Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
enterprise. But just as the public have been enrolled by experts, so too have the public
enrolled the experts, and according to its influence in this network it may alter the
kinds of science or politics pursued in the future
14
The niche is classically regarded as the organism's proper place, exclusive to it. Indeed,
Darwin, among others, regarded the niche as a space pre-existing the organism
(Kingsland 1991). Only when an organism is introduced from another ecological
system may another organism be seen to be competing in the same niche, and then
that introduced organism is often referred to as 'alien', as 'out of place'.
15
We resist the urge to use the term 'wilderness' too freely, however, as the term is
problematic, implying areas somehow free of human impacts. As Marx himself argued
in the nineteenth century, there may be very few, if any, areas left that can be thought
of in such terms as wilderness. Even areas commonly thought of as being wilderness
have often been shown to have been managed by peoples, especially by now-excluded
'indigenous' peoples, at times in the past. See also Cronon (1995). We prefer to use
the term 'wilder-lands'.
16
This position would not, of course, be unusual to many people around the world.
Philo (1995) shows the history of exclusions of such animals from British cities, but in
recent years various environmental campaigners have argued for livestock animals to
be reintroduced to cities in countries such as Britain, and for more food growing to be
undertaken in cities.
17
Images of wild animals in abundance in wild lands can sanction indiscriminate
hunting, as Thorne (1998) shows most persuasively in a discussion of the slaughter of
kangaroos in the Australian outback.
18
This term is used by Nast and Pile (1998a: e.g. 3; 1998b: e.g. 412). The term becomes
even more evocative, perhaps disturbing, when deployed in relation to non-human
creatures which often end up as 'meat' for human tables, or indeed for other animals.
More generally, it might be remarked that the recent turn to considering 'the bodily'
in human geography, as well as in the social sciences and cultural studies, has yet to say
much about animal bodies (but see some suggestions in Jones, this volume).
19
It must be noted that from another perspective the chimpanzee in the zoo is also 'out
of place'. For many critics, it should not be there, but rather in the wild, where it
would be 'in place', developing its own social ways, or, as Sorensen (1995:10) puts it,
'striving to maintain the power of existence and development that is the
telos
of
animals'.
20
Indeed, this is why both authors of this editorial have worked with and against
Cresswell's (1996: esp. 22-23) well-known distinction between transgression and
resistance. Transgression, for Cresswell, entails actions whose consequences overstep
certain limits defined by humans, but which are not necessarily intended by anybody
(or anything) to do so. Resistance, for him, entails actions deliberately, wilfully,
purposefully, knowingly, pursued with conscious intention on the part of the doer to
overstep (known) limits. See Wilbert (1999: 245, 249) and Philo (1995:656).
21
Paralleling this distinction are long-running fears in many societies regarding the risk
of certain humans reverting to the animal, or of some humans not reaching the
civilised heights of culture (the 'truly' human). Commonly, this is thought of as a
modern 'racist' view used to justify slavery, colonialism, genocide or other horrors, but
such fears have also not infrequently been expressed in connection with people
identified as 'idiot' or 'lunatic' (to use older parlances) or 'mentally subnormal' or
'mentally ill' (to use more recent, if also unsatisfactory, terms). Conversely, Richards
