A Nature More Resilient

Responding to our Environmental Keywords post on ‘Resilience’, psychotherapist Susan Holliday uses a story from her book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart to seek a more resilient nature, finding signs that collective stresses need not overwhelm us.


1,870 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes


Ralph tells me he has come to therapy to learn how to be more resilient. His broad frame perches awkwardly, as though the softness of the chair threatens to emasculate him. Arms heavy with a calligraphy of tattoos — serpents, skulls, a bird of prey — every inch of his body communicates toughness. Only his eyes give him away. His look is haunted, as though a ghost stalks through the inner chambers of his being.

The record company Ralph works for operates in a competitive market. Its staff are rewarded for high-octane performance and long hours. Like his colleagues, Ralph works hard and plays hard. In recent months his sleep has been disturbed by night terrors, which can no longer be assuaged through drinking. He feels he has reached a breaking point. Ralph blames himself for not being tougher. This brings us to the heart of the matter, for Ralph is always trying to be tougher. The only alternative he can see to being tough is to give in to being weak.

“What might it look like to be more resilient?” I ask. Perplexed by the question, Ralph replies “I’d be able to take the heat, like everyone else.” I feel him bristle with irritation. He wants solutions from me, not daft questions. “How do you take the heat at the moment?” I persist. Looking me straight in the eye he replies, “I just keep going. I try harder.”

Taking the heat

Ralph is like a moon unable to turn away from the sun. It simply hasn’t occurred to him that there might be a natural limit to the amount of heat he can take. Competition in the marketplace keeps getting hotter. Everyone is stressed. They just have to deal with it. Resilience in this relentlessly ratcheted environment begins to fail. Under the skin, beneath the protective totems of toughness, Ralph is beginning to crack. His intimate anguish unfolds out of sight. The face he presents to the world is indestructible.

Ralph’s tattoos intrigue me. What might these sentinels be guarding, I wonder. What treasure might warrant this level of protection? We begin by exploring the qualities of his shield — tough, hard, impenetrable, deflecting, protecting. Then, looking for the concealed aspect, I suggest we reverse the tattoo qualities (like a negative in the darkroom). Together we begin to discern the inverse faces of his toughness — soft, tender, yielding, revealing, allowing. Risking everything, I ask Ralph if there might be something he secretly wishes to reveal, something he longs to allow, something he might want to feel. His face flushes. He looks away.

Ralph does not show up for his next session. Nor the one after that. I fear I have lost him. To my surprise, he returns the following week carrying a battered old shoe box covered in faded stickers. Opening the lid Ralph shows me a roughly packaged pile of cassette tapes. A secret hoard of songs, written and recorded when he was just fifteen. This is the first time he has opened the box in twenty years.

Ralph recalls the morning he woke to find his father missing from the breakfast table. A neatly written note explained that he had left them to be with a woman he had met the year before at a conference in Germany. Ralph’s mother said his father was ‘a lousy piece of shit’ and they were better off without him. He would get over it. In the months that followed she soldiered on, modelling a kind of stoic fortitude. Bewildered and bereft, Ralph found himself being the ‘man around the house’, looking out for his mother and three sisters. He had to be strong, for all their sakes.

In the concealed safety of his bedroom the tender adolescent survived — for a while. Wrapped around his guitar he wrote songs about anger and fear, about love and loss. Music stopped him dying inside. No one listened. Hollowed out with forbidden grief for his father, Ralph’s emotional world remained hidden. Shameful evidence of his ‘weakness’. Increasingly he found himself in trouble at school. He got into fights and began taking drugs. They helped block out his vulnerability, his yearning, his grief. In the years since then he has walked through life as a shadow artist, toughing it out organising gigs and record deals for musicians with half his raw talent.

