am extremely grateful to the editors of the Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series, Claire Colebrook and Tom Cohen, for their support and feedback on this book. Thank you to Bruce Braun, for so much support and friendship over many years. Hutch Ismael Valentin, Janice Vargas, Estefania Panesso, Julian Chupacabra Monar, Frankie Cruz Echevarria, Peppa Holder, Mia Matković, Dominika Jargilo, Prabesh Gurung, and everyone else from CrossFit Breed: your friendship changed my life and I would not be the same without you. Kevin Grove, for extensive support on the way to and at Florida International University. Elizabeth Johnson, who introduced me to CrossFit. Caroline Busta, whose brain is always five steps ahead and continuously motivates me to push my own further. David Chandler, for conversations and especially critiques. Nigel Clark, for lots of inspiration and the idea of "unsafe operating space." Clark Fitzgerald, Kat Nelson, Corey Eastwood, Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Elise Duryee-Browner, Alyssa Bonilla, Tony Buczko, Antek Walczak, Gean Moreno, George Sanchez Calderon, Elizabeth English, Jacques Lacour, and Buddy Blalock.

The book was written primarily while I was visiting Eugene Lang College-The New School as an assistant professor of Culture and Media. There, I would especially like to thank McKenzie Wark for her incredible support, as well as Shannon Mattern, Dominic Pettman, Simon Critchley, Timon McPhearson, and Ed Keller. I am grateful also to my students at Queens College and The New School, especially those in my Anthropocene Futures, Anthropocene Life, and Infrastructure courses. Particular thanks to Annabel Finkel, Galen Peterson, Stockton Cobb, Jacob Channel, Isabella Kazanecki, Jil Averbeck, Kate Bilezikian, Jessica Davies, and Dawit Yohannes Kiflemariam. You inspired parts of this book and I hope you will find yourselves present in it.

The final writing and editing of the book were made possible by a generous fellowship from the Urban Studies Foundation. I am very grateful for this support.

Parts of the book were presented at meetings of the American Association of Geographers in Boston and New Orleans; the Design 4 This Century seminars at The New School; the Miami Beach Urban Studies seminar at Florida International University; the "Anticipation, Experimentation & Design in the Anthropocene: On Governing Futures of Life" Research in Conversation Workshop at Durham University; the Urban Studies Foundation Symposium at the University of Glasgow, the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies SAGGSA Colloquium Series at Florida International University, Post-Planetary Futures symposium at The New School, and the Measuring the Anthropocene Symposium at the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. For invitations to speak at these events and/or for thought-provoking discussion at them, huge thanks to Oliver Belcher, Claire Colebrook, Melanie Crean, Kevin Grove, Marisa Jahn, Elizabeth Johnson, Ed Keller, Jonathan Pugh, and Kathryn Yusoff.

Parts of the book or early versions of ideas developed in it were previously published in different forms in "Amphibious Architecture Beyond the Levees," *Mobilities* (2019); "Infrastructures of Liberal Life: From Modernity and Progress to Resilience and Ruins," *Geography Compass,* 12, no. 7 (2018); "Inhabiting the Anthropocene Back Loop," *Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses,*  6, no. 1 (2018): 1-18; Stephanie Wakefield and Gean Moreno, "Tools for a Thawing World." Exhibition catalogue essay for SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat, Museum of Art and Design, Miami Dade College (2018). "Dreaming the Back Loop," *Affidavit* (2017); "Field Notes from the Anthropocene: Living in the Back Loop," *The Brooklyn Rail* (2017). Thank you to Hunter Braithwaite and Paul Mattick for generous feedback on these last two pieces.

A special thank you to KD, who kept me company while I finished editing the book. Most importantly, thank you to GD. I love you so much.

*Stephanie Wakefield* March, 2019

#### Introduction

#### Why back loop?

Liberalism's old structures are unraveling. We are free to create our own. That is the basic premise of this book.

When the Anthropocene first entered public discourse around 2011, it seemed at least to my mind to offer an opening, a way to break out of ineffectual political frameworks, and to take up the basic matters of transforming what it means to be alive, within social and political flux. For this reason, I experimented with it in writing and in political practice as a name for the present. Over the years however the term been molded and modulated in many ways by resilience proponents as much as by critical theorists, across whose diverse discourses it has become nearly synonymous with entanglement, antihumanism, and diminished expectations. Over and over, when the word Anthropocene is uttered, it is followed by listicles of environmental destruction or musings on the scale and scope of crisis, which, rather than inciting any range of actual responses, themselves lead to moralizing instructions on the necessity of educating the masses, using smarter lightbulbs, jettisoning "outdated" nature/human binaries, and supporting resilience gurus or a green new politician. In so far as it is perceived as such, the Anthropocene has become a hindrance, rather than an opening, to transforming life. I am exhausted by the apocalyptic and hateful images being forced on us by political culture in this and all regards, and by the rigid modes of discourse that now portray life in the Anthropocene as survival amid entangled ruins of a broken world. "Annihilation! Annihilation! Annihilation!" the psychologist in recent cli-fi book *Area X* screams repeatedly, hoping to make the biologist self-destruct, only to realize that the more she repeated it, the more meaningless the word seemed. Like apocalypse, the End, or all the *Guardian Environment* articles retweeted each day—the word tends to lose its power with aggravated repetition.

This book proposes an alternative reading of the present, one which seeks to break with these crisis-ridden contemporary imaginaries, and to again see other possibilities open now. To do so I borrow the heuristic of the back loop from resilience ecology. As explained in chapter one, a back loop is a time of confusion and collapse as well as potential and reorganization. I find the back loop useful as a lens through which to see the present because it allows phenomena to appear not as endless crises or self-confirming signs of impending doom, which ultimately only shore up one's own preexisting beliefs, but instead as the singular responses they are in a liberal society in freefall.

I started thinking about the back loop in the spring of 2017 while teaching resilience ecology at The New School in New York. Despite the fact that my research on resilience has always been extremely critical, the concept of the back loop struck me as a compelling way to think about the moment we're living in at society or civilizational level. At the time I was experiencing many deep transformations in my own personal life as well, with a lot of the basic assumptions and modes I'd been living in being upended. In so far as it implies responding to such situations at whatever scale by allowing oneself to let go and actually experience them, allowing metamorphosis to occur rather than holding on to old frameworks senselessly, the back loop concept made sense to me on that level as well. In general, what I seek to do with the back loop, as I'd tried to previously with the Anthropocene, is to get away from the really unimaginative frameworks used in politics to understand life, and to test a way of seeing that would break with preestablished categories. Such approaches assume that life is a known quantity, reducing it either to surviving impending apocalypse or a range of preexisting yet completely inadequate political models. Instead what happens if we look at the changes happening around us from a less rigid or calcified perspective, and instead see that while one set of codes for living are coming undone, this doesn't need be a tragedy? It can also mean that we have an opportunity, one many people have actually wanted for a long time, to create our own new codes, now.

To be clear, by borrowing the back loop concept from resilience ecology, I am not importing the field's attendant frameworks wholesale or accepting resilience's view of the world in terms of systems. Such would accept a cybernetic view of life, which I neither find sufficient nor accurate. Instead I am borrowing the back loop heuristic as one tool among countless others for trying to think the now. As I will suggest toward the book's end, inhabiting the back loop may lead to the end of any such loops altogether. Likewise, the goal in using this heuristic is not to own or constrain the present. It is not to brand it, nor to try to define it once and for all. Instead it is just one provocation to thought, a proposal to shift out of established liberal models that currently dominate. A lens through which to see contemporary phenomena differently. There could and should be many other ways to think the present. The goal of this book is simply to put the idea of the back loop and contrasting ways of responding to it on the table for discussion and elaboration.

#### Responses to the back loop and experimentation (overview)

Times of deep change are usually perceived existentially rather than cerebrally—singularly rather than abstractly. As such this book explores the back loop beginning from what is being done—from practices occurring now. Practices of power and truth, dreaming and living, governing and shaping: such practices are as old as humans themselves. They are how we create our worlds, take them in hand and shape them. But what is happening to these practices of life as they enter the back loop?

The book is a tour through some of the back loop's linked iterations, exploring the different ways different people are responding to and living in it, as well as some lessons that we can learn from their diverse practices. Obviously, the ones I explore are only some amidst a broader range of practices. Not everyone experiences the back loop in the same manner (the desire to go back is equally, if not more, ubiquitous than the desire to inhabit here). That said this book is for the new. My interest is in practices that directly take up back loop dislocations in their own unique ways. This holds for "malevolent" and "liberatory" practices alike, and includes the activities of governments, technologies, and ordinary people within back loop transformations. But throughout my concern is to explore possibilities of liberation and freedom for ordinary people in a back loop context, and the way in which these possibilities can be redefined within its shifting configurations.

One way to respond to the back loop is to try to maintain safe operating space via deploying new modes of management. I discuss two versions of this response in chapters two and three. Chapter two explores one of the most dominant ways of responding to the back loop: resilience. Resilience is the current incarnation of liberal governance, a transfiguration in its own modes and techniques. Defined as "the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure,"1 resilience has risen to the top of urban management agendas, replacing sustainability as means, end, and theoretical framework. Moving between reflections on my research on resilience infrastructures in New York and Miami and theoretical and cultural site-based analysis, this chapter analyzes the political, social, and technical dimensions of urban resilience and its hopes of preserving and managing global urban systems in their "safe operating space." I argue that although many celebrate resilience as the city or planet's salvation, it supports a disabling fiction whereby human survival in the era of climate change is tethered to the maintenance of existing economic, social, and political relations. In contrast to management

#### Introduction 13

past, which promised a better future, the role of resilience technologies in coastal cities, I argue, is to manage and adapt to changing conditions of catastrophe at sea—rising seas and storm surge—in order to secure and manage an unchanging urban order on land.

In chapter three I trace the affinity between resilience's desire to maintain the old operating space and imaginaries of post-apocalyptic life present in contemporary critical theory and media, with special focus on recent climate fiction and theoretical work of Bruno Latour, one of the most widely heard voices of the Anthropocene. Surveying speculative imaginaries of post-apocalyptic life found in film, fiction, and critical theory, I argue that what is emerging are not novel imaginaries that help us generate other possible ways of living—as I believe many in this field hope. Instead their works impose a new "Anthropocene moral code" with damaging constraints on life and imagination, demanding adherence to laws of entanglement, antihumanism, and limits, with failure to do so risking being seen as obsolete hubris. As such, I argue, these imaginaries aim to stabilize (to govern) life, albeit by declaring the latter to be unstable and outside human control.

I have another major disagreement with this body of literature. To be very clear, the "front loop" I describe in this book is not "our" world for which we are all equally responsible; it is the world forwarded and enforced by liberal regimes. I am not in agreement with other Anthropocene theorists for whom "our" world is ending, one which "we" profited from. From my vantage point the world of liberalism must be understood as an historically specific regime of government, with interests in discipline, profit, and productivity, which sought to mold much of life, human and nonhuman, in its image. Another way to describe the back loop is to say that society is witnessing the slow motion trainwreck of this regime in its last moments, and we are its collateral damage. In this context both resilience and ruins imaginaries impose a blackmail of a single loop on all of us. Human survival and the survival of the liberal way of life are conflated into one. We are to choose between a life of governance or a life of governance.

