Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities

Jodi Frawley, Iain McCalman, Jodi Frawley, Iain McCalman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415716567
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134756162
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Biological Sciences

Research from a humanist perspective has much to offer in interrogating the social and cultural ramifications of invasion ecologies. The impossibility of securing national boundaries against accidental transfer and the unpredictable climatic changes of our time have introduced new dimensions and hazards to this old issue. Written by a team of international scholars, this book allows us to rethink the impact on national, regional or local ecologies of the deliberate or accidental introduction of foreign species, plant and animal. Modern environmental approaches that treat nature with naïve realism or mobilize it as a moral absolute, unaware or unwilling to accept that it is informed by specific cultural and temporal values, are doomed to fail. Instead, this book shows that we need to understand the complex interactions of ecologies and societies in the past, present and future over the Anthropocene, in order to address problems of the global environmental crisis. It demonstrates how humanistic methods and disciplines can be used to bring fresh clarity and perspective on this long vexed aspect of environmental thought and practice.

Students and researchers in environmental studies, invasion ecology, conservation biology, environmental ethics, environmental history and environmental policy will welcome this major contribution to environmental humanities.

PART I

Setting the scene

1
Invasion Ecologies

The nature/culture challenge

Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman

In 1984, the American comedy/horror film Gremlins hit the screens across the world. A little furry animal, Mogwai, is given to Billy Peltzer as a pet with instructions to keep it away from light, not to let it get wet and never to feed it after midnight. But Billy inadvertently spills water on the creature, causing it to multiply, and the beguiling animal also tricks its human companions into a late-night feeding. Instantly the cute fur-ball is transformed into a reptilian gremlin whose rapid reproduction changes the scenario from controlled domesticity to explosive over-population. The proliferating gremlins then run amok in Billy’s hometown, altering the landscape to suit their own needs. The town swimming pool, for example, becomes a fertility site, its waters seen by the creatures as a perfect breeding place to accelerate their expansion. Gremlins proceed to frighten the residents, destroy the shops and go berserk through the schools. In short, they become a threatening invasive species, which has to be dealt with by Billy and the town folk.

All the key elements of invasion are present in this story. There is the link with humans who willfully move this biological species out of one habitat into their own. A new environment is provided for the animal, where it appears to be right at home, so long as it is contained within human rules. Water and food are environmental cues that trigger its multiplication. Invasion is shaped by the fecundity of the species. All of these things move rapidly out of synchrony with the host community. And as the conditions of life alter this biological entity, its interactions with humans change too. Relations between species shift from congenial to fearful as the animal’s transformation into an invader becomes evident. Where it had once been a companion, it was now regarded as dangerous matter out-of-place. Christopher Smout sums this up in saying ‘to be an alien is not a biological characteristic, like being blue or having a square stem; it is a character implied by man’ (Smout, 2011).

In other words, it is the way that species interact within bio-cultural environments, rather than their individual biological characteristics, that results in the formation of invasion ecologies (Hobbs et al., 2006). These formations are not restricted, however, to isolated local places. They also include multilayered geographies. A series of sites, identified by Haripriya Rangan and Christian Kull (2009a), are connected by the global movement of the acacia species, camels and cameleers around the Indian Ocean. In this example, these plants and animals transferred between India, South Africa and Australia. They moved along with bundles of knowledge that constantly remade places at a range of geographic scales: local, regional, national and global (Kull et al., 2007; Kull and Rangan, 2008; Rangan and Kull, 2009b). These conditions are always understood in relation to human cultural discourse—whether they emerge from science, management, history, economics, or the environments themselves. Each configuration is as specific as it is complex.