Ralph asks me if I would like to hear one of his songs. He has brought an old cassette player. Slowly, tentatively, he presses the red button to ‘play’. A rough and tender voice pierces the space between us. It is shot through with the raw edge of adolescent loss. Ralph observes me intently. He sees that I’m moved. He knows then that something about his expression of vulnerability is good.

Listening to these songs together in the weeks that follow, Ralph and I begin to discern that sensitivity (not weakness) is the hidden aspect which lies on the other side of his armoured strength. In time he is able to acknowledge that he has never stopped loving his father. He misses him every day. Connected once more to the vulnerability of his heart, he is surprised to discover that love is a power. It stirs in him now with a force that feels unbreakable.

A more resilient nature

It seems that ‘toughness’ has become the exclusive aspect to which we aspire. We admire ‘nerves of steel’ and ‘rock-hard determination’. We ‘hammer out’ and ‘battle through’ our problems. We spin the promise that through therapy and mindfulness we can withstand the intolerable ratcheting up of societal stresses. This confounding of resilience with a limitless capacity to absorb pressure masks the structural problems behind so much of our suffering. It locates the cause of our distress in failures of individual resilience. Worse still perhaps, in our quest to mask our vulnerability, to override our sensitivity and ultimately to deny the inconvenient truth of human limitation, we stuff ourselves with things. Mountains of things.

This compulsive consumption is costing us the earth.

In her highly influential TED talk ‘The Power of Vulnerability’, Brené Brown challenges the way we understand our relationship to vulnerability, arguing that our sensitivity to feeling lies at the very heart of our ability to survive and to thrive: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability and authenticity. If we want greater clarity or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Author of The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron suggests that heightened sensitivity manifests in a certain proportion of all higher species, because it is essential for the survival, expression and evolution of the whole group. As a community of beings we are in effect all aspects of one indivisible skin, which needs to be both tough enough to protect and sensitive enough to feel.

Showing bleached coral

We can see this intimate correlation between sensitivity and toughness throughout the natural world. Reef-building corals for example survive for millennia in a continual cycle of impact and renewal. The living polyps may only be a few years old, but they rely on an underlying skeleton that can live for thousands of years. These corals can adapt to withstand short periods of elevated seawater temperatures. Sensing the warming waters, they expel the microscopic marine algae that live in their tissues exposing the white exoskeleton beneath and losing their vibrant colours. This coral bleaching is a natural process combining sensitivity and strength. It enables the reef to adapt to summer months when the ocean temperatures are warmer.

In recent years sustained marine heatwaves have led to mass coral bleaching events. The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef system, has already suffered five mass bleaching events since 1998. The events in 2016 and 2017 alone led to the death of 50% of the iconic reef. This unspeakable tragedy points to a condition of nature, concerning which we are increasingly in denial: Nature, including human nature, operates within limits.

Like coral reefs, we too are deformed under excessive stress. The damage begins at the more vulnerable margins, with those of us who are by nature, or through poverty, or by age or youth, more sensitive. But in the end the unbound stresses will affect us all.

Increasingly I see the people who courageously step into the therapy room as equivalents to canaries in the coalmine. Their sensitivity alerts the wider community to psychological toxins and rising temperatures in our collective environment which threaten to overwhelm the balance and limits of resilience in our human ecology as a whole. If we could begin to listen to these more tender voices, rather than medicating them into dumb silence, if we could stop urging people like Ralph to toughen up, we might recover qualities of sensitivity that makes us more resilient as a community.

Could it be that the explosion in mental health problems in people of all ages and backgrounds is not a straightforward failure of individual resilience, but a sign that collective stresses are overwhelming the inherent limits of our shared nature? Ralph’s story reminds us that the waters of our human ecology are overheating. At this point it seems we have two choices. We calcify. Through medication, consumption and addiction we numb the sentient organs of perception that feel. Or we crack, as the colour bleaches out of our lives. The people I worry most about are those who choose to calcify. They are often the ones who head up our corporate organisations and lead our nations. Shorn of their capacity to feel they become a danger to themselves and to others. Increasingly they lead us into war and to the irreparable despoiling of our planet.