In chapters four, five, and six I explore other ways people are responding to the back loop. In contrast to resilience's nihilistic reduction of life to crisis management, and in further contrast to critical accounts of the Anthropocene that celebrate the life of things or a world without humans, these short chapters show that our time is just as equally one of great experimentation in human capacities and ways of living. Chapter four deals with skills and infrastructure, exploring ways in which people across the US are taking up survival skills, technologies, or amphibious architecture and, through these, the means of existence within shifting environments. Chapter five moves to the scale of the body, to look at how contemporary physical fitness movements, in particular CrossFit, are developing new physical practices by looting existing stores of fitness regimes, and in process taking possession of health and body amidst a tidal wave of chronic disease and decrepitude. Chapter six is concerned with possibilities for crafting new forms of subjectivity in the back loop, and looks at the work of contemporary Jamaican singer Chronixx and possibilities present, as he puts it, in experimentation with one's soul. These three chapters are short and focused on extremely specific examples, some of which may resonate more strongly with readers than others depending on their sensibilities. What these chapters show are other responses to the back loop by regular people, which they develop not to govern the back loop, but to inhabit it according to their own needs and inclinations. Moreover, they seek to show the vast range of valences within which it is possible now to rethink life and how it is lived. Together these chapters ultimately argue that living in the back loop requires a new practical orientation, a letting go of old frameworks, hubristic experimentation with new uses, and an allowance for the unknown—and all of this imbued with a confidence in one's own pathways. In the use of tools, use of the body, and use of one's own soul, we are witness to a deeply dramatic taking up of life—how it is described, defined, and lived.

Though such practices are extremely diverse, they can also illuminate a divergent way of responding to the back loop, which, rather than governing it, concerns living with autonomy in and beyond it. To explore this in the final chapter I reevaluate and employ theoretical tools found in the works of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk, as well as methodologies derived from ecology, to theorize these practices, as a means of understanding how people can appropriate and transform their worlds. In contrast to resilience's efforts to preserve the old front loop safe operating space, this chapter argues for a widespread, popular taking up of the possibilities of the back loop by experimenting with one's own modes of inhabiting it. This I suggest requires transfiguration and reclamation of tools of existence and the hubristic confidence to wield them. In keeping with the speculative and experimental spirit I have outlined, my goal is to put such ideas on the table, so that they may be discussed, debated, explored or rejected. Embracing experimentation in the back loop could lead us to unpredictable, provisional collaborations and divergences whose outcome cannot be known or predicted in advance. Much remains to be explored.

#### Introduction 15

As a whole the book works as a tour through landscapes of the back loop opened by each of these different responses. Each chapter can be seen as a snapshot or vignette of a different trajectory in it. As it proceeds the book shifts registers and styles as much as scales, to track and develop on some of these pulsations. This is intentional and designed to evoke different frequencies on which the back loop is experienced. These iterations can be read as linked or coexistent, potentially feeding or limiting one another, but they may also be seen as divergent trajectories that delink and take on their own independent velocities. Each represents both broader paradigms of back loop response, while also maintaining their own singular rhythm as practices.

In the book I use experimentation as the best word I could find to describe both practices of back loop governance and for living with more freedom and autonomy in the back loop. I do so not to suggest a grand new concept of experimentation,2 but just to note that, amidst back loop dislocations and shifts, diverse people and forces are jettisoning preexisting models and experimenting with new ones. In the realm of governance, one finds real-time experiments in urban environments conceived as living laboratories, with the aim of managing urban populations and environments and, as I argue, more fundamentally maintaining liberal orders by new means, projecting them into the future infinitely even amidst the catastrophes they generate. In the case of resilience, these experimental practices often result from a perceived obligation to relinquish past modes of urban administration and to embrace a new ecocybernetic approach. On the other hand, practices I discuss in the second half of the book in terms of autonomy may be described as experimental in the sense that they do not follow from exterior political or moral blueprints; instead emerge from within the needs, lives, and dreams of practitioners themselves; are enacted and made use of by practitioners themselves; are modulated over time as practitioners discover new needs, desires, or limits to overcome; do not seek as their end a specific society or scenario, but are better described as tools for living, for taking one's life into one's own hands and in so doing making it into a work of art; and which finally open onto possibilities unpredictable in advance, and see this as a fine thing. In this sense there is a freedom to them. While there are perhaps many formal similarities between the experimentation of resilience government and that of autonomously inhabiting the back loop—one may also easily remark that experimentation broadly speaking is a liberal category—there are also important differences. While resilience seeks to *govern* back loop dislocations, practices described in the book's second half seek variously to freely inhabit the back loop, and to take their lives in hand within it in various shades and tenors. Focusing exclusively on formal qualities of experimentation may lead to readers missing this more fundamental difference of sensibility.

#### Nobody knows what this is

While for the purposes of the book I limited myself to these examples, I could have easily looked at many other trajectories and examples. I could have, for example, also discussed the unpredictable rise of posttruth itself as a back loop phenomenon, that is, the idea of a single objective truth, to which you could speak truth to power and it would all be revealed, shattered by the recent agreement that most media images are and have always been fabrications, and by a man who just realized you can say whatever you want, not apologize for it, and suddenly everyone feels entitled to their own definition of truth. Other frequencies of the back loop that could be discussed might include the seeking online and IRL of new ways to understand the world now manifesting variously on social media, or the rise of movements from Occupy to Gilet Jaunes for which "nobody knows what this is" has been as much an assessment as it has been a rallying cry and badge of honor. On the rise of experimentation as a back loop mode of governance and flight both, a second volume of this book might cover developments in the realm of space colonization such as SpaceX, blockchain, or Google's desire to aggregate human being into data. Together and in their conflict these practices make up the back loop not as a thing or universal encompassing epoch, but an epochal assemblage with many possible trajectories.

Just as there is not one truth of the back loop, equally there is no single truth to any of these stories. There are always many angles, and many ways in which what seems negative from one angle can become useful or take other directions from another. Thus chapters two and three, which are primarily critical, conclude with thresholds, points where the topic under discussion exceeds itself, spiraling beyond even its own goals toward other horizons (the element most worth finding in any situation). I finish chapter two, for example, with the argument that resilient urbanism, despite its problems, offers tools for a different way of responding our turbulent epoch, in the form of the experimental ethos that suffuses its efforts. Just as equally, if the back loop premise proves useful to readers, it will hopefully do so by leading them in completely different directions.

Truth is ultimately a local and contingent thing. Not only does this perspective entail recognition that that which we are told represents absolute fact—as portrayed by CNN or Fox, for example—is in reality the interest of this or that party. Moreover this perspective on truth entails understanding truth as an extremely personal matter. We have

always been post-truth. This does not mean that there is no truth, but that there are as many truths as there are peoples, dreams, and realities. Following this perspective, this book does not aim to get the truth of the back loop. It aims rather to insist that there *isn't* one. In arguing such, it is engaged in what Foucault once called a "battle 'for truth', or at least 'around truth'," which, he explained, is not for an absolute truth can be "discovered and accepted," but is a battle about "the rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true."3 In contrast to efforts to lay down the meaning of the Anthropocene for everyone, the book instead argues that there are many truths to the back loop, many ways in which it is experienced, understood, and taken up. Experimental techniques of resilience government, techniques of imagining post-apocalyptic life, and techniques of free inhabitation: each are frequencies of the back loop, different ways of responding to the questions and problems it poses, is seen to pose, uniquely across place and time. Each create and follow their own forms of knowledge, practices of truth, and technologies of power and life, as well as ways of constituting subjectivity on the basis of these imaginaries and practices.

What all of these trips through the back loop and its iterations ultimately suggest is that we are heading not into a single imagined future but that the loop, long imagined in the singular, is spiraling out beyond its own bounds. Decoupling, breakaway subjects, or even breakaway civilizations—it remains to be worked out.

#### Free to move on other planes

In the end, I do not offer a solution to the back loop, at least not in the traditional definition of a problem-solving response, a means to a final resting place without conflict or change. In my view the back loop is not a problem to be solved. Rather, the shift I am outlining in this book is simply toward a different thinking about transformation and about life. To say there is no solution is not the same as saying, as do governments and theorists, that nothing else is possible, so we may as well keep greasing the wheels along this catastrophic path. To say there is no solution is rather to suggest that this calcified way of thinking is part of the problem. A lesson I take away from the experiences I have had over the past decade in political movements such as Occupy, as well as in experiments which emerged from such moments based on the Anthropocene hypothesis—during which the question of why political modes of thinking and acting are so limited, why despite their stated aims of transforming the world anew they instead contribute to its maintenance and the dulling of imagination within it reappeared to me incessantly—is not that past forms were wrong and what is needed is to find the next new correct one. The lesson is that the one form that would finally end all conflict, finally establish paradise on Earth, will never be found. Moreover, that spending our whole lives searching in vain to establish it leads us to miss what is already possible here, now. My suggestion that we are in the back loop means that we have already crossed various tipping points, but that in doing so, everything from social practices, technologies, and truth to plants, animals, and places have become shaken out of their normal frameworks. We are free to move on new planes. And this should compel us to shift our perspective a bit. Instead of lugging around old political frameworks for no reason, and then trying in vain to make our new realities conform to them, we now have the opportunity to stake out entirely new possibilities for ourselves and each other. I do not think we require alternative ways of organizing the whole world or society, but instead to take back the conditions for asking what life can be. We likewise do not need new laws, but instead new practices and tools for getting on with the immeasurable beauty that is living, for giving new sense to the secure, happy, rich, or meaningful life. Instead of looking for solutions *to* the back loop, it seems more relevant to explore the possibilities offered to us *by* it, the potential it holds here and now. What's on the table now is what is true, what being human means, as well as who gets to answer those questions and in what ways.

In the back loop, we have the opportunity to rethink, define, and powerfully shape our existence. From this perspective our time is a time for audacity, experiments on the same playing field where our future is already being written for us.

In terms of scale, many practices are going to be hyperlocal they might not make sense in other environments—while others are undoubtedly going to require complex global cooperation. A whole civilization in the back loop. This is a venture open to all of us. Fundamentally this is going to be a vast experiment, wildly imaginative and deeply democratic in nature. It's something that has to happen but something that many of us also really want. After all, one of the only things most Americans agree on is that, at a bare minimum, we need a revolution.

The changes we need are going to be deeply transformative—going for them will require both daring and courage—but that doesn't mean they won't draw on what exists now or traditional practices and behaviors. It's not about the new or old, but about new combinations and arrangements for a meaningful and livable existence on this planet. This orientation entails finding new modes of nourishing ourselves, designing and raising buildings, staying warm or cool, and accessing clean water as it is does learning to face the unknown and learning to look into ourselves and ask what kind of life *we* want to make live, what kind of life is worth living, and asking previously unaskable questions. What is being human? By "we" I don't just mean designers, city governments, planners, or resilience theorists who have already become back loop participants, as testified by the existence and growth of the resilience paradigm*.* Nor do I mean a fictional homogeneous "we" of the species, the assumed liberal body social, or any other. By "we" I mean anyone: common people where they are, how they are, people who will bear the brunt of climate change, people who already needed the world to end yesterday.

#### 1 The Back Loop

#### The coordinates are scrambled

Record heat waves blaze across Europe and North Africa; wildfires scorch Greece and even the Arctic Circle, while on America's West Coast, meteorologists warn that billowing smoke could choke out views of annual Perseid meteors. According to Earth systems scientists, the planet is shifting out of the stable climates of the 11,000-yearlong Holocene interglacial in which modern civilizations developed (and also out of the glacial-interglacial cycle in which it flickered for the last 100,000 years) and into the Anthropocene, a more volatile and unknown operating space where the glaciers are melting, seas are rising, and climates are changing.4 Fueled by carbon dioxide emissions and biosphere degradation, this headlong movement will surpass various tipping points of biogeophysical feedback—permafrost disappearance, land and ocean carbon sinks weakening, polar ice sheet melting—accelerating global warming as well as pathway irreversibility.5 While for some scientists the term is a matter of the impact humans will leave on Earth in the deep geological future and is thus a matter of geology, for other Earth systems scientists such as Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, the Anthropocene represents "humanity's effect on the Earth cross[ing] a tipping point" and the Earth's shifting into a new domain of operation, out of the Holocene's safe operating space and into a question mark, with Earth heading into "planetary terra incognita."6 In this sense the Anthropocene offers a name for a time of profound transformation.

