The papers in this panel explore ecological resilience in contemporary Europe as constitutive of economic, political, social, and cultural domains of resilience.  While Europe (and in particular, northern Europe) has long been considered a model of a sustainable path to industrial postmodernity, especially in comparison to the United States, discussion of resilience invites environmental debates that go well beyond existing green parties or policy analysis.  Indeed, the age of anthropogenic climate change calls for flexible and grassroots strategies that no longer rely on a stable ecological baseline.  We live, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and others have argued, in a new geological "age of humans" created by industrial civilization yet entangled in geophysical and biological forces that evade risk assessment or environmental management. 

The papers in this panel show that Europe offers models of ecological resilience that extend far beyond top-down processes managed by Eurocrats or promulgated by corporate sustainability offices.  Nor will future climate crises best be managed by authoritarian regimes, as Naomi Oreske indicates in The Collapse of Western Civilization, a book that imagines a "China solution" to ecological catastrophe and portrays Europeans as too weak to institute radical change.  Instead, these papers explore resilience in Europe as dependent on shifting baselines of knowledge and power (Wilko von Hardenberg), grassroots energy initiatives (Carol Hager), or realms of cultural representation (Judi Pajo). The most ecologically resilience societies are those that accept "nature" as a fluid and contested construct, rather than a fixed set of material or normative horizons.