Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

This video is called Mutant Planet- The Evolution of Marsupials.

Talking about Australia and climate change …

From Murdoch University in Australia today:

Kangaroo evolution maps climate change

2 hours ago

The evolution of kangaroos has given a clear picture of Australia’s changing climate, according to a new study.

Murdoch University’s Dr Natalie Warburton and Dr Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University have analysed changes to the kangaroo skeleton over time which reflect Australia’s changing environment and climate.

Dr Warburton said in this way kangaroos represent a sort of barometer for climate change.

“This is important for our understanding of historical climate change in Australia,” she said.

“Our study represents the most comprehensive anatomical analysis of the evolution of modern and fossil kangaroos on the basis of the skull, teeth and skeleton – including some of the new fossil species we recently identified from caves on the Nullarbor.”

Interesting alternatives if not contradictions in understanding “resilience” in recent publications.

Stephanie Wakefield & Bruce Braun understand resilience as a Foucauldian dispositif (apparatus):

we understand resilience as a mode of governing the ‘ecological’ city.

In Resilient Life, a new book by Brad Evans and Julian Reid, they also think of it as a mode of governing:

‘resilience’ … is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century…

But the book is then blurbed as follows:

Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency.

My interest here is not so much whether this is an accurate summation of their book (which is not yet out) but that the discourse of resilience is framed as disempowering (the word used is “nihilistic”).

I wrote about this last year here, in the context of Neocleous’ piece in