The boundary crossings and dislocations of the present also concern the human realms of thought and action. Alongside the Earth's transformations, we are equally contemporaries of liberal civilization's shifting baseline.7 While interpretations are diverse, it is clear is that in the Anthropocene the grounds, parameters and imaginaries for thought and life are being upended and shook loose from their moorings. We witness this dislocation in what is seen by many as the bypassing, scrambling or breaking down of modernity's unified categories of Human or Nature said to mark the Anthropocene, transfigurations leading new visions of human life to emerge. We see it equally in the unexpected rise of the post-truth age and the "challenging [of] well-established dualistic boundaries such as nature and culture or good and bad," as scientists Jan Zalasiewicz, Will Steffen, Reinhold Leinfelder, Mark Williams and Colin Waters put it.8 Likewise

Figure 1.1: The trajectory of the Anthropocene, showing Earth beginning to move out of its glacial-interglacial cycles of the late Quaternary in 2016 and onto a new, unknown pathway. Adapted from Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, "The Anthropocene Equation," *The Anthropocene Review*, 4, 1 (2017): 53–61. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd.

geopolitically we see Anthropocene destabilization in regimes spending millions of dollars trying to ward off crisis; the United States and the United Kingdom's attempting exiting of liberal global order; the giving way of old modes of social regulation to the soft bans and behavior policing of tech companies like Facebook and Google; while at other scales and in various sites, new tribalisms of all stripes develop.9 Other times we sense present dislocations in less cerebral manners. In so many ways, as artist Gean Moreno has put it, "we can feel—the modulations are like soft electrodermal pulsations, but on the inside—our imaginary undergoing significant restructuring."10

#### Adaptive cycle

How to think this situation? For some critical thinkers, the present is experienced as something to lament, a catastrophe to endure, or crisis to manage. For others we are living in an apocalyptic end time, either literally or in its temporality.11 Many now celebrate the end of Man and the "life of things" or the "world without us," offering new antihumanisms appropriate to a moment in which our potential extinction is much discussed.12 But to better capture the complex depths and textures of our time—without nostalgia or morality—rather than a crisis or the end of the world, I argue that we are living in not only the Anthropocene but also, more specifically, its "back loop," a time of release, fragmentation, and great potential for reorientation.13 The back loop concept was developed by C.S. Holling in the 1970s and

Figure 1.2: Adaptive cycle. Design adapted from Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding transformations in systems of humans and nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002), p. 34, by Caroline Castro for this book, 2019.

is now used widely by resilience ecologists.14 For ecologists, every system (a forest, a body, a city, etc.) goes through a cycle with two phases, what they call a "front loop" and a "back loop" (together making up the "adaptive cycle" (see Figure 1.2)).15 The front loop is seen as progressing from an initial growth or exploitation phase to conservation and seeming stability, while in a back loop those structures come apart, leading to a period of destabilization, fragmentation, confusion, and release but also great potential for experimentation, reorganization, and transformation.16

The back loop is a relatively new and little-studied concept. Until the 1970s, ecologists viewed ecosystems through a teleological model of succession, seen as progressing from the initial growth or exploitation phase, represented by r, to a second and final phase of stability represented as K.17 To take the classic forest example, the first phase is dominated by fast-reproducing pioneer species that colonize and exploit a fresh base of abundant resources.18 Over time, they are replaced by larger, more specialized organisms, which annex the system's niches and nutrients. The result is a mature forest, a stable, tightly connected climax community where everything—sunlight, water, biomass—is "in its place."19 The climax phase was viewed thus as the ideal end point, where a system's steady state was made up of the organisms best adapted to its environment. Equilibrium was the key idea for systems understood to possess homeostatic modes (homeotherms, etc.). For most of ecology's history, environmental

management was geared towards conserving and managing ecosystems in this stage. They thought, in other words, the front loop was all there was to life.

This model underwent revision in the 1970s when Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling made his now-well-known interventions that led to the new field of resilience theory.20 Systems, Holling argued, do not remain in a single steady state. Rather, they regularly experience phases of release and reorganization, times of collapse, creative destruction and renewal. By comparing myriad case studies of diverse ecosystems, Holling and colleagues argued that it was necessary to add another loop, a so-called back loop. For resilience ecologists, back loops usually occur due to a sudden crisis event: forest fire, flood or pest outbreak.21 In the release phase—represented by Ω energies and elements previously captured in the conservation stage are set free. Think again of the forest example often used by resilience ecologists (Holling himself came up with the back loop concept while on a walk in the woods22). In a post-fire forest, organized carbon and nitrogen, decomposers and producers, feedbacks of sun and water, nutrients and biomass, previously bound up in certain configurations to feed the mature forest, are scattered and released.23 "Now suddenly," writes Holling, "[is] the time where unexpected events happen. The accumulated resources are disassembled, broken down, left uncontrolled". This is the "reorganization" phase, represented by α, where potential, previously bound up, is freed up for new, unexpected combinations.24 As illustrated by political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon, "it's as if somebody threw the forest's remaining plants, animals, nutrients, energy flows, and genetic information into a gigantic mixing bowl and stirred."25 Space is opened for new species to colonize the area. Pioneer species sprout from stumps of burned trees. Birds nest in their charred branches. Genetic mutations prove useful. Undergrowth is cleared, making way for the floor receive sunlight. Ash settles in, returning previously locked-in nutrients to the soil. Surviving species are freed from long-standing relationships, available and open to new combinations, exploring the new zone using seeds in the soil, debris and existing vegetation—"biotic legacies"26 left behind by the disturbance and creating new combinations and feedbacks, testing out new predator-prey relations. The back loop, in short, is a time of great possibility, where the previous forest may be reestablished via existing seedbanks, but novel "unexpected synergies" between invasive and native species may equally give rise to one or many other new arrangements.27 Resilience ecologists also point out that all back loops are different. Just as possible as the rise of new structures, is the possibility that no new structures may arise. Instead of a new loop or loops, there could be only phase shift after phase shift, cascading pulsing leading only to dissipation.

Holling summarized these ideas in a heuristic model he called the adaptive cycle. In the now iconic image—it has graced the cover of Holling's recent book *Panarchy* and was even represented in a sculpture—the adaptive cycle is depicted as a horizontal figure-eight, with a front loop of growth (r) and stability (K), and a back loop of release (Ω) and reconfiguration (α).28 While the idea emerged in Holling's work on insect predation in forests, he and others compared a series of case studies over time—New Brunswick forests, the Columbia River Basin, British Columbia fisheries, Chesapeake Bay's watershed, Austrian alpine villages, south Florida's Everglades—and concluded this cycle could be used to describe the life of each of them.29 Holling even came to understand his own life through this lens, describing it as following "7–10 year cycles of unplanned intellectual growth, frustration, and renewal."30 Today the heuristic has been adopted by most resilience thinkers, who bring to it their own uses and emphases, and the heuristic expanded to multi-scalar nested adaptive cycles or panarchies.31 But across these different emphases the basis concept remains: all systems—human beings, swamps, forests, companies cycle through a front loop of growth and stability and a back loop of release and reorganization.32

The back loop is the least studied aspect of systems.33 But I would argue it is also the most fecund. While, as I will discuss shortly, resilience proponents generally advocate for the governance of the back loop so as to prevent the loss of a system's identity—to keep systems cycling through the adaptive cycle as in an infinity loop it is clear that, within each loop's course, there is the possibility for a vast opening of fundamental reorganization or, in a less teleological sense, a period in which new arrangements and possibilities can be worked out and countless divergences launched.34 In a 2004 paper published in *Ecology and Society*, Holling asked himself whether the adaptive cycle could describe not just regional change, but global and international.

Are we in a "deep back loop" that presents the same opportunities and crises as the regional back-loop studies that we have described?35

Holling's remarks were off the cuff, suggestive and non-empirical, but we can pick up his thread and take it much further, using the adaptive cycle as a lens with which to see the Anthropocene.

#### Stitching the whole Earth together (Anthropocene front loop)

Within geology, the Anthropocene has generated an impassioned debate concerning its status and chronology, with early efforts dating it to around 1800 with industrialization and the combustion of fossil fuels in England.36 Likewise, many narratives date with urbanization and proletarianization.37 Others have proposed that it began in 1610 with the genocide of Native peoples in the Americas while more recently, the "Great Acceleration" has taken precedence, with the Anthropocene Working Group calling for the beginning of the formalization process.38 Each of these Anthropocene periodizations is important in their own right, and such attempts to measure and demarcate humanity's stratigraphic impact birthed the important study of technofossils, implicating a wide variety of phenomenon, including the Columbian cataclysm, the first atomic bombs, the proliferation of plastiglomerates, and the settling of soot in some of the world's most pristine environments.39 Yet insofar as these proposed dates seek an origin, asking when it began, how long it may last, and outline appropriate metrics, they do not fully capture the strangeness, disruption and temporal transformation of the Anthropocene as phenomenon. As cultural theorist Daniel Hartley has noted in an insightful essay, "the temporality of the Anthropocene as a periodizing category is bizarre … shifting as it does between the present, a retroactively posited past and an imagined future."40 What if this bizarre temporality—the bizarre temporality of our present—is what makes the Anthropocene so powerful both as a conceptual lens and as a historical moment?41

To preserve rather than eliminate this strangeness, perhaps the Anthropocene is better thought as having a front loop and back loop.42

The front loop refers to the historical periods and processes typically referred to in histories of the Anthropocene and Western liberalism: colonization of the Americas, slavery and economies of resource extraction, as industrialization and the combustion of fossil fuels in England catapulted segments of humanity out of the biological old regime in which humans harvested energy from sunlight, water, plants, wind, and animals, and into a world of factories, proletarianization, and wages, transforming people and environments into resources.43 Imaginaries of a world split in two, with nature on one side and humans on the other, both seen as resources to be governed and purified, quantified and exploited, as well as the material production of environments in this image and the production of an abstract relation to them, were each moments of the same process of transformation.44 Dams and bridges, massive in scale and composed of thousands of tons of concrete and tempered steel: such infrastructures,

Figure 1.3: Anthropocene adaptive cycle. Design by Caroline Castro for this book.

along with the architects who built them, were in the 19th and early 20th centuries hailed as potent evidence of Western civilization's Promethean ability to shape and order both human life and powerful natural forces, bringing stability and order to cities while transforming natural forces into usable flows.45 Levees, spillways, and dams were erected to control and regularize the flows and floods of the Mississippi; railways and electrical lines laid out across the United States; all facilitating commerce and urbanization. For city planners behind these audacious engineering feats, among them Robert Moses, "the beauty of public works surpassed that of nature."46

Likewise many of the world's peoples were removed from land or forced onto a path of migration toward cities for wage work. Cities, factories, and even schools were reshaped into grids of order to discipline, coordinate, and increase the populations' productive powers and create docile subjects.47 And even if the mastery and happiness promised was a fiction, it was a fiction that functioned*.* Looking back at Polaroids of grandparents smiling in front of massive dams or bridges, there is a sense, believable at the time despite most evidence to the contrary, even for working class families, of being a part of an order that was going somewhere better. In the mid-twentieth century coincidence of Fordism and the Great Acceleration, brief windows of possible stability for swathes of the American population opened, built on years of divided and circuitous struggle for industrial democracy and civil rights.48 With stability of course meaning assembly line production at a rate of every 30 seconds of the rest of one's life.49 With

Figure 1.4: Family visiting the Grand Coulee Dam, built on the Columbia River in Washington between 1933 and 1942 for irrigation and hydroelectric power. Photo circa 1950.

the building of the (segregated) suburbs and urban ghettos, the workers' movement, with its lumbering union bureaucracies and rank and file masses concentrated in various industries fought for and achieved powerful wage and quality of life gains, as well as a positive, albeit circumscribed, sense of identity.50

In this bubble, politics was understood to be the domain in which transformation and liberation occurred. The quest of modern philosophy and politics was to determine being by giving it a name, a ground, or telos. What mattered was some abstract realm beyond or below life that gave it meaning or order. By identifying this safe operating space, outcomes were seemingly guaranteed, or at least stable theoretical pictures of them were possible: justice, equality, a perfectly ordered world where workers would control the means of production, conflict would vanish, and, everything finally equivalent, rivers would flow with lemonade.51 Thus were the images of liberal life peddled by both capitalist and socialist Western governments and reflected back by those governed. Amidst this a single vision of human life conceived in the terms of liberal governments was forwarded, the Western/ Cartesian notion of the human subject—seen as separate from the environment and amenable to governance, variously a nugget of labor power or a docile subject to be shaped and molded by external forces.