Not surprisingly, one influential account of the origin of the Anthropocene—the first ever human-shaped geological era—has it begin in 1784 with the development and use of the steam engine (Robin and Steffan, 2007: 1699). Fundamental atmospheric change in the form of increased greenhouse gases and global warming are viewed as an unintended outcome of this revolution in human ingenuity. Another of the human-driven changes of the Anthropocene, however, arises from the rampant overabundance of introduced species around the globe, a diaspora of nature resulting, in some cases, in the crippling of the new country’s ecological health and balance. The results of this process have become generally known as invasion ecologies (Mooney, 2005; Mooney et al., 2005; Richardson, 2011). Research from the sciences and social sciences has been at the forefront of refining both the concept of an Anthropocene era and the emerging community understandings about what living with its consequences will mean for the future (McNeely, 2001; Rotherham et al., 2011).

The chapters in this book build on this achievement by demonstrating how research derived from a humanities perspectives can transform our understandings of the character and implications of invasion ecologies (Hall, 2003; Robbins, 2004a; Head et al., 2005). Furthermore our contributors are in agreement that modern environmental approaches that treat nature with naïve realism or as a moral absolute, unaware or unwilling to accept its entanglement in cultural and temporal values, are doomed to fail. We need rather to investigate the complex interactions of ecologies, cultures and societies in the past, present and future if we are to understand and solve the current problems of the global environmental crisis (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; Parker, 2001; van Dooren, 2011; Rose et al., 2012). During the Anthropocene time frame, environments of the new world—over both land and sea—have become testing grounds for the introduction of new assemblages of people and plants, economies and animals, cultures and coastlines (Beinart and Middleton, 2004, Johnson, 2010). The resultant environmental changes often led to unexpected and enduring ecological and social impacts, some adverse, some beneficial: impacts that we now know to be dynamic, unpredictable and often contradictory. Above all, our authors interrogate the complex and ongoing community concerns about invasive species and their ecological and cultural impacts that we will together have to face in a climate-changing world.

At the same time our book does not pretend to survey the invasion ecologies field in all its facets but, rather, to explore a linked set of themes that have become particularly salient in our time. How, we ask, will biological and cultural invasions of the past influence the present and futures of climate-changing places? How should we think about the more-than-human roles of camels and carp, or of willows and baobabs? What became of the plants, animals, people and ideas that traveled and re-made other countries and places in the pursuit of empires? From the late eighteenth century onwards the New World countries of Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the Americas all became laboratories for western science and colonization (Fullagar, 2012). As a result, these postcolonial places furnish especially rich examples of where the movement of biota has disrupted, degraded and altered ecosystemic relationships across the globe.

Another of our aims has been to multiply disciplinary conversations within the burgeoning field of the environmental humanities in order to explore how conceptual understandings of invasion ecologies can be infused with a variety of literary and artistic narratives, gendered tropes and moral fables, as well as with more familiar political, legal, and sociological inflections. Human beings, cultures and natures have been, and remain, deeply entangled and interdependent in these new landscapes of empire and post-empire in ways that only the environmental humanities can uncover.

Charles Elton’s (1958) classic study, The Ecology of Invasions by Plants and Animals, signaled a major shift in the understanding of the global movement of biological species during what we now think of as the Anthropocene (Elton, [1958] 2000; Richardson, 2011). Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new plants, animals and humans migrated to settler colonies at the same time that biological materials and ideas about nature were transiting to other parts of the world. Some of these migrating species became threats to local environments wherever they lodged. Famously framed by Alfred Crosby as ‘the Columbian exchange’ (1972) and ‘ecological imperialism’ (1986), this tidal wave of people and their non-human accompaniments surged across the globe as empires came and went during the period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. By the 1950s, however, the resulting acclimatization and naturalization movements were being challenged by new scientific attempts to manage the unforeseen ramifications of changes to landscapes, environments and ecologies (i.e. the study of relationships between living organisms and their environments).