A Nature More resilient: showing healthy coral

Of course, there is a third choice. We could hold the reciprocal qualities of strength and sensitivity in equal regard. We could understand that resilience depends on their intimate correlation.


Find out more

Susan Holliday’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart (2021) is published by Matador. You can read fellow ClimateCultures member James Murray-White’s review for us, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart. Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild, says of the book: “A wonderful book. Reminded me of The Examined Life or Love’s Executioner, but with an added ecological perspective I’d been thirsting for.”

Susan mentions Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (Penguin, 2015). You can view Brené’s TED talk ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ at her website.

Elaine Aron’s book, The Highly Sensitive Person (2017) is published by Harper Collins.

Susan contributed this piece in response to an earlier post in our series on Environmental Keywords, Growing With the Word ‘Resilience’, which offers reflections on that word from participants at a recent workshop at the University of Bristol. Environmental Keywords is part of a short project led by Dr Paul Merchant of the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities.

Susan Holliday

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...

Growing With the Word ‘Resilience’

Showing a mapping exercise for the word 'resilience' at the Environmental Keyword project eventClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants’ encounters and experiences at a workshop exploring the word ‘Resilience’, the second in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.


2,100 words: estimated reading time = 8.5 minutes


For the second Environmental Keywords workshop, another group of researchers from different university departments, as well as writers (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) and others gathered in Bristol to explore a local area and one of the critical concepts in addressing how we respond to our biodiversity and climate predicaments. On this occasion, the event took place in the Barton Hill area of the city and — as with the earlier session in Easton — everyone shared a walk there before discussions back at the university’s local micro campus. While a couple of the participants had been to that earlier session on ‘Justice’, it was mostly a new group that came together here to discuss the word ‘Resilience’.

Again, my role — as someone who couldn’t be in Bristol for these workshops — has been to speak with participants afterwards and gather their reflections once a little time had passed, allowing the walk, discussions and role-playing session to ‘settle’ with them. So, as with my post on the ‘Justice’ session, this cannot offer an objective account of the workshop or of the word ‘Resilience’ and its meanings. Instead — as one commenter on that first post rightly described it — I offer a personal, ‘impressionistic view’ rather than attempt any definition: definitions (hopefully many of them) must come later, as part of the wider conversation. I hope this is a fair reflection of what participants have shared with me once they’ve had some distance from the workshop, and that it offers a way towards further conversations. As before, I encourage all ClimateCultures members and other visitors to our site to offer their own insights and responses, ideas and examples.

Getting going

As with the ‘Justice’ session, the local walk proved to be a popular way into the topic. One person noted examples of resilience in how the natural world responded to the human environment of hard structures and air pollution: “As we walked over a bridge — traffic-jammed, and rather a hideous piece of brutal architecture, I noticed from in between the cracks between the tarmac and the concrete a bed of low weeds was flowering madly. Really pretty little white blossoms. Despite the noise, the stink of exhaust fumes, the grim and rather chilly day. It struck me again (after all it’s that most miraculous of seasons, spring) that nature — plants anyway — just want to grow. And they will, given half, a quarter, a tenth of a chance.”

Showing a visual metaphor for the word 'resilience: photograph of weeds growing in a concrete crack
‘Give nature half an inch’
Photograph: Workshop participant © 2022

Another noted how “walking there was good and thinking about the reality of the area with the tower blocks and the park, which turns out to be an old chemical dump”, was maybe a way of “checking our assumptions, coming from a place of privilege.” And a reminder of how, as a more general point, it’s important to be “led by local people, and not enforcing solutions.”