Figure 1.5: The Great Acceleration in socio-economic and Earth system trends. Adapted from Steffen et al.

With reality portrayed as a single, knowable canvas, an ongoing war was waged against other ways of living deemed undesirable.

Together these physical and metaphysical transformations framed a narrative of modernization—of improved standards of living, humankind's triumph over nature, conquering wild landscapes and peoples, productivity and progress—as well as the hegemony of a "one-world world," as John Law has put it, made material pipeline by pipeline, cable by fiber optic cable, powered by power plants and fossil fuels, massive factories housing huge concentrations of wage workers.52 In the post-WWII period—think here of Earth scientists Steffen et al's Great Acceleration charts (Figure 1.553)—international institutions like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank promoted highways, irrigation, and electricity as central to development and socioeconomic advancement, the material substrate for each nation's path forward into integrated global commodity chains, with open trade and flows essential strategies. In the stories of civilization forwarded, the 20th century was progressing toward a single, homogeneous and Western, liberal mode of life based on a unitary standard for thought and action, a "whole Earth" stitched together ever more tightly with global commodity chains, pipelines, and fiber optic cable.54 Across diverse versions of this imaginary of equivalence what dominated was a vision of progress and order, going toward a future promised to be different and better. The literal ground to this figure of life was the "just right" Holocene interglacial.55 For the last 11,000 years, the atmosphere trapped just enough of the sun's energy, giving Earth the Holocene's "remarkable long summer"56 ice caps at the poles, oceans at just the right pH teeming with life, fresh water rolling from aquifers and watersheds, clean air to breathe, a planet rich in life inside a protective stratosphere. Though often invisible, this was the basis of the Anthropocene front loop's shortlived, but self-described stable and linear world. The safe operating space in which liberal civilization was born, in whose "end of history" we grew up, and which we are now leaving.57

#### Splintering whole Earth (Anthropocene back loop)

It would of course be giving far too much credit to front loop regimes to accept standard narratives of them as truly stable or as a wellthought-out conspiracy to order the world. Various front loop governance techniques were developed to manage, to administer, to respond, to order, in a tangle of engineers, pencil pushers, designers, courtrooms, white papers, petroleum tanks, rebar, and asphalt. They were all intensely ad hoc, local, and reactive, producing disastrous effects along with the much-touted benefits and stability. Today their contradictions have become apparent.

As increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane trap more of the sun's heat, Earth's average surface temperature is now rising, with the ocean absorbing the bulk of the warming. Glaciers in Montana and Iceland, but primarily Antarctica and Greenland formed in past ice ages as water evaporated from the oceans, snow accumulated and compressed, layer built upon layer, under the weight of accumulating seasons, as lower snow became ice, formations became glaciers, and ancient air was preserved, trapped as bubbles within ice—are melting, sending their water into Earth's swelling seas. According to data gathered from microwave and GPS sensors installed on land and ice, in oceans and in space, sea levels have been rising throughout the 20th century and the rate of rise has increased in recent decades, with .1 inch per year in the 1990s to a current approximate rate of .13 inches per year.58 With this rate increase accelerated by ice melt, the amount of sea level rise projected for 2100 may be doubled from those figures based on a constant rate of rise.59 Beyond seas, Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill suggest Earth has left the Anthropocene's first industrializing phase and entered into a second one post-1945, marked by a rising ticker of anthropogenic-induced tipping points crossed or neared: fisheries collapse, biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycles, ocean acidification and coral reef bleaching, as well as deforestation.60

In pace with mass extinction, coastal inundation, and drought is also the withering of the certainties to which Western liberal societies tethered their populations, the fracturing of the grounds that gave sense to what could be done and known. Concurrent with post-1945 Anthropocene indicators was the dismantling of the Fordist edifice, which pulled the rug out from beneath the feet of whole populations of workers, canceling the promised future and increasing consumptive musts while making their fulfillment more and more impossible. After decades of revanchism and counterrevolution—wage cuts; deunionization; urban crackdowns; switching from social control by welfare to hyperincarceration; massive wealth gap and soaring profits for the very wealthy—the death of the so-called American dream is felt widely and across diverse sectors of society.61 Many of the most important social, economic, and political structures which made the 20th century liberal subject—and indeed more broadly liberal ideas of life, politics, and thought themselves—appear possible have been systematically dismantled. For resultant surplus populations, work is defined by low pay, informal, and unsteady work.62

The claims to governmental mastery of the world and human life are being washed away by rising seas and unprecedentedly powerful storms—as much as by Twitter feeds—while terminal diagnoses of Western civilization proliferate as quickly as fantasies of the end.63 Infrastructures once heralded as feats of civilizational mastery are today a key concern not for the glorious order they represent but due to the threats they are seen to pose (cascading network failures, release of greenhouse gasses, toxic waste, targets of terrorism). Global interconnectivity has rendered social political systems not only more chaotic and unpredictable as well as prone to disruption but as analyst John Robb notes has fundamentally changed how they work, with traditional forms of planning and expertise breaking down, nonlinearity leading to destabilizing events, and in other cases complete collapse of legitimacy for traditional institutions.64 What William S. Lind calls "fourth generation," nonstate warfare predominates, while amidst the crumbling of once-coherent narratives, fractious discourses and new tribalisms of all stripes—religious, clan/gang, made up ties to a made up past or created anew on 4chan and 8chan—abound.65 In this unique moment, as Peter Sloterdijk notes, "both of the old Anglophone empires have within a short period withdrawn from the universal perspective" and politicians such as Trump "instinctively subvert the norms of modern governance."66 Amidst the growing absence of unifying, coherent social order or world, social media and tech companies are stepping in in hopes of regulating conduct, to govern and lock in place the data they have made of us. Or it is more accurate to say that human subjectivity is transforming from liberal personhood not only into what Weinstein and Colebrook describe as "a disturbance and a vibration orienting around the chaotic intensities that swirl in the absence of a concept of life as a controllable, containable, nameable force …" but toward forms of cybernetic immanence?67

As Brad Evans and Julien Reid aptly sum it up*,* "we are living out the final scenes of the liberal nightmare in all its catastrophic permutations."68 But part and parcel with this are new ways of living and knowing now embraced diversely across place, an expanding universe of trajectories fissuring what was once dreamed to be a single world order. Alongside ever-amassing accounts of colossal earthly transformations that proceed regardless of human involvement—epitomized in modernity's culmination in a "world without us"—equally and together with what are indeed widespread catastrophes, the Anthropocene's back loop is just as importantly defined by a vast proliferation of experimentation in redefining what human life will be. In their own powerful ways, these back loop experiments attune themselves to warmer, wetter, or simply changing worlds, to the upending of deeply held notions and environmental conditions. SpaceX "Mars I" dreams of another space. Pleistocene Park cowboy ecoengineering and dreams of bringing back the past to the present. De-extinction, rewilding, and efforts to recreate the past. In cities worldwide, planners, designers and governments dismissing modern infrastructure as outdated and experimenting with soft, ecological, even "living" infrastructures designed to build resilience. Neighbors and families set up makeshift gyms in backyards and empty lots, experimenting with what bodies can do. We are amidst a wave of experimentation with new ways of transforming bodies, minds, lives, and the world around them: from hacking, making, modding, prepping, and weight lifting to citizen science, eco-design, solar energy grids, and wireless mesh networks. People everywhere are searching their souls, scouring the Earth for tools, and trying in a million ways to reinvent what it means to be human and to dwell on Earth. But together with this search, since 2011 we are also in an era of riots, insurrections, and revolutions from left to right that, to the front loop mind, may look insane, but are very real.69

Nature is experimenting too. As global warming has decreased the number of days below freezing, mangroves' habitable range has increased and the trees are taking root in salt marshes farther north.70 Alligators are adapting to live in residential areas with lakes or canals and use south Florida's waterways as a network of highways to get around. Florida's Everglades are also inhabited by a large population of Burmese pythons—brought to the area as exotic pets and discarded. Despite a state-organized "Python Challenge" that awards cash prizes to freelance citizen groups who catch the most pythons, the release of an iPhone app for crowdsourcing python sightings, and the state's importing of snake-catching specialist Irula tribesmen, the pythons continue to thrive and multiply in their new environment.71 Seasons are shifting: spring is coming earlier in many places, while winters as we know them in New York have grown more erratic and 60—70 degree temperatures increasingly frequent. "Insects are emerging earlier; birds are nesting earlier; plants are flowering and leafing out earlier."72 We create our worlds in nature's transforming worlds, and vice versa.

#### Now what?

In short, if the front loop was the safe operating space of the Anthropocene—here understood not only as a "geo" but also a "geosocial formation" built on a transcendent terra firma of thought and action, however fictional that may have been—this complex, nonlinear post-truth world of fragmentation, fracture, dissolution, and transfiguration is what I propose we call the Anthropocene back loop. 73 The back loop is our present, the moment of the naming of the Anthropocene (as a failure), in which the past (front loop) has not disappeared, like points trailing behind on a line, but is erupting in unpredictable ways in the present. However fictional they may have been, the ties that bound—the feedbacks that wove?—the Anthropocene stability domain are coming undone.

The Anthropocene, which literally means Epoch of the Human, has received extensive criticism for its invocation of a single figure of Man (or The Human or Anthropos), which authors have taken to task variously for what is seen as its erasure of race and gender difference or its elision of the fact that the destruction now wrought by "humanity" is in fact caused by the actions of a very small percentage of wealthy humans.74 While such arguments contain much truth, in my view its invocation of a single definition of human life is the Anthropocene thesis's greatest virtue. For this way of thinking about and molding life within one frame is that of modern liberal regimes, which the Anthropocene thus refers to as an historically specific dated and finite—strategy for approaching human being. More specifically, the Anthropocene front loop names the liberal project of defining and enforcing life as a one world world in order to call all of this a failure, evidenced in the degradation of natural environments and human subjectivity alike. Thus the Anthropocene back loop provides a name for the liberal way of life as one finds it today: a sinking ship increasingly taking on water from all sides. Instead of heralding the building of a one world world—processes congruent with the front loop's ascendant phase—the moment of naming the Anthropocene—the back loop—is one of confusion, chaos, and the potential for transformation.

For many this situation can only be perceived catastrophically. Within ecology itself, negative characterizations of the back loop dominate, with the latter depicted primarily as a time to be avoided or governed and illustrated with images of destruction and chaos. Indeed, as I will discuss in the next chapter, ecologists and resilience advocates often seek ways to keep systems in the stable front loop zone, or at least minimize back loop disruptions. For others the back loop is experienced variously as a chaotic time of confusion, fragmenting, crisis, or upending. To paraphrase writer Gretel Ehrlich, is this a world coming apart, or piecing itself back together? Either way, that the old world is finished seems clear to everyone. Whether that is a blessing or a curse depends on one's vantage point.

Viewing the Anthropocene through the adaptive cycle lens, and in particular our threshold now of scrambled grounds, discombobulated modes of knowing and being as a back loop, has a number of benefits. Chief amongst these is the ability to see the Anthropocene not as a tragic End or world of ruins, but a scrambling where possibility is present, old codes are becoming unhelpful, and the future more open than typically imagined. But as will be seen throughout this book, using the back loop to view our time also requires we push resilience thinking's own boundaries, especially as pertains the deep potential for transformation at the heart of its foundational heuristic.

