Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
wilderness'
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) areenvisaged as the province of wild animals (such as wolves and
lions). It is this spatial structure which organises the progression of the chapters
below, the spatial referents of which loosely shift from the city to the countryside
and on to wilder-lands.
As these chapters nevertheless make clear, the imaginative geography described
above is scrambled, and destabilised, in various ways which make the conjoint
conceptual—physical placements involved both more interesting and more difficult
to decode. Thinking first about the urban chapters, Howell stresses the equation of
pets with the (gendered) domestic hearth and the well-to-do neighbourhoods of
Victorian London, but not with the whole city, whereas Griffiths, Poulter and
Sibley show that an urban area such as Hull is imagined not just as a city of pets but
also as a city of feral cats (and, we may add, of many other wilder animals too).
While animal welfare organisations such as the Cats Protection League tend to view
feral cats as 'convicts on the loose' (Ingold 1994a: 3), needing to be re-domesticated
and returned to the household, the suggestion is that some (if not all) Hull residents
are prepared to view feral cats as legitimate residents of certain (but not all) city
locations. Wolch, Brownlow and Lassiter reveal differing senses of which animals
should be where in a city like Los Angeles, as particularly linked with the rural pasts
of some African-American women which lead them to expect the proximity of
livestock animals (alive or dead) in the city.
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For other of their interviewees,
though, it was easier to accept wild animals coming into the city, perhaps trying to
visit old habitats now subject to building, than to accept the proximity of animals
being reared (as it were) for their table. In the one strictly countryside chapter,
Yarwood and Evans show how the issue is not merely that livestock animals are
regarded as the correct occupants of rolling pasture, but also that much more
detailed imaginings are coming into play which associate specific breeds of livestock
(such as Aberdeen Angus cattle) with particular regional agricultural landscapes.
Moving into the chapters dealing with different varieties of wilder-lands, Matless
discusses the English Broadlands, a region of attractive landscape that is inscribed by
a contested 'moral geography' (see also Matless 1994) comprising different visions
of which wild animals should properly be present and which are 'alien' invaders.
The issue in this regard is not merely that Broadland should be home to wild
animals, but precisely which wild animals are to be deemed the rightful occupants
of the region, the best suited to the local environment and the most aesthetic
relative to the local landscape. Brownlow covers parallel ground when surveying
debates about whether or not the gray wolf is an appropriate wild animal for
restoration to the Adirondack mountainscape, while Waley reconstructs debates
about the ecological restoration of fish to Japanese rivers which reveal the
interleavings of science and spirituality in the imaginative placings of fish and other
animals across Japan's spaces (urban, rural and wild).
As most of the chapters relating to wilder-lands also indicate, a common
assumption is that wild lands beyond the circle of normal human activity are, and
should be, stocked with all manner of large and/or dangerous animals with whom
humans would not normally wish to have encounters. Many people, as in the quote
