GAIA 19/1(2010): 25– 32 | www.oekom.de/gaia 25 t is clear from several prominent studies that we currently face a worldwide loss of vital ecosystem services, i. e., of benefits people obtain from ecosystems, such as fish stocks, drinking wa- ter, fertile soils, and climate regulation (UNEP 2005, IPCC 2007). To manage ecosystem services in a more sustainable manner is therefore of high priority both for nature conservation and devel- opment policy (WBGU 2005), and thus for sustainability science (Kates et al. 2005). The Resilience Alliance 1 , an international multidisciplinary re- search network, has recently promoted the “resilience approach” as a powerful tool for sustainable ecosystem management (Folke 2006, Walker et al. 2006, Chapin et al. 2009). This highly influen- tial research program (Janssen 2007) considers nature as a nest- ed hierarchy of ecosystems, which, similar to single organisms, are self-organizing and adaptive functional entities (e. g., Holling 2001). Based on this organismic holism, the Resilience Alliance ad- vocates an environmental management approach in which hu- man societies are closely bound to the naturally evolved ecosys- tems in which they live (Holling and Meffe 1996, Gunderson and Holling 2002): society and nature form a co-evolutionary system (Berkes et al. 2003, Liu et al. 2007). Society should be aware of this relationship and act accordingly. Otherwise, our relationship with natural ecosystems would result in unsustainable, highly unfa- vorable, or even disastrous, consequences for societies. Is this approach justified? Can it rightly demand universal va- lidity? These questions are the subject of this article. To answer them, we do not elucidate the empirical limitations of the resil- ience approach, i. e., we do not show that there are natural ecolog- ical “systems” that are constituted in a different way than the re- silience approach holds they are. Rather, we argue that the organ- ismic theory of ecological units that is supported by the resilience approach is founded on presumptions that have a large cultural origin. Our hypothesis is that the claimed universal validity of the resilience approach is untenable because it presupposes an organ- ismic notion of ecosystems (figure 1, p. 27), which is based on a particular, not universally accepted cultural idea of individuali- ty and society. This particular idea leads to the masking of alter- native, well-founded individualistic ecological theories, which conceive nature as a quite flexible plurality of individualistic or- ganisms, and, therefore, imply very different recommendations for sustainable environmental management. Please note that we are not questioning that resilience concepts are promoting ecological knowledge and are useful for environ- mental management. Neither do we deny that the resilience ap- proach of the Resilience Alliance is leading to important research and insights. On the contrary, we believe that the awareness of > The One-Sidedness and Cultural Bias of the Resilience Approach | GAIA 19/1(2010): 25 – 32 Keywords: concepts, ecosystem theory, environmental management, epistemology, individualism versus organicism, paradigm, resilience, sustainability I The One-Sidedness and Cultural Bias of the Resilience Approach We currently face a dramatic loss of natural services, such as fish resources, fertile soils, and climate regulation. In order to sustainably manage these services, the resilience approach is increasingly being put forward. The cultural presumptions of this approach frequently go unnoticed. However, they lead to both a partial organismic concept of ecological units and a one-sided concept of a highly bounded man-nature relationship – and thus to potentially inadequate recommendations for environmental management. Thomas Kirchhoff, Fridolin S. Brand, Deborah Hoheisel, Volker Grimm Contact: Dr. Thomas Kirchhoff | Technical University Munich | Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management | Emil-Ramann-Str. 6 | 85350 Freising | Germany | Tel.: +49 8161713712 | E-Mail: thomas.kirchhoff@wzw.tum.de Dr. Fridolin S. Brand | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) | Institute for Environmental Decisions, Natural and Social Science Interface | Zurich | Switzerland | E-Mail: fridolin.brand@env.ethz.ch Deborah Hoheisel, MS | Technical University Munich | Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management | Freising | Germany | E-Mail: deborah.hoheisel@gmx.de PD Dr. Volker Grimm | Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ | Department of Ecological Modeling | Leipzig | Germany | E-Mail: volker.grimm@ufz.de 1 www.resalliance.org