As observed in ecological systems, the back loop is the phase of life in which individual organisms or small groups of individual organisms interact across previously unbridgeable divides and in so doing create something fundamentally original. In contrast to life in the regimes we are leaving behind, where innovation was stifled and influence limited to a few actors with the greatest power—the stability "trap"—in the back loop beings and things are released and open to new potentials.75 Although most back loops studied by ecologists have been regional in character, in 2004 Holling penned an essay suggesting that "we are at the time of a large-scale back loop," a global situation in which "each of us must become aware that he or she is a participant."76

I think Holling's challenge is important; but it is also an apt description of a phenomenon already underway. If we're in the back loop, the question becomes, how to respond? Try desperately to maintain the old safe operating space, freeze a process already in motion? Or let go, allow a time of exploration and experimentation, see what possibilities life holds and what it can become?

2 Government in the Back Loop: Resilience and Managing Safe Operating Space

#### Governing safe operating space

In the face of back loop dislocations, resilience has emerged as the dominant methodology and discourse under which a host of technologies, designs, and visions are being gathered in hopes of managing urban and global systems in their "safe operating space." Developed by C.S. Holling as a mode of managing the adaptive ecosystems described in his research, resilience is defined as "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure."77 In contrast to what are now seen as outdated front loop modes of management that sought to maintain a single stability state, resilience is heralded as a form of back loop management that seeks to create and define "safe operating spaces" able to absorb and manage, rather than eliminate, disturbance. Seen as a scientifically verified new worldview, resilience management has risen to the top governmental agendas, from global institutions like the United Nations to city government and activists.78 As I will argue in this chapter, resilience is a mode of government proper to the upheavals and exigencies of the back loop.79

At the global scale, one finds the efforts led by Stockholm Resilience Centre executive director Johan Rockström and host of Earth and social scientists to identify and govern the "planetary boundaries" of the front loop's safe operating space.80 In a 2010 TED talk indicative of resilience's attitude towards the back loop, Rockström compared our situation, of being close to or beyond the thresholds of the stable Holocene, to a photograph of a man standing at the edge of Victoria Falls, the massive 350-foot-high waterfall in Zambia (see Figure 2.1). "You don't want to stand there!" he warned. "In fact," he continued, "you're not even *allowed* to stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In fact there's a *fence*, upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger zone."81 In response to what they perceive as a world on the brink, Rockström and an international team of scientists have proposed the identification of the Holocene's key Earth processes, and management of "a planetary boundary—a fence—within which we have a safe operating space for humanity"82 (see Figure 2.2.). For Rockström and colleagues, the ultimate goal is global institutional collaboration to manage thresholds and maintain the safe operating space that undergirds "our way of life … and how we have organized society, technology, and economies around them."83 This safe space of the front loop is for Rockström the only known Earth system capable of supporting the modern liberal way of life and thus must be preserved. Yet he, along with many other scientists, also agrees that we are already leaving the Holocene and entering the new world of the Anthropocene.

Rockström's response to the back loop, though colorful, is exemplary of the broader spirit of resilience as it is understood at diverse scales, perhaps most ubiquitously in design efforts underway in coastal cities to maintain systems and prevent the crossing of thresholds. In this vein, cities like New York and Miami are now seen as "first responder" laboratories for resiliency infrastructures and strategies for climate change, rising seas and natural disasters.84 As city governments, designers, and communities search for responses to these new conditions–witnessed recently in Hurricane Harvey's inundation of Houston, the wildfires in the American west, and the devastating power of Hurricane Irma and Maria in the Caribbean resilience is celebrated as "a vital calculus for any city in this age of uncertainty."85 "There's no other way," declares a recent film by the Rockefeller Foundation, this is "the resilience age."86

#### Governing urban risk, front to back loop

Cities of course have long been laboratories where shifting modes of governing life are trialed and modulated, and urban resilience as we

Figure 2.1: Photograph of Devil's Pool at Victoria Falls, Zambia, shown by resilience proponent Johan Rockström in "Let the Environment" to illustrate a place "you don't want to stand!" Photograph copyright: Annie Griffith, National Geographic, 2012.

now know it marks the latest configuration of this much longer history of biopolitical government. As put by Michel Foucault, biopolitics—the way in which regimes maintain control over and administer cities and populations via the securing of life—does not proceed primarily as a matter of governments nor preconceived plans, but rather through ad hoc-arrangement of techniques. Such techniques include discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, knowledges, technologies and designs, brought together in response to a crisis and that together and in their relations form what he called a *dispositif* or apparatus.87 Surveillance systems, militarized architecture, urban sanitation, street lighting, policing practices: so many security techniques are responses to other actions and forces: riots, disease, crime, terrorism. Individually and together the techniques of liberal regimes thus proceed reactively and in an ad hoc manner, developing and stitching together disparate knowledge, practices and designs in situ to manage situations perceived as problems or crises on the ground—specifically crises from the perspective of the regimes that seek to maintain their power—within shifting social and political landscapes.88

In the face of myriad crises, liberal regimes in the front loop long posited themselves as bulwarks against disorder and their deliverance of security and protection of life in the face of such disorders was central to the kind of life and landscapes they actually helped produce. The so-called stability phase of the Anthropocene's front loop was in fact maintained through constant crisis management of this kind. Indeed, this order played a central role in the creation of ways of life deemed acceptable or productive for liberal regimes in the front loop while extinguishing others deemed unacceptable.89 As Tim Mitchell recounts, whole cities such as Cairo were reshaped into a grid of order, machines composed of army barracks, schools, and factories whose aim was to discipline, coordinate, and increase the country's "productive powers."90 Open and orderly streets free from impeded circulation and visibility were a key means of eliminating crime but also constituted the conditions of possibility for the liberal subject and helped shape life in its image.91 Just as nature's soft, muddy, or meandering environments could be governed with hard, clean, or metal structures of electrical power, dams, and highways, uncooperative populations could be disciplined with pipelines and automated grids, laid out by companies to neutralize worker power to strike.92

Since the 1960s, as the front loop probably began to give way to the back loop, apiece with structurally-led disinvestment and ghettoization, the American city has increasingly been construed in the minds of managers, sociologists and governments alike as a place of

Figure 2.2: Planetary boundaries: a safe operating space for humanity, adapted from Steffen, Will et. al. "Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet," *Science* 347, no. 6223 (2015).

crisis under perpetual risk that must be secured. Working through an "ecology of fear"—in which everything from garbage to graffiti, striking workers and panhandling were recast as threats—new forms of management were devised based on embedding security into urban environments.93 As has been well-described by geographer Neil Smith, this effort was an attempt by the bourgeoisie to reassert control through a sustained warfare on the poor and working classes through militarized redesign of public space, public and private-led gentrification, and embedded surveillance, backed by intensified policing.94 Instead of trying to normalize or include the city's working class and marginalized populations, in New York this "revanchist" assault brought forth a new sterile urban geared toward commuting, tourism, and investment.95 Ultimately, past models of liberal social control were augmented by more explicitly militaristic models of governance based on constant securing and ever-intensifying policing of undesired populations.96

More recently, with the rise of "networked societies" and the post-September 11 "war on terror," technical systems, like unruly human populations, are seen by governments as posing a source of uncertainty and potential menace to urban orders.97 In the 1960s companies automated their critical infrastructures, increasing profit rates but also creating systems able to maintain function amidst strikes, thus contributing to more hoped-for order. Today however, interconnected critical infrastructures are now seen as vulnerable to threats coming from ever-expanding list of outside threats—terrorists, hackers, eco-saboteurs, bored kids, and protesters—within broader infrastructurally-comprised environments. But what governments and companies now seek are ways to defend these complex infrastructural systems not only from the outside but from themselves. As during the 2003 northeastern blackout in the US, a very small incident such as a downed power line or faulty switch can now rapidly generate cascade effects across vast distances.98 Thus for some time now, notes geographer Jon Coaffee, "cities and regions are attempting to embed security and risk management features into their built environments and their systems of governance as part of a drive towards more 'safe' and sustainable communities."99 Through strengthening existing infrastructural systems and creating new and more systems the drive to "the 'securitization' of network-based urban societies," writes Graham, "becomes such an overpowering obsession that it is used to legitimize a re-engineering of the everyday systems that are purportedly now so exposed to the endless, sourceless, boundless threat."100 "Everything," continues Graham, "from the design of subways, through the topology of water networks, to the thickness of airplane doors and the software that makes electricity systems work, becomes a site of subtle militarization.... discourses of 'security'... saturate, and militarize, the tiniest details of everyday urban life."101 Within this field of critical infrastructure protection, infrastructures are now seen as vulnerable to catastrophe, the source of catastrophe*,* and yet more than ever they are also viewed as carrying the hope of managing catastrophe. Replacing their past status as icons of order, we now hear of hypervulnerable and securitized "cities of risk," where discourses of risk interchange with techniques of security, the one folding back into the other, feeding into and augmenting one another in an ever-expanding environment of paranoia and fear, well-illustrated in New York City's new Domain Awareness surveillance system, which integrates over 3,000 closed circuit television cameras around the city with Microsoft software allowing the New York Police Department to crosscheck and monitor criminal databases, measure radiation levels, scan license plates and even human faces.102

#### New York City as lab

Thus has governance of the city stretched to unimaginable dimensions hoping to maintain its own order, as the front loop nevertheless gives way to something less controllable. But climate change adds new dimensions to this story. Amid Hurricane Sandy's wreckage in 2012, for example, architects, designers, planners, and politicians reimagined New York as a fragile city menaced by not only social risks but also ones ecological and infrastructural in nature. A slew of facts now situated the city in space and place—"you know, Manhattan is an *island"*—but not as an ecological matter of getting back to nature, rather one of facing up to water as an unavoidable, threatening presence.103 Instead of hunter green eco-urbanism, coastlines and neighborhoods were cast in shades of red, orange, and yellow levels of risk and the cityscape marked in varying degrees of vulnerability. These new landscapes referred to households without power, flood areas and casualties caused by storms, but also painted a picture of what is now endlessly promised to be the city's apocalyptic new future. NYC's Office of Emergency Management and FEMA's revised flood maps doubled the number of homes in the high flood risk zone. The *NYT's* interactive guide to sea level rise titled What Could Disappear enabled readers to envision major American coastal areas according to various levels of sea rise.104 Perhaps most dramatically, *National Geographic* featured a cover story on "Rising Seas" with the Statue of Liberty halfway underwater, while *Nature* magazine's post-storm cover perhaps best summed up the new orientation: "New York vs. the Sea."105

For the world's elites, the stakes after all are clear: "we have to do a better job," then-mayor Michael Bloomberg declared after Sandy, "not only keeping our networks up, but keeping our markets and businesses open, come hell or high water."106 Recent storms, and back loop disruptions more broadly, are generating a climate of existential urgency, setting in motion a widespread search for solutions. For politicians along with designers, planners, and higher education institutions, maintaining business as usual "come hell or high water" is not a matter of just more management needed, but is now cast as requiring a new idea of management itself. In this vein, slews of articles and opinion columns now devote themselves to debunking old approaches of management. City papers welcome readers to the "new normal" *ad nauseam*, calling on readers to abandon dreams of mastery and equilibrium—"the world doesn't work that way," explains resilience pundit Andrew Zolli, calling instead for new ways "to manage in an imbalanced world…in constant disequilibrium."107 Instead of making the city smart or sustainable they now ask, how to make cities resilient in this new world of omnipresent risk and uncertainty.108 While sustainability, many experts agree, was an impossible quest "for ways to put the world back in balance," they promote resilience as a more "realistic."109 "We're not going to make the mistake of fighting the last war," Bloomberg declared post-Sandy.110 Instead of continuing to block out nature or disorder, resilience is said to welcome such intrusions and entanglements in hopes of managing through attenuation and interconnection. Connected locally and globally, the urban system now imagined is not that of a harmonious, balanced network of interconnection, as in the ecosystems and closed loops of the 1960s, or the blue-green urban nature of sustainable urbanism,111 but that of an out-of-control, careening landscape of complexity, uncertainty, and risk. "Forget sustainability," cried a *Times* headline post-Sandy, "it's about resilience."112 City planning commissions, art exhibits and newspapers all repeat similar catchphrases, creating an echo chamber in which resilience rings as the best and only refrain. In place of front loop forms of urban administration, which sought to block out crisis, volatility, or risk, resilience is heralded as a new paradigm that welcomes such intrusions and entanglements, views crisis as inevitable, and, seeing cities as coupled social, ecological, and technical systems, aims to develop their capacity for absorbing or withstanding turbulence.113

New realities are said to require new plans, both experimental and audacious.114 Toward this end, early on New York quickly positioned itself as a test lab for urban resilience. Not only did the city become a "climate change first responder"115 in a technical sense, but it also rebranded and opened up as a laboratory where new techniques of governing the city in an age of climate change could be tested out.116 ("New York is where the future comes to audition," has become an often-repeated quote). The Department of Housing and Urban Development put hundreds of millions of dollars into New York City efforts. Meanwhile at diverse other scales ccommissions are constantly organized, expert panels held at places like the New School and SoHo galleries, reports drafted, newspapers' think pieces, with the search for new forms of management forefronted as the key imperative of the future and to "never let a good crisis go to waste."

