Getting the Best out of “Resilience” as a Conservation Policy Goal: A Response to Newton ()

Even when taken in good faith, Newton argues, resilience may lead us astray if its pursuit leads us to prefer systems that are stable in their degraded states (“intransigence,” is, after all, resilience's twin). Even when ill‐defined, it encourages policy makers to think deeply about ecosystems as dynamic, multiscaled and socially linked systems (Fischer et al. ; Folke et al. ). Often (e.g., Morecroft et al. ), these explanatory goals turn out to be familiar and measureable: large populations, adequate gene flow, sufficient habitat, few invasive species.