Another person said of this integral part of the workshop design, “the walk at the beginning is amazing, it really gets people going,” while a fourth emphasised how “My strongest memory was the spaciousness the workshop gave, thanks to the walking format. It gave a real opportunity to reflect what we mean by resilience before jumping in to make our points.” And having a range of people with whom to share these local encounters was clearly important: “I met a wide array of people from artists, social scientists to an engineer.” As another of the respondents put it: “There was room for a range of conversations from philosophical to quite practical: what are we resilient for, for what are we resilient against?” And another mentioned that “Everybody was very eloquent and engaging, I was really taken by the stories they told.”

Reclaiming the word ‘resilience’

Thinking on the word ‘Resilience’ itself, one person reflected on how “I guess I’d been … using it without necessarily thinking how others interpret the word. I was surprised to hear that for one of the others … it has negative connotations.” And “for architects and builders the important thing is to make structures stronger and more stable, not more permeable and likely to ‘bend in the wind’, if you like.” And another person admitted that “I was not particularly attracted to this word. To me it had contradictory meanings, relating to being tough and strong.”

As one contributor said, “It’s made me look at it in a much more nuanced, complex way, more of a live way. It’s one of these words where we become almost blind to it. It’s almost like a buzzword. Some of these words now are becoming so co-opted by greenwash, it’s like a cliche: so, reclaiming that. For me it’s alongside ‘regeneration’, which is a great precept of the XR movement: we have to look at how do we regenerate ourselves, look after ourselves.” 

Showing a local poster on the climate crisis
‘The sign says it all’
Photograph: workshop participant © 2022

Another person expanded on this sense of the nuanced nature of ‘resilience’: “a word I’ve been considering for some weeks now, which I think is pertinent to resilience: ‘provisionality’, in the sense that everything is provisional. None of us knows what will happen tomorrow or even in the next hour, so many things being dependent on so many others … I think emotional resilience can be improved by helping people engage their imaginations more effectively while navigating the uncertain — the provisional — and holding in tension many different uncertainties, at the same time as working for the best options available (or even imagining those options into being). So projects involving science, technology, the arts, and communities are key to this. I feel this kind of active and practical imaginative work within communities will contribute to resilience in all its many meanings.” This was reiterated by the respondent who said “I think imagination is a very powerful tool. Imagining together within the community how the future should be gives us the tools to be resilient.”

Showing local graffiti in Bristol
‘What have you truly loved so far?’
Photograph: workshop participant © 2022

One comment maybe suggests another word that can be appropriate to discussions of resilience — ‘transience’. Someone had pointed out during the workshop conversation “that actually in nature there were things that were not resilient, that were actually very fragile. A delicate flower, for example … That led me first to think — and I think I said — ‘resilient’ does not mean ‘permanent’. The two terms are often conflated. And at the heart of the matter is our equation of death/decay/transiences with failure. When the delicate flower ‘dies’ this is not the failure of the flower to beat the odds, as it were. That ‘explanation’ makes no sense! The natural world being so continuous, contiguous, is something that we modern humans, wedded to the idea of our separateness, find extremely hard to comprehend. We are not permanent, we are fleeting — always changing, transitioning into new forms constantly.”

This opening up of one term through others — of the word ‘resilience’ through ‘provisionality’, ‘transience’, ‘imagination’ — perhaps speaks not just to those nuances of resilience itself but to the actual value of encounters and conversations like these walk-and-workshops: that our understanding of keywords such as these cannot be ‘monolingual’, so to speak. As another comment offered: “It made me realise how complex it is as a topic, how many different ways of looking at resilience there are. How there were people there who were working on it at a grassroots level, or looking at structural engineering as a form of resilience … [or] looking at resilience in terms of how do we access the land and grow our vegetables. Or myself looking at how do we prepare ourselves for what’s to come. And we drilled down into: is resilience necessarily a positive thing or not?” 