With the creation of 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), funded with a \$100 million investment by Rockefeller Foundation, worldwide 81 cities now have a Chief Resilience Officer, of which Michael Berkowitz, President of 100RC has explained:

Our goal remains the same—that a mayor wouldn't run her city without a CRO in the same way that she wouldn't run it city without a chief of police.117

Once-quaint ecologists from places like Sweden are tapped for expert advice and Dutch "traveling salesmen" flown in from Amsterdam ("'It's like the Dutch East India Company all over again," as scientist Harold Wanless puts it. "They have expertise to sell, and they are pushing it hard'").118 Across diverse discourses, one thing is emphasized: old models will not work—resilience government must complex; cannot come from top down onto a blank landscape; requires collaboration between diverse actors and communities; must incorporate local environments in which they are implemented with diverse voices announcing resilience as a revolutionary break from obsolete models: a movement even. As Dr. Raj Shah, President of the Rockfeller Foundation, describes it: "When the Rockefeller Foundation launched 100 Resilient Cities in 2013, we did so with the hope of sparking a global movement to build urban resilience."119 Cast in terms of innovation, risk-taking, and as a paradigm breaking with old ways and willing to throw out old models, resilience is portrayed as cutting edge and cool—rather than a top down project of urban security and governance—said above all to require experimentation.

Such thinking is endemic to resilience thinking's perspective on the back loop. As resilience-thinking founder Holling himself puts it, when faced with a back loop—which he emphasizes is a situation of the fundamentally unknown—instead of rehashing old models, one shouldn't "try to plan the details, but invent, experiment, and build."120 Consequently, in a back loop, continues Holling:

It is essential to do the following: 1. Encourage innovation through a rich variety of experiments and transformative approaches that probe possible directions. It is important to encourage experiments that have a low cost of failure to individuals, the environment, and careers, because many of these experiments will fail. 2. Reduce inhibitions to change, which are common when systems get so locked up. 3. Protect and communicate the accumulated knowledge and experience needed for change. 4. Promote discourse among all parties involved to try to understand where we are going and how to achieve it. 5. Encourage new foundations for renewal that build and sustain the ability of people, economies, and nature to deal with change, and ensure that these new foundations consolidate and expand our understanding of change. 6. Allow sufficient time.121

Following resilience's experimental methodology, elite universities and think tanks, celebrity architects and city commissions are converging on cities in a scramble for high profile grants and competition awards, and the privilege to use cities or parts of cities—blocks, sidewalks, neighborhoods, communities—as living laboratories for their designs and projects and varied goals.122

The Rebuild by Design competition, co-organized by the Rockefeller Foundation, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force in June 2013, has offered such a platform. Billed as an effort to "drive innovation" ("innovation has to break rules") and "to be a model for the rest of the world,"123 the competition offered \$930 million in a search for innovative, immediately applicable and replicable urban resilience measures. Harnessing large scale federal funding for use by local city governments and designers—"those willing to entertain and support unconventional solutions" as one article gushed— "highly unorthodox" design competition. Entries ranged, "from largescale urban and multi-functional green infrastructure to small-scale distributed flood protection measures and resilient residential structures."124 Joining forces with hip designers, art institutions, and activists, New York was recast not as an evil oligopoly, but an experimental, innovative, hip, and inclusive site for moving beyond the myopia of federal government inaction and into the urgent 21st century needs.

#### Redefining infrastructure

Alongside new codes or laws, the focus in Rebuild by Design and resilience more broadly is on design and infrastructure, both as object to protect and a means of protection, with a search for new resilient infrastructures that can better adapt, respond, or absorb risks and transform the urban into a resilient eco-technical-social system of systems able to get hit, reorder, and continue as-is amidst crisis.125 But the definition of infrastructure itself—traditionally thought in terms of brick and mortar bridges and roads or networked grids—is undergoing a transformation. Here resilience responds to back loop disruptions not only of an environmental but also metaphysical nature. The dualist ontologies separating subject and object that grounded the front loop are seen by resilience practitioners as outdated, and future survival dependent on overcoming them. "We have a new reality and old infrastructures and old systems," Governor Cuomo intoned post-Sandy, adding that the city's electrical utilities seemed like vinyl records in the age of the iPod: "antiquated, 1950s-style institutions that don't serve our current needs."126 Far from brick and mortar past—highways, power plants, or massive bridges, now seen as brittle, obdurate, out of date—self-organizing and data-sharing human communities are forwarded as "social" or "human" infrastructural systems, the modulation and management of which is now seen as key to resilience. City residents are instructed in preparedness: neighbors with backyard gardens and disaster go-bags are called on to shovel out, clean up, and rebuild, taught to be knowledgeable in first aid and search and rescue—and, as importantly, to be ready to transmit data to city agencies.127 Residents trained as such are increasingly referred to as what the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) now calls the social infrastructure crucial to resilient cities. This is because, as the Homeland Security agency itself agrees, prepared and connected neighbors add to a city's ability to bounce back, while isolated and helpless citizens subtract from it. Among a host of related emergency preparedness initiatives, the City of New York's Office of Emergency Management (NYCOEM) has launched a campaign called Ready New York, that encourages New Yorkers to see themselves as integral to the city's preparedness and response efforts—"'Re-sil-ient,' 'synonym TOUGH,' see also: New York City," as one City report put it128—offering educational videos and guides to a litany of disasters, a "Ready Girl" super heroine (see Figure 2.3), "Choose Your Own Survival Story" "tween" stories, and guide to building a Go-Bag.129 This expectation is not only after disasters, but extends to "non-disaster" time as well.130

Nature too is being asked to become critical infrastructure as well, explicitly incorporated into a larger meshwork of security infrastructures. In perhaps one of the most remarkable designs, New York State is building two miles of artificial oyster reefs in Raritan Bay off the coast of Staten Island, where it is hoped they will act as "living infrastructure" capable of buffering future storm surge and remediating polluted water (see Figure 2.4). Living Breakwaters, as the project is named, is one among six winning designs in the Rebuild by Design competition. In the design pioneered by Kate Orff and led by SCAPE Landscape Architecture firm, oysters are being asked to act alongside other proposed resilient systems to buffer future extreme events and act as a "first line of defense for Manhattan against storms as fierce or fiercer than 2012's Hurricane Sandy."131 By mobilizing oysters' natural processes (attaching themselves to each other and developing reefs that adapt to changing sea levels), the hope is to cancel out other natural processes (i.e. hurricanes and storm surges). Titled the Tottenville Reach, the reefs are being built on a pilot site, and understood by designers as a large-scale experiment in real time, providing both opportunity for different firms to engage in new live trial methods devised for the back loop's new exigencies and moreover to see whether or not the project even works.

In contrast to traditional restoration, the living breakwaters are the first experiment utilizing reefs for their "protective function," and are therefore being designed along a different, more biopolitical criteria: they need to function, be efficient, maximize capacity, be sturdy, and able to confront "aggressive" waves. As a result, the construction site is to be situated further off coast, directly in the midst of

Figure 2.3: Ready Girl, super heroine created by New York City Office of Emergency Management, teaches school children about emergency preparedness. Copyright: NYC Emergency Management.

dangerous high wave climates. Just as the resources and the landscape of New York as resilience lab gave SCAPE an opportunity to test new oyster recruitment structures in real time environments, likewise for companies like SeArc—a Tel Aviv-based coastal engineering/consulting firm, who designed one meter by one meter, one-ton blocks or "ecological armoring units" for the project—it is a chance to test their techniques in real time—with the aquatic architecture a pathway into a "living laboratory."132 While testing has been done in the Mediterranean Sea, Key West, and Haifa laboratories—making the Tottenville Reach its first live trial. Ultimately, it is the hope of designers that oysters will grow on each other, layering onto and strengthening the assemblage to which they are attached: "Designed as living systems," SCAPE's report to the Rebuild by Design jury explains, "they build up biogenically in parallel with future sea level rise," "rising elegantly with the seas."133

#### Further south in Miami

Meanwhile early models test run in Sandy's wake are now being replicated in other coastal cities, with the Bay Area recently launching its own Rebuild by Design competition and the launching of other resilient cities networks. Further south in Miami, Florida, early onset of sea level rise has likewise led to adoption of the resilience modality.

 Figure 2.4: Living Breakwaters design for south Staten Island, New York. Image by SCAPE Landscape Architecture team for the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery.

Built as real estate reverie and known for its art deco fantasy image, Miami—crisscrossed by unique, often conflicting metabolisms and trajectories including a hyper-segregated real estate development driven by foreign capital, environmental policies oriented around maximizing land value, and diverse local cultures—is increasingly seen as "ground zero" for sea level rise amongst US cities.134 Due to its position as one of the lowest-lying coastal cities in the US and foundation of porous limestone, sea level rise is a present-day reality in the city, with sunny day flooding ocean water coming up through the city's sewer system and sidewalks even on non-rainy days six times per year.135 Current flooding is now captured through iconic images like that of an octopi floating in a parking garage or Miamians wading through flooded intersections on their way to work, and is projected to increase to 80 times per year by 2030, and 380 times a year across a much-expanded territory by 2045, when sea levels are projected to rise 15 inches.136

While former governor of Florida Rick Scott publicly denied climate change—and issued an unofficial ban on use of phrases like "climate change," "global warming," and "sea level rise" in government documents137—in recent years the City of Miami Beach has taken up the task of building climate resilience. Now labelled a living laboratory for urban resilience,138 Miami Beach has taken up the resilience mantle in diverse ways including joining Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities as part of the Greater Miami and the Beaches collaboration, participating in Columbia University's Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes-100 Resilient Cities' Resilience Accelerator program, and working with local organization ArtCenter/South Florida to bring its first embedded artist to help the city brand its resiliency strategies more sensitively using tools of the avant guard.139

University think tanks and resilience networks have converged upon the city in the back loop, pouring billions of dollars into the search for new modes of administration. Resilience studies and institutes, expert consultants and funding agencies—Columbia University, Bjarke Ingels Group, Rockefeller Foundation, to name a few—have flocked to the city. Alongside its branding efforts, Miami Beach is currently the site of a projected \$600 million, ten-year climate resiliency infrastructure program laid out under former mayor Philip Levine, a "cruise line media magnate" elected in 2013 on a campaign promising to build resiliency to current and future floods, even filming one of his campaign videos leaving work in a kayak.140 Under Levine, via no-bid emergency contracts, doubled stormwater fees, and drastically multiplied sea-rise projections, the city of Miami Beach fast-tracked a suite of infrastructure projects including installing a fleet of industrial pumps, elevating streets, and building new seawalls designed to prepare Miami Beach for the next 30-50 years of sea level rise, and specifically for coastal flooding, King Tides, heavy rain and storm-related flooding, and groundwater flooding.141

As part of the plan, referred to as "Miami Beach Rising Above," in Sunset Harbor, a neighborhood of Miami Beach, engineers have elevated several blocks of road adjacent to a cluster of condos and restaurants. Today walking through the neighborhood's cluster of towering condos you may overhear wealthy condo dwellers debate whether to order the \$25 vegan noodle paella with corn alioli or the \$29 grilled octopus with fingerling potato foam which is not unusual for the area except for the fact that diners are now seated two and a half feet below the recently raised street (see Figure 2.5). To accommodate the elevated streets, modifications to existing businesses have been made. Publix grocery store chain, for instance, built to what several years ago was seen as base flood elevation, with seven stairs leading from the previous street height into the store's entrance, has now had five of the previously existing stairs leading into the large store eliminated, with just two stairs now leading into the store. Complimenting the raised streets, to build resilience to the regular flooding, Miami Beach has torn up streets to install twenty industrial pumps—costing \$2 to \$3 billion each—with plans to increase this number to 60-80 in coming years to funnel flood water out of city streets and into adjacent Biscayne Bay.142 Finally, capping off the Rising Above plan, the city is installing a series of new sea walls to protect streets and property from flooding coming from the Bay.