Scientific-based approaches to invasive species were consolidated in the 1980s with the advent of invasion biology and the related disciplinary fields of conservation biology and restoration ecology (Simberloff and Rejmánek, 2011). These new disciplines focused dispassionately on the non-human world to analyze relations within natural ecosystems on both land and sea (Mooney et al., 2005). Yet wherever humans had remade local places in ways that compromised functionality, complex ethical and normative issues arose that many scientists felt to be outside of their remit. Other social activists and thinkers, believing that humans had incurred a responsibility to protect both present and future environments, urged the need for fresh interventions in order to restore lost places and optimal outcomes. It was in this context and in an effort to create different, more sustainable futures that a pressing need developed for humanities research to contribute to social and cultural interpretations of invasion ecologies.

Admittedly, the disciplines of history and geography have long had some limited acceptance within the primarily scientific-based fields that make up modern invasive ecology studies (Kitching, 2011; Henderson et al., 2006; Carlton, 2011). Historians have sometimes been co-opted to assist in the discovery and development of the temporal and spatial baselines that are so critical to the work of sciences that investigate organic invasions (Brown et al., 2008). Ecologists draw data from historical sources, which are then fed into computational modeling for restoration work (Bjorkman, 2010). Without such data, many of the kind of models commonly in use in conservation and restoration work would be meaningless (Anderson, 2006; Bolster, 2008). Environmental geographers too have been encouraged to contribute in specific ways to invasion ecology research (Robbins, 2001, 2004b; Pawson, 2008). By creating different scales for ecological analysis, biogeography has been particularly important in mapping the ways that species move into new places (Davies and Watson, 2007).

Yet there is a danger that historical and geographical research of this kind is viewed merely as a handmaiden to invasion ecology work driven almost wholly from the perspectives of the natural sciences. By expanding the range of humanities scholars involved in this field of study, our hope is that new questions will emerge to complement and challenge those driven solely by science, important though these are. Here, such fields as eco-criticism, cultural geography, indigenous studies and environmental philosophy can offer both complementary and alternative ways of analysis, interpretation and understanding.

One key such contribution is the mapping of ‘shifting baselines’. This refers to the way that each generation, ignoring prior historical conditions, blindly considers their own ecological circumstances to be the foundation for all decision-making in science and policy. Understanding the impacts of anthropogenic change requires, however, that historical evidence and contemporary cultural theories be incorporated into policies, regulations and popular understandings (Jackson et al., 2011). Although there are many ways to assess such vital benchmarks, most have up to now been dominated by scientific classifications of ‘nativeness’, and by value-laden notions of what constitutes stable, balanced or healthy ecosystems. Restoration work, conversely, assumes that ecologies have been corrupted, put under threat or thrown out of order. Here ecologists tend to conjure up perfect ahistorical pasts, which contemporary scientists, managers, and communities then work to recapture (Alagona et al., 2012). All too often nostalgia has subsumed a reality that is much more ambiguous. Research grounded in the experiences of people engaged in grappling with changed or changing environments often proves more complex, revealing that new ecosystems may be detrimental to some actors, while others can be energized by these same disrupted, hybrid or changing environments (Davis et al., 2011).

Part II Invasion and the Anthropocene

Few would dispute that the environmental problems we face today link directly to the Age of Empires from the eighteenth century through to the present. In Chapter 2, distinguished historian Harriet Ritvo explores the back story to global ecological change by investigating the imperial movements of biological species. Colonial acclimatization movements that were set up to facilitate transfers of useful or economic plants and animals into new worlds provided much of the ideological and infrastructural momentum for such change. Ritvo focuses on starlings and camels as subjects of acclimatization, each with their own histories of global travel. Acclimatization stories of this kind can be multiplied for species and nations, across and between empires and in oceans and soils of the earth. Here we see one compelling example of how anthropoi animated the new geological era of the Anthropocene.

The concept of the Anthropocene intersects with invasion ecologies in a variety of other ways as well. In Part II, we also situate invasion ecology within wider historical and scientific frameworks in order to explore the broader narrat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Setting the scene
• Part II Invasion and the Anthropocene
• Part III Everyday life in invasion ecologies
• Part IV Ecological politics of imagining otherwise
• Part V Unruly natives and exotics
• Index