Grounded connection

A couple of participants looked to particular examples like this as a way of demonstrating resilience at these different scales or sites, drawing on their own backgrounds or on the role-playing session midway through the afternoon. “Our ‘team’ worked on looking at the local streets and parks by focusing on the disused, or unloved ‘edges’. The small bits of road or edges of fields or pathways, that could be loved back into everyday life. Planting fruit trees or bushes, creating wildflower areas, making things more wildlife-friendly, especially for insects: this could all be done relatively easily but only with the direct involvement of the people who lived right next to those spaces … [who] have a more intimate and grounded connection with their own environment and place within it.”

Showing a mapping exercise for the word 'resilience' at the Environmental Keyword project event
‘Our ‘Green Edge’ project takes shape’
Photograph: workshop participant © 2022

Another reflected a personal motivation to use their ethnographic experience with engineers “to share how critical infrastructure engineers understand this concept … [So] I did share a couple of engineering perspectives on resilience, how they relate to sustainability, what their limitations are.” Terms that this contributor fed back, such as ‘redundancy’ and ‘preparedness’, and ideas of ‘bouncing back (or forward)’ from extreme events or of some things being beyond our control — all play into complementary or overlapping understandings of ‘resilience’.

One person observed that “We can’t just always be resilient … I shared something that’s important to me, that it’s important that we allow ourselves to break sometimes, or to bend. I shared some of the emotions and the psychology around it, which is something I think about a lot.” This was complemented by another’s reflection that “Particularly when we’re talking about extreme weather events (but also with the ’emotional weather’) we need to find ways to counter the common assumption that you need to do more to stand strong against these things in a direct kind of way (e.g. flood defences/higher walls) and advocate more strongly for things like tree planting, soil health, etc so water can be absorbed and dissipated and held more gently.”

Showing a workbook form the event on the word 'resilience'
‘Workshop notebook’
Photograph: workshop participant © 2022

Clearly, as with ‘Justice’, these are conversations that can run on in time and shift into wider territories, and will continue to influence how we see the language as well as how the issues are illustrated all around us. As one person told me, “I will carry on thinking about it for sure. Just the act of being in a room together is so much bigger than the sum of its parts. I’m such a believer in that interdisciplinary ‘just hanging out’ together, having tea and doing activities that break down the barriers.” And another suggested that this dialogue between disciplines and experiences reminds us that “There will never be a single authoritative definition (and that’s a good thing!) but it’s certainly useful to think how/whether we can apply thinking in one area to another.”

As another put it: “I definitely like the word more now. I can see it doesn’t necessarily mean to be strong but to be adaptive. Also [it] made me reflect that maybe it’s not about adapting to climate change but to a new way of living that doesn’t cause climate change.”


Find out more

Do contribute your responses below to be part of the conversation! See the Leave a Reply box underneath the existing comments.

Environmental Keywords is a short interdisciplinary project at the University of Bristol, investigating three keywords — ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’ — that are common in the environmental discourses that shape how we think of, talk about and act on the ecological and climate predicaments facing us.

With funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, the project is led by Dr Paul Merchant, Co-Director of the University’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, and involves colleagues from different departments and disciplines, as well as local community groups, ClimateCultures members and other creative practitioners.

The project focuses on three workshops in Bristol, facilitated by Anna Haydock-Wilson and complemented by online content here at ClimateCultures:

‘Justice’ — Wednesday 16th February 2022
‘Resilience’ — Wednesday 9th March 2022
‘Transitions’ – Thursday 24th March 2022

We have two previous posts in the series, both reflecting on our first keyword ‘Justice’: Walking With the Word ‘Justice’, also by Mark Goldthorpe; and Permeability: On Green Frogs, Imagination & Reparations, a response from writer Brit Griffin. And the main Environmental Keywords section on this site also now has a new page with other creative responses on that word: ‘Environmental Justice’ – Taking the Conversation Forward. You can help us build the page for our new word, ‘Resilience’: do let us have your thoughts, questions suggestions and examples via the Leave a Reply box on this post or via our Contact page. 

Mark Goldthorpe
Mark Goldthorpe
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.