But with sea level rise, many speculate that Miami's most urgent climate change threat is not flooding or land loss but destruction of the city's freshwater supply via seawater infiltration into Biscayne Aquifer.143 As such, the once-restorative goals of a U.S. congressapproved new Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan—a 30-year, \$7.8 billion effort of the South Florida Water Management District and the Army Corps of Engineers to restore historic surfacewater flows of the 9 million acre Everglades system144—are now reconceived as a nature-as-infrastructure effort to render the city resilient by increasing natural water flows to maintain freshwater pressure against the intruding salt water. Here making the city resilient is understood as a matter of restoring "nature's" flows outside the city, by reversing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers's massive hydraulic infrastructural control system built in the mid-twentieth century to channel and contain the Everglades' flows. Part of the project is being conducted via experimental techniques in a vastly altered landscape replete with technological and industrial legacies and diverse human communities at Deering Estate145–an active experimental restoration site in Miami designed as a trial run of methods to be used in the Everglades proper, a kind of niche space for future "patchy" restoration strategies. Most recently in Miami under the umbrella of the Florida Disaster Resilience Initiative a coalition of politicians, consultants, and academics came together for a day-long live action role playing game—the Serious Games—to imagine and anticipate a future disaster scenario in all its cinematic details, and guide community participants toward the prepared solution of building resilience hubs. Different from New York, all of this is the Miami iteration of climate resilience: maintaining a (static yet ever-receding) pastel and neon art deco fantasy while the oceans rise around the city, with new infrastructures like these streets alongside a delirious postgreat Recession building boom, with 1.6 million square feet of office and 1.8 of retail space under construction in the second quarter of 2016 alone.146 The future is sure to be more resilient, with the recently approved \$400 million bond to build sea level rise and flood prevention infrastructure across Miami, part of Mayor Tomás Regalado's vow to fight the already-occurring sunny day flooding: "we cannot allow this to become the new normal."147

Figure 2.5: Dining beneath the city's newly-elevated streets, Miami Beach, Florida. 2017. Photo by author.

#### Resilience's relationship to the back loop

Though resilience recognizes deep-seated problems, its key tenet and goal is to attenuate and govern disruption in order to maintain the identity of the system. It is therefore possible to read resilience in its global and urban manifestations as representing one possible orientation to the back loop, Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre's "you don't want to stand here!" at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. Indeed, most resilience literature portrays the back loop in the negative.  In other cases, the back loop is the other side to the deadly tipping points that threaten human civilization (the anarchy which the loss of liberal order threatens to deliver). Echoing Rockström's reaction, Walker and Salt write, "given how unpleasant release and renewal can be, it's comforting to know that most systems spend most of their time in the fore loop, which is generally slow compared with the back loop."148 Likewise, in most accounts movement into a back loop is caused by a crisis event: wildfire, hurricane, or financial crisis, sending systems into the back loop "freefall."149 Like Rockström, who seeks to ward off the Anthropocene and welcomes us to it in the same breath, Holling shifts between a coming and an already-present back loop, with the world both "on the brink" and "in" a big back loop.150 In all cases, resilience practice follows with its techniques to "navigate" or safely "pass through" such times, the latter portrayed as something to endure, a crisis to prepare for, a disaster to stay afloat during, bounce back from, or pass through.151 Ultimately, resilience's goal as a mode of management is to maintain the overall cycle or system, while allowing for its modulation or mutation.

As resilience ecologists see it, endogenous and exogenous disruptive events such as fires, floods, or droughts "test" systems in the stability phase, leading to the uncertain time of a back loop, in which institutions must respond.152 Management responses may take the form of avoidance, or of efforts to stay in the front loop and maintain stable parameters and approaches. What resilience practitioners recommend instead is a period of experimentation, which embraces the period of uncertainty and uses it as an opportunity to test out new management responses.153 Such an approach begins from acknowledgement that there is a buffer zone within which regimes can exist while still maintaining their state or identity, and experiments seek to find those thresholds, while testing out new ways to maintain systems. In its current urban resilience iteration, what we might call an emergent paradigm of "back loop urbanism," represents the taking up of this approach to urban systems faced with Anthropocene dislocations such as rising seas and flooding. Rather than deny the reality of these events, and rather than attempt to use past management forms to administer them, back loop urbanism represents the range of experiments underway to adapt and remodulate cities in tune with such transformations.

For some, such resilience experimentation promises salvation: to heal the nature/culture divide by uncovering nature's potential or reconnecting urban dwellers with nature, each other, or Earth systems154—as if imagining a fully interconnected city could somehow soothe the latter's volatility. In ecology and systems thinking, fields from which the concept itself emerged and where it is today much discussed, resilience is promoted as a corrective to outdated "stability" models with their notion of ecosystems as single steady state and equilibrium and sought to manage them by preventing disruption or change.155 For resilience thinkers such as Carl Folke, this is now an "old" perspective, that "provide[s] little insight"156 and is in fact an "alienated" "pathology" actively preventing progress and increasing vulnerability. In its place, resilience posits what is seen as a more realistic, accurate, and contemporary view of the world as made up of dynamic, fundamentally unstable, coupled, nonequilibrium social-ecological systems.157 One must now, as Folke puts it, "learn to manage by change rather than simply react to it… uncertainty and surprise is part of the game and you need to be prepared for it and learn to live with it."158 Though its definition and approaches to its management are seen as works-in-progress, amongst ecologists resilience is seen as having "universal applicability" and is an "inherent property of systems" that today must be developed.159 Although it was simply a systems error while modelling predator prey competition in the 1970s that gave Holling the idea of resilience, and about which he initially said "I couldn't decide if it was real or bullshit,"160 today many thinkers believe resilience represents the endpoint of a story of Enlightenment, where resilience is portrayed as the discovery of a salvational "correct" view of the world and of nature. "We *were* Cartesian reductionists, thinking of the world as separate objects," this narrative repents, "but now we're not! At last, we are living in a system!"

However, salvation is precisely what resilience infrastructures tell us is impossible.161 Rather than promising the future understood in terms of progress and improvement, resilience infrastructure turns the temporality and politics of front loop infrastructure on its head. Instead it assumes a future that is only getting worse, inevitable crisis, and seeks only to minimize their effects, adapting to changing conditions so as to keep existing socio-economic conditions of liberal life the same (or more accurately, on life support). From Rockström to Bloomberg, resilience's power brokers have not been shy about making such priorities public. As Rockefeller Foundation president and resilience advocate Judith Rodin succinctly summarized it:

This isn't just climate-related. We're not just thinking about hurricanes or floods; we're really thinking about any vulnerability to the system that could take it down, and how to build against that.162

What's more, if there is a difference between resilience infrastructures and modern infrastructures, with the former seen as overcoming the problems of the latter, there is also a relationship between the two. Resilient infrastructures are designed to manage destruction and disaster caused by the ongoing function of front loop infrastructures like pipelines, mines, and power plants. Resilience designs thus work *in conjunction* with front loop infrastructures, which continue to produce the disasters resilience intervenes on. Put otherwise, the role of resilient infrastructures is to manage and adapt to changing conditions of catastrophe at sea—rising seas and storm surge—to secure and manage an unchanging urban order on land. Despite their "green" characteristics–oysters, swales, reefs, and marshes–they are deployed alongside the proliferation of pipes, cables, wires and roads that underwrite modern liberal life. Far from a new ecological savvy, resilience infrastructure must be understood as the substrate of a liberal regime promising neither redemption nor progress but only survival of existing, ruinous conditions amidst catastrophe.163

Take, for example, Raritan Bay, the site of New York State's oyster reef design, which is crisscrossed by some of the most important shipping routes in the US Northeast and traversed by oil tankers to and from massive petrochemical facilities on the New Jersey side of the bay. According to designer Orff, approval for the oyster test site was contingent on SCAPE's ability to prove that the project will have "no effect" on these ACE infrastructures. A powerful reminder of the way in which infrastructures to manage the effects of climate change literally sit side-by-side technologies that continue to produce those effects in ever greater proportions. Pipelines like Keystone XL or drilling in the Bakkan Shale are necessary to liberal life as it is now lived as well as to its extension into the future, while resilience projects are being built to secure that way of life amidst the very disasters it itself generates.

Resilience's status quo goals can be seen in other ways in Miami. Whereas in cities such as New York resilience projects are often presented as a dynamic and revolutionary new design approach based in complex, entangled socio-technical-ecological systems, across Miami resilience is more typically discussed in an explicitly economic register geared toward maintaining real estate markets, tourism, and investment in the South Florida region. Resilience power brokers such as Levine have not been shy about making the priorities behind their mobilization of resilience public. For Levine and others, the main—and explicitly stated—goal of Miami Beach's resilience infrastructures is to maintain the city's real estate market.164 What is protected, politicians hope, is a way of life that moves locally between high end developments, yachts and restaurants as well as internationally through off-shore banking institutions, second and third homes, and art fairs in distant cities. Despite being portrayed as vulnerable frontline experimenters, politicians behind such projects have rammed them through via apocalyptic discourse that states there is no alternative, no-bid contracts, and high-powered funding. In a kind of blackmail, future survival writ large is conflated with the survival of this particular vision of the city, an ethos aptly summed up in the name of Miami's new \$400 million resiliency infrastructure bond: "Miami Forever."

