LIVING IN A WEEDY FUTURE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 88

that 'makes me relaxed', when she noted the cycles of plants and their flowering,
pulled weeds and planned what needed further tidying.
According to many theories about settler Australian environmental relations,
Mira was alienated from nature through taming and domesticating it, and Lennie
projected a European ethic onto it, rather than coming to terms with the essence
of Australian nature. Kris's backyard work would be seen as representing the
appropriate conservationist response, but because it was done in an industrial city,
it would be deemed far less important than her professional work in nature
protection outside the city. All three backyards would be deemed peripheral to the
urgent work of protecting the 'real' nature in remote areas. I have argued previously
that such perspectives contain two central rifts; between an immigrant Australian
nation and its environment, and between nature and the city (Head and Muir,
2007). For more than two hundred years in Australia, the distinction between the
city and the bush has roughly paralleled that between culture and nature. When
we preserve nature, we preserve it 'out there'.
In this chapter I revisit the backyard garden study to see what it can add to
current debates about invasive plants and weeds. The connection between gardens,
agriculture and weeds throughout human history is well known (Harlan and
De Vet, 1975). In the Australian context we know that many of our most prob-
lematic weeds have 'jumped the garden fence' (Groves et al ., 2005). They were
brought into the country for their beauty, and to remind migrants of home, but
have behaved differently in Australian conditions, often becoming invasive.
The garden focus of this chapter is not because that will teach us how to deal
with weeds in 'pure' nature somewhere else. It is not to help us get things back
inside the garden fence. Rather, the premise of the chapter is that if we cannot live
without weeds, the garden is (just) one of the spaces where we can understand the
complexity and diversity of what it means to live with them. Whatever our
preferences, all the evidence suggests that we are likely to live with more weeds in
future than less. Weeds will become more numerous, abundant and widespread.
Their influence will be geographically variable and they will interact with humans
and other organisms in unpredictable ways. It is increasingly acknowledged that
Invasive Plant Management (IPM), though a significant global issue, is a matter of
coexistence rather than control. Despite these contingencies, management and
legislative rhetoric around weeds are often framed in less flexible terms, using
themes such as the 'war on weeds', with metaphors of invasion, competition and
war being pervasive (Larson, 2008; Downey, 2011). Such framings 'naturalise
antagonistic ways of relating to the natural world' (Larson, 2008: 169). Thus
science-based policy can tend to see its work as educating the community in a linear
direction about appropriate management of invasive plants. And whole industries
are built around killing weeds, in contexts from the garden to the farm to the
national park.
A further contextual statement is that mainstream Australian perspectives on
nature focus on the past rather than the present or future. Yet all the scientific
information we have is that profound thresholds have been crossed, and restoration