Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
reference to The War of the Worlds . He argues that Wells's Martian red weed was
inspired by a particular historical model, the Canadian waterweed, thus illustrating
the viability of a historical approach to Wells's representation of invasive species.
This chapter will further develop this historical approach, tracing the understanding
of introduced species that was in circulation at the time when Wells wrote The War
of the Worlds and analysing the imaginative ends to which Wells put this scientific
knowledge.
The War of the Worlds tells the story of the invasion of Earth by highly evolved,
technologically advanced Martians trying to escape their cooling planet. The
Martians come to Earth equipped with an arsenal of technological weaponry - heat
rays, giant tripods, and digger machines - but they also bring with them Martian
plant species which swiftly become pests: truly alien invasives. The Martian plants
grow 'with astonishing vigour and luxuriance', spreading across the countryside in
the space of days, leaving in some places not 'a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute
their footing' (Wells, [1898] 2009: 150, 167).
Historical models for such plant incursions existed in the nineteenth century and
many were well documented by the time Wells wrote The War of the Worlds . In
his account of the voyage of the Beagle , published in 1839, Darwin describes three
European plant species introduced to South America that had become 'extra-
ordinarily common' there (Darwin, 1839: 119). 2 He records the growth of fennel
'in great profusion' in ditches around Buenos Aires, Montevideo and other towns
and the spread of the giant thistle through the Pampas (ibid.: 119). Even more
striking is his description of the thistle-like cardoon ( Cynara cardunculus ):
In [Banda Oriental] alone, very many (probably several hundred) square miles
are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man
or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing
else can now live. Before their introduction, however, the surface must have
supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether any case is on
record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.
(ibid.: 119)
In On the Origin of Species , Darwin returns to the subject of introduced plants and
to the examples of 'the cardoon and a tall thistle, now most numerous over the
wide plains of La Plata, clothing square leagues of surface almost to the exclusion
of all other plants' (Darwin, 1860: 65). 3 Darwin offers these examples of 'the
extraordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion of naturalised productions in their
new home' to illustrate his argument that all species tend towards a geometrical
rate of increase (ibid.: 65). In the process, he also furnishes a succinct explanation
of the reasons behind the success of certain introduced species: placed in an
environment in which all of its requirements for life are met and few limiting factors
are present, a species will increase in its numbers at an exponential rate.
Darwin's account of the cardoon in South America almost certainly underpins
- or underwrites - Wells's first description of the Martian red weed, and Wells's
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