While it is celebrated by many as the city's or planet's salvation—or final enlightened nature/human relation—what such infrastructures make clear is that resilience in fact forwards a disabling fiction whereby human survival in the Anthropocene back loop is tethered to the maintenance of existing economic, social, and political relations.165 Indeed the back loop is treated as a time for remodulating governance of these very relations. Within these, resilience's goal is to maintain the single, biopolitical vision of human life forwarded by liberal security, and to maintain it within the one world world that has been installed. On the brink of regime shifts (of truth, water, land, or humanity) resilience qua governmental apparatus can only offer techniques to manage old parameters. Oyster reefs to modulate and manage oceans moving into new regimes, "roadmaps" to reverse Earth systems away from the brink, while underneath communicating the futility of the task: when asked to imagine the longer-term future of Staten Island, oystertecture designer Kate Orff replied, "towers, walls, and jellyfish."166 Similarly, while Rockström's 2010 planetary boundaries TED talk held the Great Barrier reef up as an example of management success pulling systems back from the brink, today the reef is used to represent another system passing the threshold, beyond saving except for its ecological functions useful to humans.167

Implicitly or explicitly, resilience designs therefore tell us that there is little left. In Miami Beach's case, Bvlgari bags will float on the rising seas as they churn outside the city's preserved art deco hotels: a frozen, yet ever-receding past of luxury, glamour, exuberant faith in social and technological progress. To paraphrase Harmony Korine's James Franco, Miami Beach forever… Miami Beach forever…Miami Beach forever. Or in New York, oyster reefs rise elegantly with the seas. The aerial view of a resilient Manhattan is one fringed in peaceful green, but zoom in and we find REM Koolhaas design firm OMA's vision of a new normal day lounging in Central Park, now with airdrops of Flood Alerts and Flood zone maps.168 Or take, for example, Bjarke Ingels Group's \$540 million "BIG U" sea wall now under construction around lower Manhattan.169 The "Reverse Aquarium," the project's signature building, was imagined as a museum located on the ground floor of the project's flood protection structure, featuring a glass window looking out onto New York's waters, where museum goers watch sea level rise in real time from behind plated glass (see Figure 2.6). Populations worldwide are held in suspense, fear, anxiety, buried in debt and bills and dreams of the end. The possibility of imagining or creating other worlds disappears.

Rather than promising the future—any future at all—as a mode of administering cities in the back loop resilience functions to *ward the future off.* Rather than promising to change life, functioning to ward other ways of living off. Adapting to changing conditions so as to

Figure 2.6: Mockup of "The Reverse Aquarium," signature building for Bjarke Ingels Group's BIG U sea wall for Manhattan, as imagined in original proposal for Rebuild by Design competition. Copyright The BIG Team/Rebuild by Design.

keep all other things the same. In place of what is now seen by resilience proponents as the front loop's wrongly hubristic human, resilience forwards a degraded, anxious subject that must endure crisis as condition for existence, a victim or hostage whose only agency is as stewards to Earth processes, conceived either as life support systems or living infrastructure (or as sensing nodes in a broader "data-intensive and extensive coastal site"170). Here crisis-managing infrastructure is the dominant rubric through which all spheres of urban life are increasingly seen. As in Liu Cixin's *The Remembrance of Earth's Past* trilogy, every minute of every day, every second of life lived, becomes a preparation for the end. With the world around us perceived as a constant source of risk, anything that can lessen that risk becomes acceptable. Safety becomes the end all and be all of existence. Climate governance is militarized, borrowing on techniques first developed in battlefield command strategies.171 Art, culture, the basic details of life become preparation for impending disasters seen as omnipresent and impossible to prevent. Many excellent studies of resilience have been written, but perhaps most evocative of the will to survival at the heart of resilient modes of administering urban environments can be found in fantasy writer Steven Erikson's *Malazan Book of the Fallen* series. In the books, immortality is a curse. A people called the Imass undertake a collective ritual to live forever in order to wage eternal war on their enemies (who, the reader later discovers, in fact lived with a vitality and free spirit unbeknownst to any other peoples).

#### Experimentation and power

While resilience teaches that there's no more dreaming, no more hubris, many of its animators are ironically embracing the very ethos it tells us to reject. In fact, studying resilience one cannot but be astonished at how much actual human agency—powers of imagination, hubris, and tools for their translation into reality—is currently held in the hands of those who want to preserve and profit from the present social system as the water rises. Faced with a society in the back loop—understanding we are leaving Western civilization's safe operating space—the powerful are experimenting and getting organized to thrive. Their experiments may be governmental or even malevolent, but they are also daring, often so much so that they believe they can transform the very cities we live in and the waterways that surround us into large-scale laboratories for their trials. They are maniacally trying to make a future in the images of their desire. What about the rest of us, for whom the safe operating space of existing society is not safe at all? How to move forward? How to break out of this cycle?

If cities are *already* entering the Anthropocene back loop, then why not *embrace* the back loop's destabilization and relational upheaval to open up transformative potentials and other futures? Instead of continuing on the same, eternally, for no reason, why not take this opportunity to reinvent life and make it more worth living?

Despite its dominant iteration as liberal governance, resilience's design modalities might actually provide a vector for thinking such profound kinds of transformation in the back loop. Resilient urbanism is fundamentally a shift toward situated experimentation in which the "lab" is not a pristine or sterile space but rather the urban environment itself, an expanded field in which old boundaries and limits are removed and innovation, imagination, and daring are not only considered essential tools for design but also for urban survival. Yet because it is situated in the world, in local environments, histories, and metabolisms, resilience is equally reliant and shaped by local legacies. As such resilience practices offer a critical method for the back loop: they make use of the world—more on "use" in chapter 7—but also occur in a world that exceeds us and which we do not control. Many of the very same resilience projects, which operate to dim down our imagination, are at the same time themselves deeply imaginative. They are ready to transvaluate—to let go of old models seen as no longer useful. They are experimental yet audacious, speculative and creative, and act in the here and now. Each of these experiments has an in-situ, ad hoc, character. They respond to local conditions, to manage specific local needs.

In keeping with their experimental nature, the efficacy and future of resilience designs is uncertain. Where urban government by experiment past had an uncertain character, today this uncertainty is taking on new dimensions and profundity. Raised streets and pumps in Miami are considered by many a debacle, the former causing flooding for area restaurants, the latter found to be discharging human fecal matter into Biscayne Bay. Oysters in New York may not ever take hold. No can say if it will work. "What we're looking for," Kate Orff has explained, "is a spark, a critical mass enough to jumpstart life again in a place that is practically speaking dead."172

As the consequences of more storms, floods, and fires unfold, and as the inevitable tidal wave of think pieces on how to "bounce back" wash in, the post-Sandy stitching together of a resilience doctrine bears consideration. Katrinas, Sandys, Harveys, and Marias: these are events that change us. They scramble our view of the world, shift the ground under our feet, and open up a number of possible trajectories and possible responses. There is always another choice, and while its discourse primarily provides darkness, paradoxically resilience practice may have more to offer. Its grandly ambitious plans and their deeply experimental ethos as well as the relative speed with which its proponents have succeeded in producing a paradigm shift are all something to be admired about resilience.173 As we search for other paths forward in the back loop, we are each free to use the best lessons of resilience practice and discourse to challenge its worst aspects, to open up a much wider field of possibility and with a much broader set of actors. All of us, in all our various worlds, with our aptitudes, and skills are free to take back the powers of audacity, experimentation, and transformation, and put them toward other paths, alternative meanings for resilience, and more livable ways of life. Up for grabs in the back loop is not only the survival of human life, but its very meaning. It's everyone's right to take up such a question.

3 Sit Down, Be Humble: Imaginaries of Post-Apocalyptic Survival Amidst interlinked Ruins

#### Imagining life beyond safe operating space

Red skies hang over California, floodwaters lap at America's Gulf Coast, and just about everything else seems to be going down the tubes. While resilience seeks to ward off the end, as we tip into the Anthropocene's back loop—who hasn't wondered if the end has already come?

If this is the case—if instead of awaiting a cataclysmic event in the future, we are already living in the post-apocalyptic—what possibilities for life beyond thresholds? Just like the expanding field of resilience thinking and design, recent film, theory, and literature offer ideas and imaginaries of what life beyond safe operating space might look like. Whereas resilience's imaginaries must be teased out from within its seemingly technical infrastructures, works discussed in this chapter seek explicitly to forward new imaginaries. Although widely celebrated, this chapter argues that these imaginaries require more critical investigation. What practices and forms of life are being forwarded in them? Despite their ubiquity and claims that the Anthropocene "changes everything," are we actually seeing something new in them? Or might we instead be witness to the assembling of another apparatus for governing the Anthropocene's back loop?

To begin let us consider recent film *Blade Runner 2049.*

Set 30 years after its predecessor, *Blade Runner 2049* depicts a future we can really believe in. Ecological collapse has caused widespread famine, the Blackout has wiped away data and thus history, and the only living things are stunted humans, bioengineered replicants, and giant beetle larvae on distant protein farms. Amid the ruins stands the Singularity incarnate: savior-tech-billionaire-freak Wallace, played by Jared Leto, who is based—like the late Tyrell Corporation—in a massive brutalist temple bathed in noir lighting and updated for the era of climate change with the undulating shadows of rippling watery light.

Wallace plays a katechontic role: manufacturing newer, more obedient replicants; controlling the entire food supply; and expanding humanity's reach to nine planets. Policing the existential line between human and not-so-human is our hero Detective K, played by Ryan Gosling, a dreary wage slave of the LAPD. A blade runner, K is tasked with hunting rogue replicants. The movie's opening scene shows him on the hunt, reluctantly retiring an old model unit with a powerful secret. K himself poses a threat, and after missions he undergoes a Post-Trauma Baseline Test to detect emotional response and emergent autonomy—cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem and dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Only errant memories, his live-in holographic OS girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas), and Ryan Gosling's pensiveness seem to indicate his life is anything but meaningless. But when K uncovers a miracle and begins to suspect himself of being a kind of skinjob messiah whose existence could "break the world," love blossoms and fantasies emerge. K and Joi overcome their given conditions—replicant, limited AI—and by dreaming, exploring, and some added techne, create another reality beyond ruins where colors are richer and beings more defined. But is it all part of the program—Wallace's designs, false memories, coding? Is it real?

While resilience seeks to hold on to safe operating space—thus reducing life to warding of the end in perpetuity—many in the Earth sciences including Johan Rockström himself at times, state that we have already crossed many boundaries, and that the Earth is *already* leaving the old operating space behind. According to scientists like Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, the planet is shifting out of the stable climates of the 11,000-year-long Holocene interglacial in which modern civilizations developed (and also out of the glacial-interglacial cycle in which it flickered for the last 100,000 years) and moving on toward volatile and unknown operating spaces, one of which may be a socalled Hothouse Earth,174 or alternatively the environment of *Blade Runner 2049*. Fueled quasilinearly by carbon dioxide emissions and biosphere degradation, this trajectory is coupled with nonlinear biogeophysical feedbacks creating tipping cascades—permafrost disappearance, land and ocean carbon sinks weakening, polar ice sheet melting—accelerating global warming as well as pathway irreversibility. To reiterate, this shift pertains equally to the geosocial formation built on the terra firma of liberal front loop thought and action as much as the stable Holocene Interglacial.

Safe operating space is unraveling as we enter the back loop, an unknown place of chaotic fragmentation and freefall, but also experimentation and potential, where beings and things are opened to new possibilities. As with every ending of a civilization—there have of course been many—equally widespread are dreams of, and experiments in, new ways of living. Unfortunately, much of contemporary politics and culture is dedicated to holding this deluge back, to manning the wall—disciplining the back loop—beating the lesson into our heads that ruins and bare life are our only hope, asserting in perpetuity, "You know there's nothing else, right?" Infrastructures, design, and actual walls such as those discussed in the last chapter are certainly a part of this, but perhaps most powerful of all are the lessons exercised on our interiors, imaginations, and dreams.

So, back to Joi and K in *Blade Runner 2049*. Was it real?

[Spoiler Alert]

Of course not.

Joi gets free from her mainframe, only to be crushed under the shining boot of Luv, Wallace's "best" replicant. Far from a miracle or a real someone, K learns he is just a decoy to hide the true messiah. His memories were implanted replications, and alone in the night he encounters a holographic ad for the Joi AITM, who beckons, "you look like a good Joe, let me tell you everything you want to hear." Joi is a product, an app just doing its job. K and Joi's love, their truth, and the possibility of another life beyond 2D ruins woven from the two: none of it was real. Joe—the regular Joe like all of us, working away all our days, feeling lost, wondering if we can get a foothold, maybe daring to dream of becoming someone better, somewhere different—is just a nobody, a naïve skinjob who believes in a phantom love, a tool for the revolutionary replicants, a dog for the LAPD, a foil for humanism.

#### Sovereign grounds and hatred of the self

*"Do you dream about being interlinked?  Interlinked."*